When I was 9, a youth pastor asked my Sunday school group, “If evolution is true, then why aren’t apes still evolving?” In hindsight, it’s apparent he hadn’t studied the evidence from reputable sources, nor was he asking a gaggle of grade-schoolers in hopes of an honest answer. No, his question aimed to seed a specific doubt in our young minds.
Put another way: If evolution is true, why aren’t apes becoming more human-like before our eyes? He may as well have wondered why zookeepers didn’t regularly arrive at work to discover their chimpanzee enclosures now housed troupes of very confused, very naked humans asking to bum a pair of pants and directions to the nearest bus stop.
None of this was apparent to my younger self, though. I took the challenge at face value and set out to discover why apes weren’t still evolving. Naive? For sure. However, my naivety led me to a lifelong fascination with Darwin and his theory of evolution by natural selection. I’ve enjoyed reading books on the subject ever since.
Today, I could answer my youth pastor’s question with more good faith than he posed it — and more confidence than a curious 9-year-old whose primary source on the matter was Pokémon.
Apes are still evolving. So are humans. While we are card-carrying members of the same order, humans didn’t evolve from modern chimps but share a common ancestor with our cousin species. My youth pastor’s mistake came from confusing the universal tree of life — with its boughs and branches expanding outward from deep Archean roots — with the Great Chain of Being — an ancient concept that views life as progressing linearly, with bacteria on the bottom and humanity standing tall at life’s pinnacle. And so on.
Also with the courtesy of hindsight, I now recognize that he was not questioning the evidence for evolution by natural selection. Not meaningfully. He likely didn’t harbor a similar icy rage against the Hubble constant, quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, or the germ theory of disease. His struggle was with the philosophical and spiritual fallout of the bomb Darwin dropped more than 150 years ago when he published On the Origin of Species (1859).
Actually, bomb may not be the right metaphor. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett famously described the theory as a “universal acid,” an idea so powerful that it “will eat through anything!” such that it cannot be contained. That life could result from a blind, algorithmic process doesn’t just reshape the field of biology. It dissolves those boundaries and seeps into our notions of ethics, creativity, psychology, cosmology, and human culture. It spreads to the very ideas of meaning and purpose. It leaves in its wake, as Dennett put it, “a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.”
Or, to borrow yet another metaphor from the poet Jericho Brown: The thunder scares even as the lightning helps us see.
So while I disapprove of my youth pastor’s actions, I can sympathize with his struggle. Even those who accept Darwin’s theory wrestle with its full implications, and many try to erect barriers to keep it from bleeding into, and subsequently souring, their favored landmarks. Instincts may stem from nature, but must ethics exist on a higher plane to be humane? If we accept evolved differences between the sexes, must we also accept reactionary politics and social policies? Is it evolution or culture that writes more indelibly on the human mind?
My latest read about evolution, Matt Ridley’s Birds, Sex and Beauty, steps into this fray by exploring Darwin’s other dangerous idea: sexual selection. In an exclusive interview with Big Think, Ridley discusses why mate choice not only explains the peacock’s fabulous train of feathers and the bowerbird’s bedecked love nests but perhaps also the equally flamboyant qualities of our species, such as art, humor, and music.
You can check out our interview and a preview of Ridley’s book below. This month, we also spoke to Carl Zimmer, author of Air-Borne, about the aerobiome, that “gaseous ocean” we all swim in and share with trillions of invisible life forms; Martha Beck, author of Beyond Anxiety, on how to avoid falling into an “anxiety spiral”; and Edward Fishman, author of Chokepoints, on how the United States changed the weapons and rules of economic warfare.
Keep reading,
Kevin