GEORGE MONBIOT-A LIFE WITH NO PURPOSE
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1549880,00.html
Comment
A life with no purpose
Darwinism implies that the only eternal life we have is in the recycling of
our atoms. I find that comforting
George Monbiot
Tuesday August 16, 2005
The Guardian
All is not lost in America. When George Bush came out a couple of weeks ago in
favour of teaching "intelligent design" - the new manifestation of creationism
- the press gave him a tremendous kicking. The Christian Taliban have not
yet won.
But they are gaining on us. So far there have been legislative attempts in
13 states to have intelligent design added to the school curriculum. In
Kansas, Texas and Philadelphia, it already has a foot in the door. In April
a new "museum of earth history" opened in Arkansas, which instructs visitors
that "dinosaurs and humans did coexist", and that juvenile dinosaurs, though
God forgot to mention it, hitched a ride on Noah's Ark. Similar museums are
being built in Texas and Kentucky. Some 45% of Americans, according to a
Gallup poll last year, believe that "human beings did not evolve, but
instead were created by God ... essentially in their current form about 10,000
years ago".
And not just in America. Last month Vienna's Catholic archbishop, Cardinal
Christoph Scho"nborn, asserted that "any system of thought that denies or
seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is
ideology, not science". He appears to have the support of the Pope. Last
week the Australian education minister, Brendan Nelson, announced that "if
schools also want to present students with intelligent design, I don't have
any difficulty with that". In the UK, the headmaster of one of Tony Blair's
new business-sponsored academies claims that evolution is merely a "faith
position".
The controversy fascinates me, partly because of its similarity to the dispute
about climate change. Like the climate-change deniers, advocates of
intelligent design cherry-pick the data that appears to support their case.
They ask for evidence, then ignore it when it's presented to them. They invoke
a conspiracy to explain the scientific consensus, and are unembarrassed by
their own scientific illiteracy. In an article published in the American
Chronicle on Friday, the journalist Thomas Dawson asserted that "all of the
vertebrate groups, from fish to mammals, appear [in the fossil record] at
one time", and that if evolution "were true, there would be animal-life
fossils of particular animals without vision and others with varying degrees
of eye development ... Such fossils do not exist". (The first fish and the
first mammals are in fact separated by some 300m years, and the fossil
record has more eyes, in all stages of development, than the CIA).
But it also fascinates me because natural selection is such a barren field for
the fundamentalists to till. For 146 years Darwinian evolution has seen off
all comers. There is a massive accumulation of evidence - from the fossil
record, to genetics, to direct observation - that appears to support it.
Were they to concentrate instead on the questions now assailing big bang
theory, or on the failure so far to reconcile gravity with quantum physics, or
on the stubborn non-appearance of the Higgs boson and the abiding mystery of
the phenomenon of mass, the Christian conservatives would be much harder to
confront. Why pick on Darwin?
It is surely because, as soon as you consider the implications, you must cease
to believe that either Life or life are affected by purpose. As G Thomas
Sharp, chairman of the Creation Truth Foundation, admitted to the Chicago
Tribune, "if we lose Genesis as a legitimate scientific and historical
explanation for man, then we lose the validity of Christianity. Period".
We lose far more than that. Darwinian evolution tells us that we are incipient
compost: assemblages of complex molecules that - for no greater purpose than
to secure sources of energy against competing claims - have developed the
ability to speculate. After a few score years, the molecules disaggregate
and return whence they came. Period.
As a gardener and ecologist, I find this oddly comforting. I like the idea
of literal reincarnation: that the molecules of which I am composed will, once
I have rotted, be incorporated into other organisms. Bits of me will be
pushing through the growing tips of trees, will creep over them as
caterpillars, will hunt those caterpillars as birds. When I die, I'd like to
be buried in a fashion which ensures that no part of me is wasted. Then I
can claim to have been of some use after all.
Is this not better than the awful lottery of judgment? Is a future we can
predict not more comforting than one committed to the whims of inscrutable
authority? Is eternal death not a happier prospect than eternal life? The
atoms of which we are composed, which we have borrowed momentarily from the
ecosphere, will be recycled until the universe collapses. This is our
continuity, our eternity. Why should anyone want more?
Two days ago I would have claimed that the demand for more was universal -
that every society has or had its creation story and, as Joseph Campbell put
it, "it will always be the one shape-shifting yet marvellously constant
story that we find". But yesterday I read a study by the anthropologist Daniel
Everett of the language of the Piraha people of the Brazilian Amazon,
published in the latest edition of Current Anthropology. Its findings could
scarcely be more disturbing, or more profound.
The Piraha, Everett reveals, possess "the most complex verbal morphology I
am aware of [and] are some of the brightest, pleasantest, most fun-loving
people that I know". Yet they have no numbers of any kind, no terms for
quantification (such as all, each, every, most and some), no colour terms
and no perfect tense. They appear to have borrowed their pronouns from another
language, having previously possessed none. They have no "individual or
collective memory of more than two generations past", no drawing or other art,
no fiction and "no creation stories or myths".
All this, Everett believes, can be explained by a single characteristic: "
Piraha culture constrains communication to non-abstract subjects which fall
within the immediate experience of [the speaker]." What can be discussed, in
other words, is what has been seen. When it can no longer be perceived, it
ceases, in this realm at least, to exist. After struggling with one
grammatical curiosity, he realised that the Piraha were "talking about
liminality - situations in which an item goes in and out of the boundaries
of their experience. [Their] excitement at seeing a canoe go around a river
bend is hard to describe; they see this almost as travelling into another
dimension". The Piraha, still living, watch the sparrow flit in and out of the
banqueting hall.
"Happy the hare at morning," WH Auden wrote, "for she cannot read/ The
Hunter's waking thoughts. Lucky the leaf/ Unable to predict the fall ... But
what shall man do, who can whistle tunes by heart,/ Know to the bar when death
shall cut him short, like the cry of the shearwater?"
It seems to me that we are the happy ones. We, alone among organisms, who
perceive eternity, and know that the world will carry on without us.
www.monbiot.com
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