Evolution: The Sequel
My friend Tom has a keen analytical mind, particularly in business and financial matters. He worked in mergers and acquisitions for a large industrial company, then headed two different non-profits engaged in nurturing and funding new business start-ups. Meeting with hopeful entrepreneurs, he could often tell within ten or fifteen minutes whether or not a business plan was viable and where it needed decisive changes or additions.
But when I ran into him at a coffee house a few weeks ago, his interests had ranged wildly afield from all that. Now it was Darwinian evolution he wanted to know about –- from the ground up.
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Since that’s one of my longtime interests, I was happy to oblige. I told him to stop by the house to pick up some books. I pulled out five or six by Richard Dawkins and a couple by Stephen Jay Gould.
The two I recommended were Dawkins’ earliest – River Out of Eden – and his classic, The Blind Watchmaker. Read those two, I told Tom, and you’ll have the basics on how evolution works. And if you’re pressed for time, just go through both of them reading the parts I circled or underlined years ago.
I hadn’t asked what had prompted this sudden interest, but a week or so later I started getting e-mails from Tom. He was sending them by I-phone from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, near the Kenyan border, where in 1960 Louis and Mary Leakey had discovered the two million year old fossils of Homo Habilis (Handy-Man) and some of the earliest tools ever made by humans.
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Stunning. The e-mails were full of facts, some from Dawkins, others from direct observation, and some from tour guides, who occasionally misremembered what they had been taught in learning the job.
And then he was back. For a trip of such distance and difficulty, it was surprisingly swift – ten days or so including travel. Tom and his wife, a physiatrist, are very efficient folks.
But that may not have been the only reason for keeping the trip short. It turns out they were traveling with another couple who are diehard young-earth creationists. Shown the 3.4 million year old footprints of another, even earlier hominid, the woman scoffed, “How could they possibly know?”
Tom and his wife kept their mouths shut but their brains working. When he showed up again in the coffee shop, Tom was ready to discuss evolution with anyone and everyone.
He even drew me a picture of one of those footprints – and signed it. I may offer it on E-Bay, just to irritate a few followers of Rick Perry and Justice Scalia.
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The missing link lurks somewhere in the world view of that couple accompanying Tom and his wife. Why two dead-end creationists would take on the rigors of reaching and exploring Olduvai Gorge, the mother lode of evidence for human evolution — and what they are now telling their friends in other, more dimly illuminated coffee houses — their god alone knows.