Despite pocket outbursts of irrationality, the theory of evolution has been generally accepted in the United States -- in the public sphere, certainly, and also by people who find no conflict between their own religious convictions and the demonstrable facts of adaptation and natural selection.
In certain other parts of the world, however, evolution is under blunt assault:
In Kenya, for example, there is a bitter controversy over plans to put on display the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human being ever found, a figure known as Turkana Boy—along with a collection of fossils, some of which may be as much as 200m years old. Bishop Boniface Adoyo, an evangelical leader who claims to speak for 35 denominations and 10m believers, has denounced the proposed exhibit, asserting that: “I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it.”
Richard Leakey, the palaeontologist who unearthed both the skeleton and the fossils in northern Kenya, is adamant that the show must go on. “Whether the bishop likes it or not, Turkana Boy is a distant relation of his,” Mr Leakey has insisted. Local Catholics have backed him.
Rows over religion and reason are also raging in Russia. In recent weeks the Russian Orthodox Church has backed a family in St Petersburg who (unsuccessfully) sued the education authorities for teaching only about evolution to explain the origins of life. Plunging into deep scientific waters, a spokesman for the Moscow Patriarchate, Father Vsevolod Chaplin, said Darwin's theory of evolution was “based on pretty strained argumentation”—and that physical evidence cited in its support “can never prove that one biological species can evolve into another.”
Distressingly, such eligious fundamentalism is paralleled by the narrow-mindedness of people for whom Darwin's observations are invoked to exclude all religious perspective. Extinguished by this bipolar debate are thinkers who don't believe their truths to be the only truths.
For an alternative-future explication of why such tendencies are dangerous, we can turn, as always, to South Park.
In The Beginning [The Economist]
*Image: Blu (check out the link, the panel is incredible) *
