Square One

I doubt that there’s any other scientist in history that has succeeded in gettting other scientists to make their case for them both in life and in death as much as Charles Darwin. Paul Ekman here explains the other side of Darwin’s theory and world view – altruism and compassion for all living beings, human and nonhuman – with a striking similarity to Bhuddist doctrine as discussed in “Darwin’s greatest unread book” The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. He quotes from the book:

 . . [E]xperience unfortunately shews [sic] us how long it is before we look at them as our fellow creatures. Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. . . . This virtue [concern for lower animals], one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they extend to all sentient beings.

Paul Ekman continues:

During a series of discussions, I read this last Darwin quote to the Dalai Lama about emotions and compassion. The Dalai Lama’s translator exclaimed, “Did he use that phrase ‘all sentient beings’”? The translator was surprised because this phrase is the exact English translation of the Tibetan and Sanskrit description of the highest extension of compassion by a bodhisattva (a Buddhist saint). A concern for the welfare of all living beings is not found in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), which focus upon a concern for all human beings. A concern for other animals exists in only a limited fashion in Hinduism. Among the world’s major religions, embracing with compassion all living beings is unique to Buddhism.

The other way round now, again quoting from Darwin’s same book:

Several years ago a keeper at the Zoological Gardens showed me some deep and scarcely healed wounds on the nape of his own neck, inflicted on him whilst kneeling on the floor, by a fierce baboon. The little American monkey who was a warm friend of this keeper, lived in the same compartment, and was dreadfully afraid of the great baboon. Nevertheless, as soon as he saw his friend in peril, he rushed to the rescue, and by screams and bites so distracted the baboon that the man was able to escape, after . . . running great risk of his life.

The full text of the article is here.

There is at least one sense in which Nigeria and the US are very similar: having a remarkably high proportion of religious people – or as the present fad expression goes, people that “have a personal relationship with God” – and of course also having a high proportion of creationists, which follows, so it seems, quite easily.

This was the first thought that occurred to me last year when during the heated US presidential campaign I saw John McCain and Barack Obama on the TV, apparently appealing to the American religious conservative right, both of them at the Saddleback Church, engaged in what could hardly pass for a mild debate moderated by the pastor, Rick Warren. I remember thinking to myself: the only other place where this could possibly happen is right here in Nigeria.

It is in my experience quite safe to assume that by being a Nigerian, you are simply religious by default, until confessed otherwise, and that you believe yourself to be a creationist even without having as much as a half-hearted look at the evidence for evolution by natural selection. With this premise, I have discovered what has become for me a most favoured pastime, which is to bring up the theory of evolution and Darwinism and related scientific concepts easily associated with atheism, agnosticism and all sorts of ungodly tendencies to spark up discussion amongst colleagues in Nigeria.

I hope we could have one such exchange here in the blogosphere on NigertansTalk. Painfully, competing and admittedly often more pressing issues generally trump whatever space we might have for science in our politics and national life in Nigeria.

In the discussions that have resulted, I have found that roughly half of the people I’ve encountered fall within the category I refer to, for the purpose of this post, as “the fundamentalist,” and the lowest watermark of such argument will be: “I would cease to believe in the existence of other planets and solar systems and galaxies if I find a remark in Bible (or the Qur’an) that so much as suggests that the earth is all there is in the universe.”

The other half are about equally divided into three groups: “the open minded” (”Well, it seems there is some good evidence that I’ll have to spend some time to consider more carefully.), the “I don’t give a damn” (“Whatever it is, I don’t think it matters.”), and “the malleable,” those that get convinced after a lot of discussion, only find that they have reverted to creationism at the next encounter (”What you said the other day, I really don’t think it can be true.”).

There is an American student from Texas here, with whom I’ve had two long and interesting discussions on evolution and creationism. She is an avowed creationist and a Christian, and like most of my Nigerian friends, she possibly couldn’t accept that being a Christian and an evolutionist at the same time are not fundamentally conflicting positions. For her, they are simply mutually exclusive: the exact same argument that my Nigerian friends would make.

It actually got me wondering how similar Nigerians must indeed be to Americans in this regard and why would that be? It is for me, as for most scientists a persistent puzzle as to why Americans are so religious and how creationism is so widespread and evolution is taken with so much negative seriousness in the US. I could easily explain the situation in Nigeria. I was never taught the theory of evolution in primary or secondary school, although of course more because there were no teachers to teach it than because there was a legislation against teaching it.

Looking back however, I think not having been taught evolution in secondary school was indeed a blessing because then I was left to study it all be myself and so had the opportunity to weight the evidence against my knowledge of the Biblical account of creation which I was raised in, and was, as I still am, also very well versed in. I am almost certain that even if there were teachers, it is unlikely that any will teach it well enough to present the evidence and allow the pupils make up their mind.

My comparative anatomy lecturer in medical school after discussing all the interesting and beautiful evidence for evolution, ended the lecture by saying it was all crap, and that we should take none of it any seriously beyond the point of recanting (sic) them during exams. Might that be the reason: the lack of unbiased exposure to the basic tenets of evolutionary theory? Might this be what some Americans are protecting against when they say they don’t want evolution taught in their schools?

What do you think? Are you an evolutionist? Why, if yes, and why not if not? Were you introduced to the theory of evolution by natural selection in secondary school? What do you think the effect of that might be if you were or might have been if you were not? Do you think an evolutionist could at the same time “have a personal relationship with God?” You are more than welcome to comment here or on NigeriansTalk.

The Wall Street Journal commissioned Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to respond independently to the question, “Where does Evolution Leave God?” Both knew that the other one was responding to the same commission but neither knew what the other was writing. It is interesting to see how each interprets the question: Armstrong was eager to rescue God from the claim of existence, substituting God’s existence for metaphor, while Dawkins, as usual argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do, and that anyone that claims God to be a metaphor is essentially an atheist. Here are my favourite paragraphs from each article. The full version is here.

Karen Armstrong: Symbolism was essential to premodern religion, because it was only possible to speak about the ultimate reality—God, Tao, Brahman or Nirvana—analogically, since it lay beyond the reach of words. Jews and Christians both developed audaciously innovative and figurative methods of reading the Bible, and every statement of the Quran is called an ayah (“parable”). St Augustine (354-430), a major authority for both Catholics and Protestants, insisted that if a biblical text contradicted reputable science, it must be interpreted allegorically. This remained standard practice in the West until the 17th century, when in an effort to emulate the exact scientific method, Christians began to read scripture with a literalness that is without parallel in religious history.

Richard Dawkins: The mainstream belief of the world’s peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They’ll be right.