Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – May 2, 2006.

An Evening with Niles Eldredge, sponsored by
The World Can’t Wait—Drive out the Bush Regime.
Columbia University, May 2, 2006.

Last week’s guest blog by Harold B. Rollins began to explore the connections between evolutionary and environmental science, on the one hand, and, on the other, the world of policy decisions in American society—meaning, of course, politics. Last January I accepted an invitation to add my signature to a full page ad published in the New York Times by an organization called The World Can’t Wait. Drive Out the Bush Regime. I was honored to be asked to join such a roster of notables—but I confess it was Cindy Sheehan’s presence on the list that was the most important factor in my decision to join in. Here is an image of that page:

Last Tuesday night I gave a talk at Columbia University sponsored by the same organization. I also did two radio show interviews connected with the talk—one the Mark Riley Show on Air America, and The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC (http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/2006/05/02) . I thought I would post the text of my talk in this current blog:

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An Evening with Niles Eldredge

Speaking here tonight reminds me forcefully of the Teach-ins at Columbia in the early 1960s—against the Vietnam War—where, as a student, I forged what remains my basic political viewpoint. The two forces behind the very first Columbia Teach-in were Professors Marvin Harris (Anthropology) and Seymour Melman (from, if memory serves, Engineering). The event followed by just a few hours America’s very first teach-in—held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Marvin was my role model when I was a fledgling member of the academic community—and I am happy to dedicate my talk tonight to these two pioneers.

At that first teach-in, Harris, Melman and other speakers tried hard to specify the real strategic reason for fighting in Vietnam. (Some of you might be old enough to remember Country Joe and the Fish singing “It’s one, two, three—what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn—next stop is Vietnam!”). It was hard for us kids to swallow some of their suggestions: oil reserves in the Gulf of Tonkin? Rice production????

Today we are in the same predicament—arguing about why we are waging an increasingly unpopular war. We know it is NOT about WMD, or bringing democracy to the Middle East. The case for oil being the real reason (Iraq has the world’s second largest oil fields—and Bush and Cheney are oil men) is far more plausible now than it was in the case of Vietnam; but is it also revenge for daddy? (Saddam Hussein threatened Bush’s father’s life—and the U.S. –wisely—did not pursue Saddam to Baghdad at the conclusion of the Gulf War); or is the reason some delusional neocon theory of “stabilizing” the Middle East? (if so it has sadly backfired completely). It’s probably a combination of all three…

It seems to me that 9/11, and the tragic destruction of the twin towers and loss of so many lives that horrible day, has exacted a heavy toll on the American spirit. For a time, America seems to have lost its sense of true courage—despite the bravado trumpeted by our leaders as we went off to war. I hasten to add that our young men and women, still fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq, are certainly courageous. It is those of us at home—starting with our leaders, who despite the veneer of defiance against bin Laden and (mistakenly) Hussein, really were the ones who lost our nerve. These last five years have been very painful to live through.

Tragic and serious as the 9/11 attacks were, they were in fact hiccups against globalization—carried out by the relatively few with sufficient resources and hatred enough for the United States. We should simply have gone after bin Laden—and done the job properly and thoroughly—and left it at that. But instead of doing that job properly, we got involved in this nightmarish and immoral quagmire of the Iraqi invasion.

The Bush administration—instead of really beefing up homeland security—has exploited our collective fears (remember those orange and red alerts they used periodically to scare us?). So for the last few years we have been looking for terrorists under our beds—meanwhile making only the most perfunctory real improvements to our so-called homeland security.

Among the casualties of this deflation in American spirit and self-confidence is of course the Democratic Party—which, with but a few exceptions, wallowed in a mire of me-too patriotism immediately after 9/11. The best thing I heard came from Democrat Mario Cuomo, being interviewed on air I think between the collapse of the first and second WTC towers; Cuomo was saying that the significance of these attacks was that we must ask why anyone could hate us so much; he was basically yanked—and I never heard from him again in the national media in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. I also remember Robert Byrd on the floor of the Senate asking why, as we were about to start a war, the Senate wasn’t even debating the issue. But otherwise reasoned response from the Democrats was hard to spot in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

The Democratic Party STILL cannot formulate any coherent program countering the by-now-obvious-to-all utterly bankrupt, incompetent and downright criminal policies of the Bush administration. Even now—after nearly 5 years!

But I do think there are signs of a restrengthening of our collective American moral fiber. I am beginning to see the America I know and have loved since my youth re-emerge.

I have been involved in a small corner of recent events in American public life—which I put to you tonight as a microcosmic insight into the current American political landscape.

I have been a paleontologist interested especially in evolutionary theory for my entire career—which, after getting my PhD in the Geology Department here at Columbia in 1969, has been entirely spent at the American Museum of Natural History. I have been, from time to time—when the political situation called out for it—speaking out against various forms of creationism. I have written two books about it, and given numerous talks—including some on conservative religious campuses around the nation.

My primary motivation in speaking out against creationism has always been the integrity of science teaching in public schools. I do not care what anyone’s personal beliefs are concerning the age of the Earth, or the manner of appearance of life on Earth—or what lies behind the appearance of hominids—including eventually our own species. Everyone in this great country of ours has a right—still!—to think whatever they want to think. As a scientist, I myself am of the opinion that apples fall, continents move around and species give rise to descendant species—through natural processes we can understand through science—regardless of anyone’s personal opinions on the matter. The data–the patterns of the empirical world—speak very clearly on that. But people are free to believe what they want to believe.

But I do care what we teach our students. We cannot lie to our kids (kids always detect lies—they know when their parents and teachers are lying to them); and our teachers certainly know the difference between genuine science and fake science. So we do incomparable harm asking teachers to pretend that they cannot tell the difference between evolution—as true science—and creationism—which in the form of “scientific creationism” and the most recent gambit—“intelligent design”—often pretends to be science, but is anything but real science.

I have found over the years that creationism in any guise is primarily a political movement—not science—nor even especially religion. The creationism/evolution “debate” is not being held within science—nor especially within religious communities—but rather out in the public arena—in our public schools, spilling over to legislatures and, of course, our courts.

Creationism is primarily associated with the USA—but it is spreading around the world—growing in Canada, England and Australia; but now also in Italy, Sweden—places in Europe you would not have expected to encounter it only a few years ago.

People ask me why creationism is particularly strong in the USA; the answer seems to me to lie in the fact that we have always had, since our inception, a strong anti-intellectual streak. This is not altogether a bad thing, our anti-intellectual heritage—in the sense that it represents a distrust of elitism, a resistance to the domination of the wealthy, educated elite. At the same time, though, our public educational system has been one of our strongest suits (though increasingly creaking at the seams)—and American research and scholarship has flourished even in the face of a sort of grass-roots mistrust of things intellectual.

Then, in the early days of the 20th century, along came fundamentalism, one cornerstone of which holds that the Bible is true in all its offices—so impugning the Genesis accounts of the origin of the earth, of life, of the human species—is in fact to cast doubt on the entire document.

Things quickly became political, beginning with failed Presidential candidate/right-wing populist William Jennings Bryan and his involvement with the famous Scopes trial in the mid-1920s. Skipping ahead a half century, we reach the Reagan era—Ronald Reagan also being a right-wing populist. Creationism was then in its "scientific creationism" guise—a transparent attempt to inject creationism into public schools, ducking the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

During the 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan addressed a group of fundamentalist clergy in Dallas, Texas, saying about evolution: “Well, it is a theory, a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science and is not yet believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was believed.” Garbled as this sentence is, its meaning and intent are clear!

Luther Sunderland—who told me he worked on the electrical system of the B-1 bomber as an employee of General Electric in upstate New York—was at that time America’s most successful behind-the-scenes spokesman for creationism. Luther bragged to me that it was he who got to Reagan’s speechwriters.

And Luther also told me that he had Steve Gould and me in mind: the syllogism runs: 1) Darwin said that evolution is slow, steady and gradual; 2) Eldredge and Gould say that species remain relatively stable over long periods of their history—and that change, when it comes, is relatively rapid; 3) Ergo some scientists disagree with Darwin; 4) Ergo some scientists question evolution! Then as now, “Darwin” is code for “evolution.”

Today we have the latest version—so-called "Intelligent Design"—which is actually William Paley's 1802 thesis dusted off and couched in terms of molecular biology and the microanatomy of bacterial flagellae. And, shades of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush has endorsed teaching creationism in schools, saying that “both sides ought to be properly taught.” Things got so bad that over 50% of Americans in the polls said that they either disbelieve evolution, or at least think that intelligent design should be included in the high school curriculum of public schools. Before the Bush era, the numbers were never quite that bad (appalling as the percentage of Americans who never have accepted evolution—especially human evolution—has always been).

But recently there are signs of change. In the famous Harrisburg trial late last year, Judge John E. Jones III decided to rule broadly against intelligent design in his decision in the case involving the Dover, Pennsylvania school district. That is a tremendous step forward in the constant battle to protect the integrity of science education in our schools.

And we at the American Museum of Natural History have put on an extremely successful exhibition on Charles Darwin. The exhibition was not conceived as an answer to intelligent design creationism—but rather to be another one in our series of temporary exhibitions exploring the life and work of some of the most important historical figures in science. Albert Einstein was the subject of the previous exhibition—still up and running when the Darwin exhibition was conceived and initially planned.

But nonetheless we had the courage to stand up—and do a very thorough and artistically very fine exhibition—running perhaps against the tone and tenor of our recent times. I am very proud of my institution for doing this!

And, yes, it is true that we did not get major corporate support as we usually do. The press—especially in Europe—suggests that this, too, is a sign of the tone and tenor of our times. But we DID get support from our friends and collaborating institutions.

But nonetheless the exhibition could not have opened at a better time. I believe, along with Judge Jones' decision, that we are riding the crest—and indeed helping to generate the wave—against the recent burgeoning tide of intelligent design creationism.

For the first time there is a place where people can come and actually see the evidence for evolution—what Darwin saw that led him to evolution, and what the modern evidence for evolution is almost a century and a half after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859.

And people are flocking to Darwin; we have had 300,000 visitors since we opened the exhibition at the American Museum in New York on November 19, 2005. It has been so successful that we have extended its run until August 20, 2006. People have come from all over North America—indeed the world—just to see Darwin. The exhibition will then travel to Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Toronto, and London—in time for Darwin's bicentennial. It’s great that we in creation-land USA actually get to put on the show for Darwin's birthday party on his native soil!!!!

So I think—at least in this little corner of the political landscape—that things are looking up. People are beginning to fight back against the excesses of the current regime.

As to the exhibition itself—I feel that it succeeds at a fundamental level as an almost unparalleled exploration of human creativity—scientific creativity, to be sure—but one so basic that it clearly links science to other realms of human creativity as well.

Darwin left an extremely rich written record of letters, notebooks and unpublished manuscripts in addition to his papers and 20+ books. There is some original scholarship in the exhibition on Darwin’s intellectual odyssey. Our intent is simply to trace Darwin's intellectual life: how he began, what he saw while on the Beagle, and how he developed his ideas—especially, of course, on evolution.

Indeed, when the visitor enters the main room devoted to the Beagle voyage, Darwin sort of melts away—and the visitor stands there in his stead—seeing the critical things that Darwin saw that led him to develop his ideas on evolution. And they are the getting it! It turns out that comparative anatomy—and comparative embryonic development—are the visuals that are grabbing our visitors the most. True, we are living in the fantastic era of molecular biology and the genome—but it is the old-fashioned display of bones and embryos that people can see and understand most easily.

This holds true even in our "World Before Darwin" room—devoted to the creationist perspective into which Darwin was born. One of my son Gregory’s students asked if that was the skeleton of a young chimpanzee in the case of vertebrate skeletons in that room—and when my son said “yes,” the kid said “OK—I don’t have to see anything more—I get it!” Evolution comes through even in our room devoted to the creationist beliefs that Darwin was born into!

Though the bulk of the exhibition is a positive examination of the evidence for evolution—as Darwin saw it, and as we see it today, we HAD to acknowledge that some people still have trouble with Darwin's ideas. Darwin himself wanted to see his account of the evolution of life—including humans—enjoy the same fate as eventually befell that of the astronomers. Isaac Newton, though himself deeply religious, was nonetheless opposed by the Christian church, before his laws of planetary motion were eventually accepted under the rubric: God has created heaven and earth and all living creatures—but has done so using natural law. Darwin would have been disappointed—but probably not surprised—that this hasn't happened in all quarters for evolution as yet.

We acknowledge the creationist perspective throughout the exhibition—at the beginning panel; in the aforementioned room "World before Darwin"; the fact that he was planning on entering the clergy while at Cambridge—and had the Rev. John Stevens Henslow and the Rev. Adam Sedgwick as his main teachers and mentors; inclusion of his Bible brought onto the Beagle; his wife Emma's distress over his evolutionary views in the late 1830s; his decision to keep his work a secret—clearly in large part for fear of the anti-religious take on his work that would erupt if and when he published; and then, at the end, our coverage of "what is a theory?"—in conjunction with the Georgia textbook sticker that says evolution is "only a theory"; and our coverage—by filmed talking heads and a historical timeline—of creationism and intelligent design. In this final section, we take creationism on and dismiss it as non-science; it is not a "debate"—but rather scientists looking askance at creationism.

When I lecture at conservative religious campuses, I hit human evolution very hard. There is nothing like a long sequence of hominid skulls arranged through time to show the very best evidence for human evolution—the only aspect of evolution that creationists actually care about. That's why we have that terrific sequence of skulls over the last five million years near the exit of the last big room in the exhibition.

So, in conclusion, in conceiving and mounting the Darwin exhibition, we did not set out to make a political statement. Rather, our goal was to maintain our tradition of excellence in exhibitions pertaining to science---including the history of science.

But there is no doubt that we are in the right place at the right time—helping to stem the creationist tide—and perhaps thereby fighting back a bit more broadly against the antiscience stance of the present Bush administration.

Niles Eldredge

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