Why Darwin Matters (24 page)

One gentleman recounted a lengthy tantric sexual encounter with his lover that lasted for many hours, at the culmination of which a lightning bolt shot through her left eye followed by a blue light-being child entering her womb, ensuring conception. Nine months later, friends and gurus joined the couple in a hot house, sweating their way through their own “rebirthing” process (to cleanse the pain of one’s own childbirth so that it is not passed on to the child) before the mother gave birth to a baby boy. Right then and there the father informed this infant that he would need to become an athlete in order to get into college; two decades later, the father told me as I slipped deeper into the hot tub, this young man became a professional baseball player. “How do you explain
that?
” he queried. I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.

People have and share such spiritual experiences, and impart larger significance to them, because we have a cortex large enough to conceive of such transcendent notions, and an imagination creative enough to concoct fantastic narratives. If we define the spirit (or soul) as the pattern of information of which we are made—our genes, proteins, memories, and personalities—then spirituality is the quest to know the place of our essence within the deep time of evolution and the deep space of the cosmos.

There are many ways to be spiritual, and science is one in its awe-inspiring account of who we are and where we came from. “The universe is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be,” began the late astronomer Carl Sagan in the opening scene of
Cosmos
, filmed just down the coast from Esalen. “Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us. There’s a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a great height.
We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.” How can we connect to this vast cosmos? Sagan’s answer is both spiritually scientific and scientifically spiritual: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff,” he said, referring to the stellar origins of the chemical elements of life, which are cooked in the interiors of stars, then released in supernova explosions into interstellar space where they condense into a new solar system with planets, some of which have life that is composed of this star stuff. “We’ve begun at last to wonder about our origins, star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps throughout the cosmos. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”
²

That is spiritual gold, and Carl Sagan was one of the most spiritual scientists of our epoch.
³

How can we find spiritual meaning in a scientific worldview? Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one’s place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond oneself. There are many sources of spirituality. Unfortunately, there are those who believe that science and spirituality are in conflict. The nineteenth-century English poet John Keats, for example, lamented that Isaac Newton had “destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism.” Natural philosophy, he complained in his 1820 poem
Lamia
,

will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow
.

Keats’s contemporary Samuel Taylor Coleridge similarly averred, “the souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton.”
⁴

Does a scientific explanation for the world diminish its spiritual beauty? I think not. Science and spirituality are complementary, not conflicting; additive, not detractive. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades. I am deeply moved, for example, when I observe through my Meade eight-inch reflecting telescope in my backyard the fuzzy little patch of light that is the Andromeda galaxy. It is not just because it is lovely, but because I also understand that the photons of light landing on my retina left Andromeda 2.9 million years ago, when our ancestors were tiny-brained hominids roaming the plains of Africa.

I am doubly stirred because it was not until 1923 that the astronomer Edwin Hubble, using the 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson just above my home in the foothills of Pasadena, discovered that this “nebula” was actually an extragalactic stellar system of immense size and distance. Hubble subsequently discovered that the light from most galaxies is shifted toward the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum (literally unweaving a rainbow of colors), meaning that the universe is expanding away from an explosive creation. It was the first empirical evidence indicating that the universe had a beginning, and thus is not eternal. What could be more awe-inspiring—more numinous, magical, spiritual—than this cosmic visage? Mount Wilson Observatory is the Chartres Cathedral of our time.

Since I live in Southern California, I have had many occasions to make the climb to Mount Wilson, a twenty-five-mile trek from the bedroom community of La Cañada up a twisting mountain road whose terminus is a cluster of telescopes, interferometers,
and communications towers that feed the mega-media conglomerate below. As a young student of science in the 1970s, I took a general tour. As a serious bicycle racer in the 1980s, I rode there every Wednesday (a tradition still practiced by a handful of us cycling diehards). In the 1990s, I took several scientists there, including the late Harvard evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould, who described it as a deeply moving experience. Most recently, in November of 2004, I arranged a visit to the observatory for the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. As we were standing beneath the magnificent dome housing the 100-inch telescope and pondering how marvelous, even miraculous, this scientistic vision of the cosmos and our place in it all seemed, Dawkins turned to me and said, “All of this makes me so proud of our species that I am almost moved to tears.”

As we are pattern-seeking, story-telling primates, to most of us the pattern of life and the universe indicates design. For countless millennia we have taken these patterns and constructed stories about how life and the cosmos were designed specifically for us from above. For the past few centuries, however, science has presented us with a viable alternative in which the design comes from below through the direction of built-in self-organizing principles of emergence and complexity. Perhaps this natural process, like the other natural forces which we are all comfortable accepting as non-threatening to religion, was God’s way of creating life. Maybe God
is
the laws of nature—or even nature itself—but this is a theological supposition, not a scientific one.

What science tells us is that we are but one among hundreds of millions of species that evolved over the course of three and a half billion years on one tiny planet among many orbiting an ordinary star, itself one of possibly billions of solar systems in an ordinary galaxy that contains hundreds of billions of stars, itself located in a
cluster of galaxies not so different from millions of other galaxy clusters, themselves whirling away from one another in an expanding cosmic bubble universe that very possibly is only one among a near infinite number of bubble universes. Is it really possible that this entire cosmological multiverse was designed and exists for one tiny subgroup of a single species on one planet in a lone galaxy in that solitary bubble universe? It seems unlikely.

Herein lies the spiritual side of science—
sciensuality
, if you will pardon an awkward neologism but one that echoes the sensuality of discovery. If religion and spirituality are supposed to generate awe and humility in the face of the creator, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists, and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists?

Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.

The fundamental difference between evolutionary theory and Intelligent Design is the nature of explanation: natural versus supernatural. The problem with the supernatural explanations of Intelligent Design is that there is nothing we can
do
with supernatural explanations. They lead to no data collection, no testable hypotheses, no quantifiable theories: therefore, no science.

To demonstrate the logical absurdity of trying to squeeze the round peg of science into the square hole of religion, I offer the following scientific revision of the Genesis creation story. This is not intended as a sacrilege of the mythic grandeur of Genesis; rather, it is a mere extension of what the creationists have already done to Genesis in their insistence that it be read not as mythological saga but as scientific prose. If Genesis were written in the language of modern science, it would read something like this:

In the beginning—specifically on October 23, 4004 BC, at noon—out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang, followed
by cosmological inflation and an expanding universe. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He created Quarks and therefrom He created hydrogen atoms and thence He commanded the hydrogen atoms to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process to release energy in the form of light. And the light maker He called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what he was doing, so he created Earth. And the evening and the morning were the first day
.

And God said, Let there be lots of fusion light makers in the sky. Some of these fusion makers He grouped into collections He called galaxies, and these appeared to be millions and even billions of light-years from Earth, which would mean that they were created before the first creation in 4004
BC
. This was confusing, so God created tired light, and the creation story was preserved. And created He many wondrous splendors such as Red Giants, White Dwarfs, Quasars, Pulsars, Supernovas, Worm Holes, and even Black Holes out of which nothing can escape. But since God cannot be constrained by nothing, He created Hawking radiation through which information can escape from Black Holes. This made God even more tired than tired light, and the evening and the morning were the second day
.

And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the continents drift apart by plate tectonics. He decreed that sea floor spreading would create zones of emergence, and He caused subduction zones to build mountains and cause earthquakes. In weak points in the crust God created volcanic islands, where the next day He would place organisms that were similar to but different from their relatives on the continents, so that still later created creatures called humans would mistake them for evolved descendants created by adaptive radiation. And the evening and the morning were the third day
.

And God saw that the land was barren, so He created animals
bearing their own kind, declaring Thou shalt not evolve into new species, and thy equilibrium shall not be punctuated. And God placed into the rocks, fossils that appeared older than 4004
BC
that were similar to but different from living creatures. And the sequence resembled descent with modification. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day
.

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that have life, the fishes. And God created great whales whose skeletal structure and physiology were homologous with the land mammals He would create later that day. God then brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, declaring that microevolution was permitted, but not macroevolution. And God said, “Natura non facit saltum”—Nature shall not make leaps. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day
.

And God created the pongids and hominids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, the Bible, in one chapter He said He created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in another chapter He said He created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. This caused confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created theologians to sort it out
.

And in the ground placed He in abundance teeth, jaws, skulls, and pelvises of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures. One chosen as his special creation He named Lucy, who could walk upright like a human but had a small brain like an ape. And God realized this too was confusing, so he created paleoanthropologists to figure it out
.