By Steven Gan
I once had a very interesting science teacher in the seventh grade who taught our class about evolution. He told us something very simple: that our bodies can evolve right before our very eyes. Now, I know what you’re thinking. How can that be? Doesn’t evolution of any living organism take a gazillion years?
My science teacher explained the evolutionary process like this: If starting tomorrow we lived barefoot in the trees, in order to keep ourselves balanced, humans with toes that were spread out and elongated could better grasp the branches. In the beginning we would be extremely clumsy in trying to do this and those of us who were not able to do it might end up on the ground. But those of us who managed would survive and pass this trait on to the next generation.
See? That wasn’t so complicated.
I’m sure you can even rationally take it to the next level and foresee that if we stayed living in the trees for the next million years, we would end up looking a lot different than we do now. We might have a tail protruding from our posterior (for better balance), and maybe we’d be holding marathons, swinging in great leaps from tree to tree. Although we wouldn’t recognize ourselves, that’s the way the evolutionary process works over time.
Evolution is a scientific theory with 150 years of accumulated evidence to support it. It can be criticized and refined by scientific methods. But it is not a matter of belief. Religious thought cannot be applied to disprove a scientific proposition any more than grammar can be used to build a skyscraper.
Yet according to Ben Carson, a proclaimed 2016 Republican candidate for President who is a highly accomplished neurosurgeon and, thus, an esteemed man of science, evolution is a matter of belief—something that just doesn’t fit into his view of the cosmos.
Carson’s view of evolution first became widely known back in 2006. In a 2006 debate with Richard Dawkins (British evolutionary biologist), Francis Collins (American physician and geneticist), and Daniel Dennett (American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist), Carson stated: “I don’t believe in evolution…I simply don’t have enough faith to believe that something as complex as our ability to rationalize, think, and plan, and have a moral sense of what’s right and wrong, just appeared.” In 2012, nearly 500 professors, students, and alumni of Emory University wrote a letter expressing concern about his views in advance of his commencement speech (there was no request to rescind the invitation). They cited a quote in a Carson interview with the Adventist Review: “By believing we are the product of random acts, we eliminate morality and the basis of ethical behavior.” More recently, Carson again reiterated his beliefs that the theory of evolution is just not possible. He stated that as a neurosurgeon who has spent most of his life studying the human brain, he believes the brain is too complex to have “simply evolved.”
“Simply evolved?” Carson apparently forgets that evolution just doesn’t happen overnight, but over millennia.
My hope is that Carson continues to insist that the theory of evolution is for the birds. He has his conservative religious following, and to those who cheer him on, he’s talking their language. To the rest of America, he’s on the fringes.
I’m thankful that Carson never sat in on my seventh grade science class.