Defending Evolution

By Sally Morem

[Note to Readers: I wrote this letter to the editor in response to a letter published in
the Pine City (Minnesota) Pioneer defending the Kansas school board decision to not
teach evolution in that state's schools and asserting that the theory of evolution led to
Nazism and school shootings.]

Making the teaching of evolution illegal in Kansas or in Minnesota would be just as

bad, if not worse, than making the teaching of Einstein’s theory of relativity illegal.
It would render scientific inquiry suspect among the young and seriously mislead
them as to the nature of the universe and our place within it.

Hitler and his extermination camps were made possible by the mistaken belief in a
“master race” and “inferior races” among the German population, and their
willingness to do anything to destroy the latter while encouraging the former to have
large families. The Nazis considered their Fuhrer to be a kind of prize breeder, not
an evolutionary theoretician.

Evolution, on the other hand, reveals that all life forms are descended from earlier
successful life forms, which tended to pass on their more effective and efficient traits
to more offspring than their competitors. Precisely which traits are more effective
and efficient shifts over time as the organisms’ environment is transformed by
climatic and geological change. The line of descent adapts. Hence natural
selection. Hence evolution.

If you compare the two systems of thought, you’ll see that Nazism mandated a top-
down, bureaucratic system of command, which could be and was easily corrupted.
Evolution, on the other hand, is a wholly adaptive, uncommanded, self-organized
system of biological change. It explains to ever-curious humans how the Earth
became home to the complex network of organisms and ecological systems we see
today. As an adaptive system, it can’t be corrupted. It merely exists.

School shootings are a human problem and must be dealt with on a human level.
Evolution has nothing to do with it. Don’t outlaw evolution. Learn about it instead.