There was a young scientist a little more than 100 years ago who puzzled over how to observe the world. He puzzled over what was important and what was not. In his frustration, he noted everything only hopefully to sort out meaning when he could. He enjoyed the ability to "pump" with this associates as he pondered the nature of things. He hated disagreements and discontentment. He both sought out the company of others interested in science and stood apart to study at his leisure in quiet or on long, morning walks. To learn something new about the world, he needed this environment. His name was Charles Darwin. He knew that what he discovered in his learning would start a war of values, disagreements, and discontentment. It actually was the strength of what he learned that led to this predicament of western society.
Darwin saw that nature was not immutable or unchangeable but was constantly changing as a result of something called natural selection. It was natural selection that fueled the process of adaptation through differential survival and reproduction. Darwin's most convincing proof of his theory of natural selection was the evidence of breeding of horses, cattle or dogs. This artificial or man-made selective process was his key that people most readily understood. But it was the unusual or imperfect that caught Charles Darwin's attention. It was the panda's thumb, an orchid, or tortoises on different islands that led Darwin to his powerful theory of natural selection. It was the unusual and imperfect that demonstrated the power of nature in selecting the most fit - those who survived and reproduced best.
What Darwin started in this war within society was a collision between world views. Anthropologists recognize that every culture forms a world view - a way of classifying, structuring, and organizing the world as they know it. It is a way of ensuring that people know what something is and how it fits. There is no uncertainty. World views shape our understanding of many things including where we come from as humans. It explains our place in the world; that is part of structuring and organizing. What Charles Darwin created was a new scientific world view of origins. It with an older and well established view of origins set forth in the Book of Genesis.
Evolution as Darwin saw it contradicted the biblical account of creation by proposing that the universe came into being over a vast period of time, and that living forms descended with modification from earlier ones. It questioned the divine intervention of creation. By the early 1900s, fundamentalist Christians were convinced that acceptance of evolution breeds theological and moral questions. Henry Morris, the most influential creationists of this century, associates evolution with communism, fascism, atheism among other things. He advocates that it is a vehicle by which to reject God. Some fundamentalists believe that anyone who accepts evolution is lost and will face eternal damnation.
It is intriguing that modern Creation Science argues that it is perfection that proves the role of a divine being. They argue that a watch as we know it today is evidence of "intelligent design theory". Chance, according to this theory, could not possibly lead to the tremendous complexity one finds in nature or in our watches of today. The weakness of this argument lies in the evolution of watches over time and even in broader terms of calculations of time. Just as in breeding cattle or horses, humans form the artificial selective agents for change. Better designs for keeping time occur as people invented something new. Inventions are nothing more that chance finds that work. They are analogous to mutations in genetic materials. These too are chance occurrences that may work as better designs. As Stephen Jay Gould has noted many times, it is in imperfection that we discover the nature of the world. Gould points to the panda's thumb as an example of a crudely designed piece of nature. It works to extract bamboo, but it works very crudely and awkwardly because it isn't perfect. It isn't like the watch.
What then are we to do with these two world views? Or what are we to do with the thousands of world views that explain human origins? We could discuss the story of the lonely raven who one day because he was feeling forlorned wished for company. Suddenly a large clam pushed through the sand and slowly opened. Tiny people emerged from the clam and all of them were talking and happy. Men, women, an children spread out. The raven was very happy too, and he sang a song of greeting to the first people of the world. Or we could talk about how human life began when skywoman descended to an island that grew when a muskrat brought mud from under the sea and placed it on a turtle's shell. This was her home, and she gave birth to a daughter - the beginning of the world. We must accept that different peoples explain who we are in different ways according to their own world views.
Let me quote Vine Deloria who wrote about a similar dilemma in a book called America in 1942:
The Bering Straits theory is tenaciously held by white scholars against the varied migration theories of the natives and is an example of the triumph of doctrine over facts. Excavating ancient fireplaces and campsites may be exciting, but there are no well-worn paths which clearly show migratory patterns from Asia to North America, and if there were such paths, there would be no indication anywhere which way the footprints were heading. We can be certain of only one thing: the Bering Strait theory is preferred by whites and consequently becomes accepted as scientific fact.
We can use this to see the collision of world views that can occur when different cultures exist in the same world. Traditional natives, as Deloria points out, believe in something different than archaeologists. The fact exists that archaeologists do have ample scientific evidence for a migration. There are not only archaeological "campsites" as Deloria calls them but also genetic and linguistic evidence to support a connection between Native Americans and Asians. It is equally true that Native Americans hold fast to their cultures and still explain the world according to their beliefs.
What we must accept is that scientists endeavor to understand
the world. It is a world of oddities and yet extra-ordinarily special. What
our task is in the course is to explore what is known. We, as Charles Darwin
did, will note everything only hopefully to sort out meaning when we can.
We will "pump" with each other as we pondered the nature of things.
Most importantly, we will ponder what is known and see if it is relevent
to our understanding of ourselves, of humans, and of human origins.