Once again, the ignorant among us have declared that it?s okay to question evolution. By their kind of reasoning it?s equally valid to deny gravity and continue to insist that the world is flat and the moon landing was staged by Hollywood. All scientific discoveries since Christ walked the earth are equally invalid.The myths that early man made up to try to explain the origin of life must be worshiped with unquestioning devotion but intelligent investigation is suspect.

Reduced to the definition of human beings? descent from monkeys, evolution has been perverted into nonsense by people who prefer to see themselves as special creations of the deity. In earlier eras, the Catholic Church executed intellectuals for daring to doubt their divine interpretations. But despite ridicule and religion?s rigid controls, scientific fact remained scientific fact and human curiosity demanded that its truths be revealed.

One of those obvious facts is that humans do not mate with primates; one fact deliberately left out of uninformed interpretation is that both species evolved from a common ancestor, part-primate, and part potentially human. The link between species, called Australopithecus, has been unearthed, as have the remains of other creatures such as the Neanderthal cave dweller Cro-Magnon man and assorted other variations on the way up to today?s Homo sapiens.

It doesn?t take any originality to echo the old clichés that suggest the word ?theory? means ?guess.? This is the excuse for ignorance mouthed by religious zealots who have never investigated the bible for themselves any more than they?ve delved into The Origin of Species. All they need to do for their ?salvation? is cheerlead somebody else?s misinterpretation of The Good Book. In reality, and especially in science, ?theory? does not mean ?guess?; it is a hypothesis that can be proven. And we live with Darwin?s proof every day, from science?s gift to us of cancer-fighting medicines that kill off invasive cells to vaccines against new and lethal viruses that evolve immune forms to old cures. Without the observation of how change comes about and how it affects survival, there would be no modern biology, no science of genetics. Without knowledge of genetics there would be no discovery and use of the DNA that is the road-map of individual human identity.

The Scopes Trial of 1925 has already settled the fact of evolution. The legality of teaching this science was the issue, not evolution itself. Scopes was found guilty only of teaching a science in defiance of a law forbidding it by The State of Tennessee. Snopes was fined a token five dollars for his ?crime,? but it was Clarence Darrow who won the argument against the proselytizing of William Jennings Bryant.

In the drama Inherit the Wind, authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee have their Darrow character argue against the literal truth of the Christian bible with the question, ?And how do you know that God didn?t ?spake? to Charles Darwin?? If faith alone is the answer, why did God plague us with minds? And if God created the world in seven days, how were those days measured: in Eastern Time, Pacific Time, Daylight Savings Time? And since there was no such thing as a 24-hour calendar and nobody had yet discovered the earth?s rotation around the sun, couldn?t these days just as easily be measured in months or years? To that, I would add my own question: when did you last come across a living, breathing, nine-hundred-year-old man?

Evolution is a scientific, proven fact, not a religious concept that one may believe in or not. Somewhere along the shore of life?s emergence from the seas, a creature crawled out that developed lungs so it could live on earth. From there, the offspring of that primitive creature continued to develop physical mechanisms for coping with new challenges. At a major turning point in history, a chimpanzee with characteristics both human and primate came down from the trees, evolved opposable thumbs, invented tools and learned to communicate in language. Those of its children who survived were the ones most fit to survive and give rise to offspring who developed even further sophistication in the direction of humanity. Those who could not change died out.

The human race itself is doomed to die out if we cannot change and adapt. If we?re content with mere survival, not growth, if we?re contemptuous of science and the education necessary to cope with change, if we continue to be poor stewards of our environment, if we insist on joining the lower animals in their unintelligent dependence on primitive instinct, that?ll be the end of humanity. The responsibility for it will not be God?s wrath. It will be our own stupidity.

Gerry Tatham is a retired adjunct professor of English for several universities in the Tennessee-Kentucky area. She and her husband Lew live in Edgewater, Florida.

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