Harriet the Sly: Science, Snake Oil, and the Survival of the Shrewdest

True story: a few years ago, while teaching anthropology at a major urban university, I asked my undergrads to define "evolution" in a single paragraph and submit it anonymously, no name required. In swanky pedagogical terms, it was a "low-stakes" assignment, a way to jump-start an informal discussion about the common myths that pervade the public perception of natural selection before we got down to the nitty gritty of human origins. I expected a range of responses, from muddled Lamarckian fallacies to oft-repeated but ill-understood survival-of-the-fittest mantras to expert disquisitions on Mendelian genetics. What I did not expect, being a bit wet behind the ears, was a sermon. "Evolution is a communist lie meant to steer you away from the path of righteousness and into godlessness," wrote one. "Long live Christian Science! The heathens will pay on the day of judgement." Fortunately, I had dismissed class and wandered back to my office before discovering this missive, and only wound up spitting coffee all over my computer screen instead of drenching the front row of the lecture hall like Shamu landing a backflip. I've kept that scrap of paper, because it's the most remarkable thing a student has ever handed me. And I've never figured it out: was it an honest proclamation or a piss-take? I would prefer to think that some wise-ass with a penchant for schadenfreude saw an opportunity to put one over on a young and all-too-obviously earnest professor, and had a good laugh at prospect of my discomfiture. I didn't have the balls to bring it up in class the following week, so I'll never know. No matter; lesson learned. Next time I'll dispense with the touchy-feely schtick and give the little bastards a pop-quiz. And baby, it's going to count.

I'm reminded of this incident as word comes from down under that the Methuselah of the animal kingdom, Harriet the tortoise, has died at the venerable age of 175. Harriet's claim to fame, aside from her extraordinary longevity and the scandalous fact that she was mistaken for a male for well over a century, is that she is reputed to have been an associate of Charles Darwin, who traveled to her home in the Galapagos Islands around the time of her birth and returned with several specimens of her kind. Regardless of whether Harriet and Darwin were actually personal acquaintances, her death is a reminder of how young the science of evolution is, and how vulnerable its hegemony in the world of ideas.

Harriet shuffled off this mortal coil at a moment in history when evolution is under the gun politically and sentimentally -- from the heartland, where school districts are engaged in heated debates over the place of so-called "creationism" in American classrooms, to the shire, where a recent poll revealed a remarkable degree of agnosticism on the matter of evolution among the British public. Scientists worldwide, meanwhile, are fighting back with Galilean determination, having recently nailed a Luther-like proclamation demanding that human origins be taught on the basis of evidence rather than faith to the front door of the global church. And when the eggheads emerge pale and squinting from the laboratory and start screaming blue murder, you know that something big is afoot.

My own position on the "threat" posed by creationism is one of sustained cynicism. While I'm as susceptible as the next heathen to the same sporadic bouts of indignation, despair, and bug-eyed incredulity at the sheer tenacity of Bishop Ussher's latter-day acolytes, nevertheless I find it difficult to maintain an unmitigated degree of hysteria about the creationism bugaboo. Science and religion have never been mutually-exclusive rackets, logically or historically. The relative infancy of the scientific endeavor calls for a healthy degree of humility about the extent our knowledge, beyond which lies a vast realm of conjecture. Many scientists whose work habitually pushes the edge of human understanding are deeply spiritual people, and comfortably so. Science itself is no static, homogeneous monolith, but a maelstrom of struggle which should be invigorated rather than threatened by conflict and dissent. Insofar as innovation entails hypothesis and falsification, science itself proceeds largely upon leaps of faith: hunches, intuitions, shots in the dark. And certainly science is no untouchable singularity hovering in some mythical, rarefied atmosphere above the hurly-burly of social production; the pursuit of science, like that of faith, is an immanently social and political act. All of these are good reasons to think that science and religion, as different modes of knowing the world, can coexist, however grumpily, without a cataclysmic clash between the erstwhile custodians of ecumenical insight that both sides seem eager to provoke in the current climate.

If there is any clear "winner" in the battle between iconoclasm and creed, it's capitalism: a fickle, expedient, and insatiable parasite suckling greedily at the tit of Athena. Capitalism thrives upon the production of knowledge, and in its own turn, shapes its course indelibly. Levins and Lewontin put it succinctly:

Modern science is a product of capitalism. The economic foundation of modern science is the need for capitalists not only to expand horizontally into new regions, but to transform production, create new products, make production methods more profitable, and to do all this ahead of others who are doing the same. Its ideological underpinnings are congruent with these needs and also with the political philosophy of the bourgeois revolution -- individualism, belief in a marketplace of ideas, internationalism, nationalism, and rejection of authority as the basis of knowledge (Levins and Lewontin 1996:197).

The "knowledge" produced under the auspices of capital accumulation is a mongrel canon at best; in the main, profit seems to depend upon the steady supply of a functional science -- one that creates widgets that work, wagons to carry them, and weapons to secure the expansion of their markets. But in the interstices of this rational grid, capitalism seems equally satisfied to turn a profit from snake oil -- miracle cures, quack remedies, mystical placebos -- and eminently placed to convince people that only commodity consumption can cure their purported flaws. What matters to capital is not content, but profitability.

So if the fundies can find a way to make creationism turn a profit, they've got half a chance of giving Darwin a real run for his money in the hegemony market. In the meantime, I'm sufficiently convinced of the lucrative potential of rational science to trust that its explanatory power can weather any serious assault from the tick-tock lobby. Certainly the spectre of social regression to a period in human history when religious authority dictated acceptable thought -- and I believe this is the dark dystopia evoked by the fear of creationist ascendancy -- strikes me as dubious.

But in the odd whimsical moment, I can't help but wonder if Harriet, having departed our own troubled shores for bluer waters, might not bump into her old friend Chuck, and have a conspiratorial titter at the tempest in a teapot the two of them cooked up some century and a half ago.

Citations:

Levins, Richard and Richard Lewontin, 1985. The Dialectical Biologist. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.