Friday, February 04, 2005
Checking My Change
It’s a long flight across the Atlantic from my parents’ home in the UK to South Bend, Indiana. Fatigue compounded by jet-lag and culture shock leaves me neither in one place nor the other. In linguistic limbo, I mix up elevators and lifts, goodbye and cheerio, trucks and lorries.
But a brief exchange in a local café told me I was back in the god ole’ US of A. Waiting for my coffee, I commented idly on the unseasonable January rains. As I fumbled in my coin purse to sort the Honest Abes from the Royal Highnesses still skulking there, the waitress replied. She said: “My mother’s very religious and, what with that Tsunami in Asia, she figures we’re living in the End Times.” Mainstream Brits just don’t invoke the Apocalypse as they hand back your change. Nor do they follow up with a breezy: “Have a Nice Day!” which, if her Mom is right, invites the rejoinder “… as it could be your last.”
You can learn about a country from its currency. America circulates images of Washington, Lincoln and Franklin, icons of its struggle to found a nation on the Enlightenment principles of reason and democracy, freed from the shackles of merely traditional authority. In England, an awkward compromise is struck between the two sides of a ten-pound note. On one side is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, whose rule is merely based on traditional deference to royal blood-lines. But the other side of the British tenner celebrates the triumph of reason in the person of a balding scientific genius. It’s hard to imagine the Federal Reserve printing the image of Charles Darwin on a banknote, but that’s exactly what the Bank of England did in 2003.
In my parents’ quaint hometown of Ilkley, population 16,000, local volunteers built a garden to mark the Millennium. It’s planted with indigenous species and graced with statuary to mark the continuity of all life. Over the garden presides a bronze plaque of Charles D. himself, who awaited the publication of On the Origin of Species at a hydropathic spa just up the road from my parents’ house.
Meanwhile, back in Cobb County, Georgia, in 2002, local school officials inserted stickers in science textbooks that read, “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”
Every scientist I know would agree that science should be studied carefully, with an open mind and critically considered. However, the stickers make a troubling contrast between “a theory” and “a fact.” In everyday talk, the word “theory” is sometimes used to mean “a systematic account of how the world works, backed by a substantial body of evidence,” as in, “the theory of gravitation.” But “theory” is also used to mean “casual opinion,” as in, “Jen and Brad will get together again, that’s my theory.” So the stickers suggest that evolution is just the off-hand speculation of a few nerds in lab-coast gossiping around the autoclave.
A Federal judge in Atlanta has just ruled the stickers unconstitutional, not because they’re bad science, but because the insertion of the stickers “sends a message that the Cobb County school board appears to have sided with… religiously motivated individuals,” who regard evolution as incompatible with the Book of Genesis.
Still, other religiously motivated individuals, including the Pope, see no conflict between evolution’s attempt to explain the physical mechanisms that govern change in nature, and religion’s ambition to understand the deeper significance of life. Maybe the big question isn’t how life unfolds, but why.
Given this intellectual division of labour, we can imagine a state that takes on sides on religious matters, but stands behind the theory supported by the overwhelming preponderance of evidence, in the domain of public science education. On February 12th, let’s celebrate in our public schools the shared birthday of two great nineteenth century liberators, who sought to free humanity from the bonds of unreasonable tradition and superstition: Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. And a commemorative quarter would be nice, too.