Blue Collar Scientist

Today I have to drag my carcass down to the city assessor’s office, because they’ve made a pretty substantial mistake about the recording of the deed of the house I sold eight months ago. The paperwork to make the correction is straightforward and uncomplicated, and the city bureaucrats are being quite helpful and friendly, and there’s no reason this should irritate me in any significant way - except that I didn’t get my assessment on that property until a day before the deadline to file the corrective amendment, so I have to go today; and also, I’m sick.

I’m currently fighting off a likely Streptococcus infection which I believe I caught on one of humanity’s new-fangled flying pathogen tubes - which I’ve noticed the megacorporations insist on calling airliners. My throat is currently a culture medium, rather than a properly functioning human wind- and food-hole.

So as I drag my ass down to the city offices today, I have a choice. On the one hand, I can decide that Strep comes from god. I can decide that my creator, and the creator of everything, has specially and specifically made an organism that makes its living by attaching itself to the tissues of another organism, causing it pain and suffering, and sucking the life out of it. I can decide that the god who did this is clearly malevolent - which seems to have been the default position of most of the stone-age religions I know about - or I can come up with some elaborate story about how my very nature is tainted by the activities of a concestor stretching back some hundreds of generations; that I suffer because I am evil, and that I am evil because someone ate some fruit thousands of years ago, or something like that.

Or, I can choose evolution. I can choose to believe the evidence that shows that Strep infects my throat not because some invisible sky-god is forcing it do so, but because this strain of Strep has evolved with a set of genes that allows it to take advantage of a convenient culture medium. I can take some comfort from evolution, knowing that the insane superstitious ramblings of my distant - and perhaps more recent - ancestors have nothing to do with the infection I have now; that the universe has not been designed in such a way that it is out to get back at me for something someone else did.

I can also learn from evolution that I had damn well better finish my antibiotics, or I stand a good chance of unleashing a highly virulent, antibiotic resistant strain of germ on my fellow people. Fellow people whom I value, and don’t want to infect. Not because they are the trivial and badly-designed constructions of some allegedly omnipotent sky god, and not because they worship the same sky god that I do (and damn the the ones that don’t), but because they are incredible manifestations of the natural world. They are organisms that I can prove, beyond any doubt, are all related to me. They are also organisms I find special - people, alone in the bushy tangled bank of life, seem to be able to understand the universe we find ourselves in, and people, therefore, have a special meaning for me. Because I value reality.

I can choose between evolution - an understanding that the universe is neutral, and that people and other life is to be valued - or I can choose religion - and believe the universe was made for me, but is now against me, and that only some life, only human life, and only human life I agree with, has any value or meaning.

Yeah, all the evidence shows evolution is true. And science is about what is true, not what makes us feel good. But you know what? Even if evolution weren’t true, I’d want it to be. Humans need such affirmation.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 2:06 pm and is filed under evolution, medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.