Attention Gov. Perry: Evolution Is a Fact

Guest Columnist By Guest Columnist The Oregonian
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on August 27, 2011 at 12:55 PM

By Richard Dawkins

Q&A with Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist and author of "The Selfish Gene" and "The God Delusion."

 Q. Texas governor and GOP candidate Rick Perry, at a campaign event this week, told a boy that evolution is "just a theory" with "gaps" and that in Texas they teach "both creationism and evolution." Perry later added "God is how we got here." According to a 2009 Gallup study, only 38 percent of Americans say they believe in evolution. If a majority of Americans are skeptical or unsure about evolution, should schools teach it as a mere "theory"? Why is evolution so threatening to religion?

 A. There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today's Republican party is this: In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today's Republican Party 'in spite of' is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.

 A politician's attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself. It can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy but, compared to Perry's and the Tea Party's pronouncements on other topics such as economics, taxation, history and sexual politics, their ignorance of evolutionary science might be overlooked.






 Darwin explained all of this with one brilliantly simple idea -- natural selection, driving gradual evolution over immensities of geological time. His is a good theory because of the huge ratio of what it explains (all the complexity of life) divided by what it needs to assume (simply the nonrandom survival of hereditary information through many generations).

 The rival theory to explain the functional complexity of life -- creationism -- is about as bad a theory as has ever been proposed. In fact it is such a bad theory it doesn't deserve to be called a theory at all, and it certainly doesn't deserve to be taught alongside evolution in science classes.

 The simplicity of Darwin's idea, then, is a virtue for three reasons. First, and most important, it is the signature of its immense power as a theory, when compared with the mass of disparate facts that it explains -- everything about life including our own existence. Second, it makes it easy for children to understand, which means that it could be taught in the early years of school. And finally, it makes it extremely beautiful, one of the most beautiful ideas anyone ever had as well as arguably the most powerful.

