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06/21/2005: "The Heartbeats of Evolution"

The political religious right has many unappealing qualities. High on the list is smugness and sanctimoniousness, their serene, holier than thou presumption of perfect knowledge of God’s plan not only for their own lives but the lives of their neighbors, countrymen, and in fact all human, animal, and plant life. Higher on the list is their inconsistency and hypocrisy in cherry-picking political positions based on tortuous, self-serving interpretations of obscure scripture while ignoring much more direct and obvious passages that inconveniently mismatch their political impulses. I find all of these characteristics to be distasteful, but to my mind they are all trumped by the right’s hatred of science. It’s not only that their sniffing at science embodies all of the above shortcomings: smugness, sanctimoniousness, inconsistency, and hypocrisy. I take personal offense with their attitudes because I count myself as a personal victim. I’ve already recounted my dismay at discovering fifteen years after my high school biology class that my Bible belt lessons on evolution had been a deliberate lie. That wasn’t the only case, though. As a young boy I took great enjoyment in the works of Issac Asimov, and not only his science fiction novels. He was also a prolific writer of books popularizing science, the latter-day equivalents of Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. One interesting chapter in one of Asimov’s books (View From a Height, if I recall) had to do with an anomaly in the number of heartbeats different animal species accumulated over their lifetimes. He calculated this value as the heart rate per minute times the average number of minutes of life expectance (years x 365 x 24 x 60 x 60). Asimov pointed out that the number of human heartbeats greatly exceeded any other animal he considered, but had no explanation for it. I recall thinking that if I ever found the answer to this conundrum I’d have gained a truly important insight. This answer came many years later, in my burst readings on real biology (the kind that uses evolution as its central organizing principle) rather than the fake biology taught in Florida schools in the fifties (and, sad to say, throughout the 21st Century South). The answer has to do with the evolutionary advantage a big brain provides. It replaces brute force manipulation of objects with mental manipulation of symbols, the basis for all human accomplishment. This advantage comes with a steep price tag – the extraordinarily long growth period these big brains require, and the vulnerability this long period of infancy creates. How does evolution mitigate this vulnerability? By allowing preceding generations to live longer (clocking up additional heartbeats) so that they can assist with child-rearing. It’s amazing how many fundamental human characteristics can be similarly explained with a few simple concepts. Why aren’t these powerful insights being taught in schools? It comes down to vanity, plain and simple. And doesn’t the Bible have something to say about vanity?