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September 15, 2007
A Perspective on Evolution (Historical, Personal)
On February 12, 1809, two exceptional men were born. Both would play pivotal roles in modern history and leave important legacies; although in quite unrelated fields. Abraham Lincoln, who was eventually elected Sixteenth American President in 1860, was born into relative poverty on what was then the frontier. Although his second term was ended by an assassin shortly after it began, his leadership during the first had provided the nascent American democracy with a second chance to succeed after its founders’ catastrophic embrace of chattel slavery in 1787.
Charles Darwin was born on the same day as Linclon, but into a wealthy and well-connected physician’s family in Shropshire, England. His patient and responsible development of one of the most productive insights ever to occur to a human, not published until 1859, would provide the Biological Sciences with the model now being used to reverse engineer the development of life in much the same way equally crucial intuitions by several others had given rise to the modern Physical Sciences roughly two hundred years earlier. Ironically, the concept Darwin’s name is most famously associated with can now be applied beyond biology to both the entire universe and to all human thought.
As we come nearer in time to their joint bicentennial, perhaps their conincidental births will inspire coincidental assessments of how their lives have affected human history in its relatively short span since then; or perhaps not. Lincoln is now revered for the improbable feat of preserving federal hegemony over a deeply divided nation engaged in what was then the first "modern" war, a bloody and protracted struggle that has continued to divide it both racially and politically; even as it continued to grow in size and global importance as the country that turned the tide against Germany and its allies in the First World War, "saved" the world from Axis domination in the Second, and then vanquished the Soviet Union in the Cold War that followed.
A sober assessment of that same nation's current activities is nothing less than shocking: on the domestic front, it remains deeply committed to a punitive drug policy that selectively punishes its poorest and most vulnerable citizens in improbable ways that are endorsed and carried out by all three branches of the same federal government Lincoln preserved and in obvious violation of the pious claims made by its founding manifesto.
That drug policy is also being steadfastly ignored by the gaggle of candidates from both political parties now competing expensively for one of the two nominations that will produce the next American President; even as the current holder of that office is stubbornly defending a destructive war that, although now opposed by a large majority, will still be in progress when he leaves office and probably well beyond. An ironic counterpoint is that the same incumbent is a member of the "party of Lincoln," which, since the end of World War Two, has neatly swapped roles with the party that had controlled the deeply prejudiced Solid South from Reconstruction onward. Ironically, the first phase of Reconsruction was undone by a deal which "elected" another Republican who also received a popular minority (in 1876).
To return to Darwin and his legacy: although scientifically validated as a theoretical construct comparable in importance only to Gravity and the Periodic Table, the Theory of Evolution is widely opposed politically, and in many instances, prevented from being studied by a majority of the planet's human subscribers to one of several organized religions. An interesting consequence of that opposition is that there has been far more international progress in exploring space than in any unbiased scientific understanding of human behavior. We have racked up a series of stunning successes attributable to international cooperation in what was once a "Space Race," while failing abysmally to curb the fratricidal impulses now so manifest in the "War on Terror," which is more properly thought of as a modern reprise of the Crusades.
As a token of how promptly and wilfully any controversial idea is now vilified by political opponents, I feel constrained to add that my preference for that term is based solely on logic and does not connote any approval of Osama bin Laden.
One conclusion that could well be drawn from whatever comparison between Darwin and Lincoln may ensue over the next 18 months is that although Science may have allowed our numbers to explode to unanticipated levels while increasing both human knowledge and the relative wealth of a comparative few, those increases have generally come at the cost of the short, miserable lives a rich minority is inflicting, albeit often thoughtlessly, on the poor majority.
An additional realization, becoming clearer almost by the month, is that Global Warming, still politically opposed by the same forces that oppose Evolution, poses an enormous threat to the tattered economic model that still permits our burgeoning human population to function on a day-to-day basis.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at September 15, 2007 06:55 PM