The Bible Belt

Is it that important that we accept evolution? Surely we’re free to believe what we choose.  Yes, but what if those beliefs then lead to deleterious effects on society (as well as being demonstratively untrue)? 

In the United States the acceptance and teaching of evolution has often been opposed in the former slave states, the region which interestingly is also the most Christian region of America as measured by church attendance. One church in Houston, Texas claims a weekly attendance of 43,000, and several have their own radio and or TV station. Years ago this led the writer H. L. Mencken to coin the phrase the ‘Bible Belt’ - an area basically synonymous with the former slave states. 

Recently I finally got up the courage to see the movie “Twelve Years a Slave”. Not easy viewing. What was particularly appalling was seeing the slave owners justifying their beating of the people they ‘owned’ with quotes from the Bible.  Lynching – the mob murder of African Americans continued up into the 1960s! One of the major denominations in the Bible Belt are the Southern Baptists who strongly defended slavery as Biblical, and are today thoroughly anti-evolutionist. You see, if like this ‘science’ teacher in Louisiana, you believe that the Almighty created the entire universe six thousand years ago, (as Sam Harris says - about 1,500 years after the Babylonians started brewing beer J), then he could well have made white people to rule the earth and then ‘some lesser creatures’ to serve them. Sounds good eh? 

In earlier decades the teaching of evolution was banned by law in Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas. Most of you will be familiar with the famous Skopes Trial in Dayton, TN when in 1925 a teacher was found guilty of teaching evolution.  But in Louisiana last year a sixth grader complained to his parents that his science teacher, in a public school, had told the class that evolution was a “stupid theory that stupid people made up because they don’t want to believe in God.”  The parents are suing. 

Besides the wrongness of this Louisiana teacher telling kids untruths, there are further disturbing comings together in the former slave states Bible Belt that should be faced up to. Here, before I say more, I must underline that much needs to change in the northern states as well. Slavery in America officially ended in 1865, almost 150 years ago. And yet, a recent study shows that in those same states there is still less social and economic mobility amongst African Americans compared with other parts of America.  And just last month in Ferguson, Missouri, a young African American, carrying no weapon, was shot to death by a white policeman. The nation learned that in this predominantly black suburb of St Louis the police force is almost all white. Sadly, similar stories abound. 

That’s not all. Because the Southern Baptist church and other similar churches, mostly in the Bible Belt, believe in biblical inerrancy, the preachers – all men of course by church law – point out that Adam was created before Eve, and then it was Eve’s fault that they got expelled from Paradise.  Women therefore should be subservient to men and kept an eye on in case they get up to something they shouldn’t again :-) One leading Southern Baptist commenting about the Equal Rights Amendment said: “Satan’s fib about women’s lib”; and on another occasion: “This unisex movement has been belched out of hell.” 

In most other parts of the world people with such views would be totally marginalized. Exceptions are conservative Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia where women aren't allowed to drive cars. And heavens knows what horrors are being perpetrated against women in areas controlled by these ISIS maniacs. But in the rest of America it is mostly assumed that such men could not reach positions of political influence. Not so fast. Ronald Reagan spoke at the Southern Baptist Convention when he was running for president praising them to the hilt. Jimmy Carter was a Southern Baptist when president but has since left the church in protest. Good for him, but it took him a while. Texas Governor Rick Perry was a contender last time around and is clearly gearing up for another run.  

 It’s not as simple as whether you like chimps or not.

Whose labor is it? A few thoughts on Labor Day

In 1950 there was a parliamentary election in Britain. This ten year old boy asked his parents over supper who was winning. My Dad answered first by saying that 'we' were losing. My mother then gave an impish grin and said 'No we're not' She, as the daughter of a union organizer, had voted for the incoming Labour Party. Nevertheless, it was not until about fifteen years later after the famous Dagenham workers strike, when women struck for equal pay in the Ford Motor plant and the strike spread, that a Labour government passed the equal pay legislation in Britain. 

It is difficult for me to believe that fifty further years later this simple point is not the law in every civilized country. But not here folks in the land of the free and the brave. How is it that someone doing the same job of work is paid more money simply because he has a penis? I know - testosterone tends to create stronger muscles, but we're not talking about sledge-hammer jobs. And seventy years ago Rosie the riveter showed that women could do a lot of what were previously considered a man's job.

We have a Congressional election this November. It's simple: ask your candidate if he or she is for equal pay for equal work. If not, don't vote for him.

Human Nature – the bad and the good

Every day I read the newspaper and watch the TV news and there are conflicts raging often between different ethnic groups or involving different religions, including this ISIS group who seem to think that chopping people’s heads off is going to persuade the rest of us to convert! Then there are reports of domestic violence – a man kills his female partner and baby after discovering that her baby is not his; then yet another gang-rape! Or another politician’s career is brought to an end because of sexual scandal; and violence breaks out between fans of opposing sports teams.

Then, when I’m about to throw up, there is an uplifting report of someone who spends a lot of her spare time reading to people in an old-folks home; or someone donating a kidney to save a life, or dives into dangerous waters to save someone drowning.  What is it about us humans that we are composed of this troubling mix of violence and sexual aggression, and yet have the capacity for extraordinary levels of love and caring? Can a look at our ancient background give us some pointers? I believe so.

In my last blog (Aug. 10^th) I wrote about our close relationship to apes. This is fairly commonly accepted now.  What similarities and differences to do with these tendencies do we find in our cousins the other apes? Two books amongst several that I’ve found helpful in this regard are: “The Naked Ape” by Desmond Morris (1967), and “The Story of the Human Body” by Daniel Lieberman (2013). Three things amongst several that obviously separate us from other apes are: our nakedness; our fully upright position and bipedalism; and of course our intelligence, and with that our language abilities, that puts us in a different league to all other creatures so that many still think that therefore we must be a separate and very special creation. 

When changes occur rapidly in evolution they occur because of special evolutionary pressures, or to put it more bluntly –when the death rate is high. What were the evolutionary pressures that have made us so different in a relatively short (seven million years at most) evolutionary period of time. In a word - climate change; not the man-made one we’re beginning to experience now but a natural one that brought ice over much of Europe and led to dramatic changes in the vegetation in East Africa where our ancestors were living, so that the tropical forest collapsed and turned into savannah. We were forced out of the trees and soon found that we needed to walk on our hind legs to get around big distances on the ground looking for food. Constant starvation with a high death rate would have been one of those evolutionary pressures forcing us to find new things to eat compared to our largely fruit-eating ancestors. We had no choice but to become hunters. 

Those that survived learned to hunt in groups. We became killers bonded into groups of mutual trust and communication, developing remarkable skills in making projectiles and accurately throwing them. Language developed probably first as a means for the hunting group to communicate strategy. Our brains grew, doubling in size every 1.5 million years.  Our cousin chimps have brains around 300 cc in volume. We know-it-alls have a brain volume of approximately 1,300 cc.  This in turn led to difficulties in childbirth – the infant head became too big – and so babies had to be born prematurely so that for some months afterwards they were (and are) highly dependent on their mothers. The men hunted, the women stayed near the camp. For some reason not as yet understood, menstruation became heavier. Women tended therefore to become anemic and needed a constant source of iron, and red meat was the best source. Mutually dependent bonds became much more important between males and females. The discovery of fire and then cooking was an important step as well. Cooked food releases more nutrients, especially with meat. Richard Wrangham in “Catching Fire: How cooking made us human” (2009) suggests that marriage or strong pair-bonding, not so clear in other apes, began not exclusively with sex in mind but with the female need for red meat. “Bring me some meat and you can have some sex.” And later, after the discovery of fire: “And I’ll cook it for you too”.  And when early hominins started standing upright it meant that the male sex organ and the female’s breasts were now much more in your face so to speak, and became big factors in sexual attraction. With all these things coming together you have the makings of strong pair-bonding and the creation of the human family unit involving genuine love and care. Beyond the immediate family there would have to be strong ties of loyalty and mutual support within the encampment group. But then fear and aggression if a group of strangers appeared on the horizon. Here were all the makings of early humans as sexy, violent and discriminatory. 

Richard Wrangham points out that we are closer genetically to chimps than chimps are to their other nearest ape relative gorillas. And you guessed it – chimpanzees are the most sexually active of all non-human apes. The lesser ape the Gibbon only has sex about once a year. Chimps – every day. 

But it’s the violence that really worries me. An early acquaintance of mine – David Bygot, working with Jane Goodall in Tanzania, was the first anthropologist to observe a chimpanzee murder another chimpanzee. Chimps also engage in group hunts of monkeys tearing them to pieces once caught to eat the meat. Despite the gorilla’s large size and the dominant male enforcing his dominance, gorillas are not so violent. Nor do they eat meat unless you count the small part of their diet that includes insects and snails. 

What I’m saying therefore is that our violence (including red meat hunting) and our sexual eagerness can be traced to our nearest ape cousins. But then, on top of that, the environmental circumstances in East Africa about six million years ago accentuated those trends, in particular the ‘us versus them’ mentality. Fast forward to our modern world and for me - that innate background explains the newspaper headlines I encounter every day.  

Is the situation hopeless then? Absolutely not! As I described in one of my first blogs, I worked for forty years for an international organization whose declared aim was the ‘changing of human nature’. I always thought that this was a little too simply and definitively declared, but I am still a strong believer that our natures can be and are modified for the better. We wear clothes in public to avoid unnecessary titillation and temptation. We have state laws and religious teachings that make most of us pause when perhaps tempted to strike out in anger at someone. Some of us have temptations towards unhelpful behavior in one direction or another more than others. My wife’s grandfather was one of those in the 1930s involved in the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous. Their success rate is around 30%. Sadly low you might say, but think of the millions around the world whose lives have been saved through this program of mutual caring and support under a ‘higher power’.  

When I was younger there was apartheid in South Africa where people of color were treated as less than human; and in America things were not a lot better with segregation and even lynchings. I wept tears of joy when first Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa, and again when Barack Obama was elected President of the USA – an inspiration and healing for many.  There is still a long way to go but progress is being made. Yes, we humans have violent and discriminatory tendencies in us, but, it is also true, as the song from ‘South Pacific’ goes, that ‘you’ve got to be taught to hate and fear ….

You've got to be taught
From year to year,….

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

That is – those deep tendencies can either be fed and drawn to the surface, or new and better ways can be encouraged, and loves learned and enjoyed and passed on to others. We do not have to be run by our base natures, or the way some of our forebears behaved.

In “The Better Angels of our Nature” (2011) psychologist Steven Pinker gives evidence of how, despite our modern headlines, violence has steadily decreased over the millennia. It is easy to forget the terrible carnage during the Thirty Years War in Europe from 1618-1648. And studies of skeletal remains from when about 20,000 years ago we were all hunter gatherers shows that approximately 15% of people died a violent death in those days. Pinker says that, despite today’s depressing headlines, humanity is indeed making progress, and the steady integration of modern society is a major contribution. America for all its faults (and I could write another several pages about them) is playing an important role here. Despite the current tragedy of Ferguson, Mo, America is the melting pot of the world. Nearly twenty years ago my kids’ high school hung over seventy national flags in the school gym, representing the origin of the students then at the high school. Maybe that was a factor in my daughter Dr. Rebecca Hamlin publishing her first book last week entitled “Let me be a refugee”, published by Oxford University Press, and available on Amazon :-)

  

Relationships

Allow me take you on a trip into taxonomy. I have spent a lot of time in the last years studying plant taxonomy so that when I come across an unusual plant in the forest I first start by trying to determine its Family status, and then from there to genus and then species. Some plant families are big and some small. In my state of Massachusetts, the daisy and aster family Asteraceae has 120 genera and hundreds of species. The primrose family Primulaceae on the other hand has but three genera with just four species spread amongst them. 

Now let’s switch to families of mammals. The taxonomic system is the same. A very large family – equivalent to the Asteraceae – would be the Muridae (rodents) with 150 genera worldwide containing 710 species of mice and rats and squirrels etc. A more selective family would be ours – the Hominidae or Great Apes – containing just four genera. Three of these genera – gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees – have two species each. Then there is the genus Homo and our own species of Homo sapiens. Up until as recent as 40,000 years ago we were not alone, sharing space in Europe with Homo neanderthalensis with whom we did a bit of interbreeding, and possibly a third species in Asia with again some possible interbreeding –Homo denisova. Species of the same genus can sometimes interbreed, but amongst species of different genera interbreeding is extremely rare and mostly impossible.  

Nevertheless, as one goes back in time, not only do those three genera of Primulaceae merge into a common ancestor, but just the same with the genera of the family Hominidae. An significant merger in that journey back in time for us occurs about 5 million years ago when our genus Homo – or actually its direct forerunner – merges with the chimpanzee genus Pan. We’re all familiar now with the letters DNA representing our genetic material. The amount of difference or similarity in one’s DNA is a direct measurement of how long we’ve been apart from these cousins. So my DNA is 99.88% the same as a Neanderthal, and 98.5% the same as a chimp. But then it’s about 70% similar to those rodents, and 30% with those daisies and primulas. So as I walk through the woods, when I see a squirrel or pass by a large handsome oak tree, they are for me my cousins; and I find that thrilling. I hope you might too.

My previous posting on August 1^st , about an interesting conversation that I listened to in 1969 between Arthur Koestler and Jacques Monod, was my way of coming out in terms of my belief system.  I was therefore fascinated to read in the current Time magazine issue, dated August 4th, an article by Josh Sanburn about ‘atheist churches’.  Yes, I know, it sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it would seem that in those parts of America – e.g. Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma – where churchgoing is big, atheists, often led by ex-clergy, feel the need for a mutual support group of this sort. It also may be pointing to an issue that concerns a growing number of atheists, and that is, as church communities dwindle in many parts of the country, how do we keep a sense of community to care for those in need and other issues in our towns and cities including environmental concerns? 

Sanburn’s article also reports on the Clergy Project, an online group of hundreds of ‘doubting preachers’.  Sanburn writes: “Being an atheist may be America’s last closeted identity.” The article also reports that 20% of Americans claim no religious affiliation now(still significantly lower than in Europe) and rising steadily. Mind you, an ABC poll in 2011 found that 77% of Americans believe in angels!  And polls regularly show that the majority of Americans do not accept that life on Earth, including us humans, has evolved over a long period of time from simple single-celled organisms, despite the overwhelming evidence to support that.   

Even today, America is living in the aftermath of the Cold War where Soviet Communists were the atheist baddies, therefore all atheists are evil, and probably communist to boot. This simplistic and dated view is held in particular by the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, composed it would appear mostly of older white churchgoers.    

Enough of all this. My blog is entitled ‘A biologist’s perspective’, and so I want to get to writing some fun stuff along those lines.  Stay tuned. 

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