The Origin of Speciousness
As a loyal follower of Charles Darwin (I bravely appear in public despite the shame of having a creationist nephew) I am also a devotee of Richard Dawkins. I own seven of Dawkins’ books on evolution and would own them all except that he writes faster than I can read.
In philosopher Daniel Dennett’s apt summation, evolution is the single best idea anyone has ever had.
Thus 2009 was a busy year for people like me, with over 1,000 observances in 50+ countries of the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species and of Darwin’s 200th birthday. Oh, and Abraham Lincoln was born that same day. Seemed worth mentioning.
Since air travel has devolved into cretaceous unpleasantness, I’m afraid I missed some of the liveliest Darwin celebrations, like the Manhattan Ensemble Theater’s dramatization of the great man’s voyage on the HMS Beagle.
In the Galapagos, he enters a cave which turns out to be the set of a TV Reality Show, and in the second act he’s kicked off the island.
With equal fervor, England’s University of Birmingham presented The Rap Guide to Evolution, starring “African American atheist rapper Greydon Square, the walking Stephen Hawking.”
Actually, I like the satires and the send-ups. I just wish the Manhattan and Birmingham dramatists would turn their attention to the monkeys inhabiting Texas, Kansas, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Louisiana school boards or to baboons like James Dobson at Focus on the Family.
These creationists boast genetic sequences that are 96% identical to the human genome.
They’ve even been trained to reproduce the sounds of English words, though with no apparent comprehension of what the words mean.
Clarence Darrow and H.L. Mencken demolished the creationists in the 1926 Scopes trial, and Inherit the Wind repeated the demonstration in the 1950s on stage and screen. More recently, any number of state and federal courts have definitively shown that purveyors of creationism and “intelligent design” are imbeciles, charlatans, or both.
How is it, then, that in 2010 there are half a dozen states and countless towns where the monkeys are still running the zoo?
My own species-specific, neo-Darwinian answer would be that baboons tend to like other baboons, so they vote for them.