Darwin in South Africa
Today is the 150th anniversary of the publishing of Charles Darwin’s seminal On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. (This mouthful was changed for the sixth edition of 1872 to the familiar The Origin of Species.) So this anniversary marks one of the most important events in human history: the day faith in the supernatural was no longer required to explain human origins.
Darwin visited South Africa in 1836. The HMS Beagle was on its homeward journey and although the crew were keen to get home, Captain Fitzroy needed to exercise one of his interests and visit the newly opened South African Observatory. Darwin went ashore to “geologise”. The geology of the region interested him greatly. But ever the naturalist, he discovered a bug in the Cape, and it is named after him – Kaapiad darwini.
In all he spent 18 days in the Cape. By all accounts he was sick and miserable, the cold and rainy Cape winter not helping matters. He recorded in his diary that it was a rather desolate country. (In a later book describing his travels, he stated that “there was no country like South Africa” with regard to the large animals that could be found in the interior.)
The world renowned British astronomer Jon Herschel was living at the Cape at this time, studying the Southern sky. Herschel was fascinated by the Cape’s unusual indigenous flora and started speculating on how species evolved. Darwin and Captain Fitzroy were invited by Herschel to dinner and although the details of the conversation are unknown, the 26 year-old Darwin was said to be very impressed by Herschel’s ideas.
The city of Cape Town have erected a series of commemorative plaques to mark the route Darwin took during his stay. Here are images of one of the plaques, taken in Sea Point, Cape Town.
Click to view larger image.
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Tuesday’s Tune: Earl of Darwin / Save a Place
In celebration of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday this year, the Shrewsbury Folk Festival organised the Darwin Song Project. It’s fitting that Shrewsbury’s most famous son is honoured by its most famous event.
Back in March this year, eight singer-songwriters from the UK and US were invited to a songwriting retreat in rural Shropshire. Their task: to come up with new songs that had a “resonance and relevance” to Charles Darwin. And they only had a week to compose, rehearse, perform and record the songs at the Festival on March 19th.
These brave artists came up with 17 new songs covering Darwin’s life and the confusion and anger that was caused by his radical theory since its publication 150 years ago this year. I listened to these songs with low expectations but became pleasantly surprised. From tender and thoughtful to jazzy and witty, the material treats Darwin as a friend, as the real man he was. The songs are performed by various combinations of the eight artists: Chris Wood, Karine Polwart, Mark Erelli, Rachael McShane, Jez Lowe, Stu Hanna, Krista Detor and Emily Smith.
The songs are well written and beautifully performed. My early favourite was the witty creationist outlaw ballad We’ll Hunt Him Down. But for sheer beauty and listenability, I have chosen Earl of Darwin / Save a Place, performed by Emily Smith, Stu Hanna, Jez Lowe and Rachel McShane. In this work, the young Emma Wedgewood bids farewell to her beloved Charles as he set out on his epic voyage on the Beagle.
These songs are available are available on an extremely well produced CD, Darwin Song Project.
Conspiracy Theorists and Creationsts
The Apollo moon landing missions represents the pinnacle of human achievement. It embodies all the traits that we like to think makes us human. Things like vision and inspirational leadership (“We choose to go to the moon“), individual brilliance (Wernher von Braun), purposeful administration (NASA), practical creativity (the more than 4,000 engineers and designers who worked on the project), great enterprise (Boeing, North American, Douglas, and Rocketdyne) and enormous personal courage (the Astronauts). As President Kennedy called it, “The most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which Man has ever embarked.”
It was a triumph for humanity. It showed us what we are capable of. Humans had broken the bounds from which we had evolved and were exploring the Moon. For hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors had gazed at the moon in the night sky, trying to make sense of it. Now we had stepped on the surface of this mysterious place and left out imprint.
But, I suppose predictably, the conspiracy theory kooks have slithered out of their holes and are once again defaming this magnificent, inspiring achievement with their nasty inane Moon Landing Hoax. This is not a small little fringe group of hopeless eccentrics – for instance, 25% of Britons believe it was a hoax. Hardly any popular article or TV news item about the Moon landing is complete without some reference to the CTists. I suppose they are best ignored but this really does irk me. Of course this is being driven by a smaller hard-core group of tinfoil hatters, but their anti-science delusions are having a bad influence on a generation that should rather have been inspired by the Apollo mission.
I won’t waste my time debunking their nonsense. It’s been done over and over again. Phil Plait, as usual, does a good job of that. But I have been pondering on what drives these nutters to besmirch this enormous achievement. You can read a few opinions on the psychological make-up of conspiraloons here, here and here. One thing that is beyond doubt is that CTists’ belief in their particular hoax is unshakeable. Hard, irrefutable evidence will not sway them from their beliefs. As Cumbrian Sky notes:
The HBs are never, repeat, NEVER going to be convinced that NASA went to the Moon. It doesn’t matter how many times they read, or you explain, that there were no stars in the Moon’s sky because the photos were exposed for the bright surface and foreground, so obviously teeny tiny faint starse wouldn’t be picked up by the camera. You can tell them a million times that the flags left by the astronauts aren’t “blowing in the breeze”, they’re actually flapping about because they’ve got supporting wire frames to stop them hanging there all limp and embarrassing for the photographs. They slap their hands over their ears and sing out “lalalalalala!” when you try to explain that the shadows cast by objects on the Moon look different to shadows cast by objects here on Earth because LIGHTING CONDITIONS ON THE MOON ARE NOTHING LIKE THEY ARE HERE ON EARTH!!
Does this sound familiar? Isn’t this exactly how Young Earth Creationists behave? No scientific evidence – no matter how slam-dunk conclusive – will sway them from the central idea that a supernatural deity created the universe – with the Earth at its centre, and of course man at the centre of that – about 6,000 years ago. And all living things were created by this imaginary dictator and we remain at the mercy of this space monster. So there! If there is any scientific work to be done it’s within this absolute framework. As Ken Ham would say: “Any so-called fact that appears to contradict the bible is not a fact and needs to be re-interpreted in terms of the bible”. No arguments. Don’t bring the evidence.
Like the religious types, CTists like to gather with like-minded believers and believe that they will “find the truth” and spread it to the heathen out there and foster social change. They believe they have “secret” knowledge which they impart to their inner circle of true believers. This sounds remarkably like the Pagans and Gnostics – and even Jesus himself: “The mystery of the kingdom of God has been granted to you. But to those outside everything comes in parables, so that ‘they may look and see but not perceive, and hear and listen but not understand, in order that they may not be converted and be forgiven.’” (Mark 4:10-12 NAB)
Charles Darwin gave us the priceless gift of knowing that we can actually explain the world around us – including our own origins. Creationists with their deep fear of reality would rather have us believe that we are merely pawns in the hands of an all-powerful, all-knowing celestial ruler and that their is no value in pursuing knowledge since the question of the universe and our origins is settled.
The Apollo mission gave us the priceless gift of knowing our capacity for achieving amazing feats – that humans are capable of understanding the Universe and all its wonders. Conspiracy theorists with their deep fear of anything that is beyond their control would rather have us believe that we are mere powerless pawns in the hands of secret, pervasively evil forces that conspire against us for their own nefarious ends.
These fearful little people should not be entertained and their paranoid ravings should be given no further oxygen.
Rapping for Darwin
This is Darwin’s year and exhibitions, books, television series and plays have been launched to celebrate it. Now Canadian hip hop artist Baba Brinkman has brought his art to the party, in the form of “The Rap Guide to Evolution”, which…
…uses remixed beats, comedic storytelling, and rap poetry to make the science behind evolution accessible and interesting to a wide audience.“The Rap Guide to Evolution” was commissioned by British microbiologist Mark Pallen, who checked all the rhymes for scientific accuracy, prompting Brinkman to remark his may be the first ever “peer-reviewed hip hop show.”
Here are some of the lyrics (is that what they’re called?) from I am an African:
No I wasn’t born in Ghana but Africa is my mama
‘Cause that’s where my mama got her mitochondria
You can try to fight if you wanna, but it’s not gonna change me
‘Cause it’s plain to see, Africans are my people
And if it’s not plain to see then your eyes deceive you
I’m talkin’ primeval; the DNA in my veins
Tells a story that reasonable people find believable
But it might blow your transistors; Africa
Is the home of our most recent common ancestors
Which means human beings are all brothers and sisters.
Yeah. This is good – the more audiences reached to promote science, the better.
South Africa: Creationist paradise
The British Council’s Darwin Now has released the results (pdf) of a survey it commissioned to gauge the extent of the international consensus on the acceptance of evolution. The research surveyed over ten thousand adults across ten countries, being Argentina, China, Egypt, India, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Great Britain and the USA.
Although the researchers draw the conclusion that there is an international consensus on evolution, as a South African in makes depressing reading.
The bottom (red) bar indicates the percentage of adults who have both heard of Darwin and know a bit about his theory, and agreed with the opinion that “enough scientific evidence exists to support Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution”. So here South Africa just sneaked in ahead of Islamic Egypt – at just 12% (42% of the 27% above) . Great.
So what accounts for this lamentable situation? After all, South Africa has provided the world with some of its best known fossils and other evidence of evolution described by scientific superstars. Evolution should be as much a part of South African consciousness as, say is soccer. What makes South Africa a creationist paradise?
The obvious problem must be education. The fact that only 27% of adults have a at least a nodding acquaintance with Darwin and that he had something to do with the theory of evolution must be blamed fairly and squarely on poor education.
South Africa has had a long history of poor education. During the apartheid years black people were subject to what was called “Bantu Education” whose aim was to produce a class of labourers – hewers of wood and drawers of water. Religion was also heavily promoted amongst them and it was greedily accepted. There was no room for the teaching of foreign concepts like evolution there.
The privileged whites fell under a system called “Christian National Education”, which promoted a deeply conservative, Calvinist world view which simply had no place for evolution. It was certainly not taught in schools besides some vague references to it in biology lessons. None of the current teachers were therefore schooled in evolutionary theory.
The current dispensation is not much better. Besides ill-equipped teachers, society at large remains a highly superstitious one with only about 15% of people reporting no religion. But on top of that is the race obsession of South Africans, particularly that of the government. But how would that effect views on evolution?
The following quotes culled from an article on introducing evolution into the curriculum illustrate both the religious and racial objections to evolution:
Josef de Beer, a lecturer in the faculty of education at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), said teachers of evolution might have religious concerns. “My experience in teaching evolution in a foundation-year programme at the University of Pretoria is that many students find evolution problematic because of their religious beliefs.”At a recent conference at UJ, where teachers were trained in evolution, a teacher said: “I am disappointed about the fact that evolution attacks God’s creation. It also mixes Genesis with idol worshippers of Babylon, which were never there when God created planet Earth.”
Another said he thought the topic should be voluntary because he didn’t think it suitable for people who believe in God. “I am totally against evolution,” another teacher said.
Matters came to a head after snippets of a video, Tiny Humans: Finding Hobbits in Flores, was shown. The video traces the origin of tiny prehistoric humans somewhere on an Indonesian island. They are depicted as short and dark-skinned people. This offended some black teachers. They said that evolution was a racist theory. It “terribly undermines black people, everything bad gets a black colour. It means blacks were apes,” they said.
Sigh… What can you say? Well, I did say something when this article was published last year and you can read my (published) response below the fold: Read more
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