Why do the poets not speak of it?

The Improbability Pump (Jerry Coyne in The Nation)

Readers of The Big E are probably familiar with Jerry Coyne's incisive comments on science and religion, often published to youtube.com in video form, and this long article is of a piece with his other output.

I was raised in a Christian fundamentalist household, and in church we often heard denunciations of Darwin's evolutionary theory, all with the same tired objections which do not require enumeration here. To this day I'm embarrassed that I was ever captivated by such arguments. The Drake equation, for example, was paraded before us by so-called scientific creationists (chiefly John Clayton) to express the improbability of life arising by "chance:" only one kind of galaxy, one kind of parent star, one range of planetary orbit, one range of planetary makeup, and so forth, can give rise to "life as we know it." Though the constants in the Drake equation are all made up ones, it is true that even conservative guesses for these values do multiply out to an impressive degree of improbability: only a tiny fraction of worlds are potentially fecund. What was never mentioned in these sermons disguised as scientific lectures, was the denominator in this fraction: the staggeringly huge number of galaxies (even within the now-provincial observable Universe that we knew at the time of speaking, before the Hubble deep field drove home the point with not just stars but galaxies, "like dust"), stars within each galaxy, and so forth.

What really "gets me" about the rejection of evolutionary theory is how creationists (and the children they indoctrinate) are cheated of the appreciation of the world which science reveals to us. For Darwin's idea is not merely simple, apprehendable by even young children, but a beautiful one. That every living thing I will ever see is my cousin, that the world is very, very old, "circling on according to the fixed law of gravity" within a Universe that is even older, that complex things have simple beginnings, built incrementally over millions of generations, is so wonderful to contemplate, so special, that I weep that a huge segment of our culture is willfully blind to it.

There is indeed "grandeur in this view of life," as Darwin wrote in his conclusion to the Origin in 1859. Grandeur that 150 years of study following Darwin's publication has only served to further illumine. And what a story, what a voyage of discovery! Even the "extreme imperfection of the geological record" (Darwin's phrase) as revealed by Lyell was not a deal breaker. How it would have heartened Lyell, Darwin, and Huxley to know of the Leakeys a bare century later! The shared story of life on our planet, as revealed by the fossil record, has been filled in piecewise, like the mosaic revealed by an archaeologists brush at Herculaneum or Pompeii. The results are well known to the reader, and would have been eminently sensible to Darwin.

But Darwin never knew Mendel, and was never prepared for the other record of DNA, discovered at Cambridge contemporaneously with the Leakey's early work. Remembering my travails over my high school geometry textbook, I like to think of DNA's corroboration of the fossil record as "the answers to selected exercises at the back of the book." Even if the geological record were very much more imperfect than it is, even if not one single fossil had ever seen the light of day to inspire a Darwin or a Wallace, the discovery of the deeply unifying principle of evolution by natural selection would only have been set back a century until a Pauling arrived to invent X-Ray crystallography, until a Franklin or a Watson or Crick applied it at the Cavendish. The correlation between these independent sources could not be more exact, because it is exact, the same story told by two mute and blind storytellers.

I'm out of words. Here are some not by me.

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?" -- Richard Phillips Feynman

'In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way." ' -- Carl Sagan

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." -- C. R. Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray. 1859.)