October 11, 2008

My yard is covered in frost. It's 32.7 degrees outside. I think that's the end of my tomato growing season.

On another note, it was a beautiful day yesterday in Seattle. My daughter didn't have school and so we went into the big city to go see a special exhibit currently being held at the Pacific Science Center. I don't think Sarah Palin would enjoy it quite as much as I did. Lucy was on display.

Australopithecus afarensis Lucy dated to 3.1 million years of age. You know, the one of the oldest sets of remains that showed the evolution of our bipedal hominid species. The exhibit also covers the history of Ethiopia – which was surprisingly much more interesting that I ignorantly first thought. And yet, it was for Lucy that I came. Way back in college I was an anthropology major for about a year because I read Dr. Johanson's book entitled 'Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind.' It was the first great detective novel that I read. I continued to read in the field, fascinated by the findings that were coming out of Africa that helped define the process of evolution. To actually see the skeletal remains with my own eyes was riveting. To know that this female hominid is of a species from which the homo sapien emerged brings an overwhelming sense of awe to the moment. My daughter felt it too. Perhaps it was our appreciation for the amazing evidence of natural selection at work – a process that took millions of years to become who I am today. Or maybe it was seeing Lucy and realizing that there was enough common markers between us to recognize what, at the beginning, made a hominid unique. She was not a human but she was a grandmother to humanity.

We capped our day with another interesting event – we went and saw the Bill Maher's movie Religulous. After seeing the Legacy of Lucy, evolution was clearly in the forefront of my mind and Maher certainly had some provocative questions around how anyone can believe in the literal theory of creation. I know that an amazingly high number of people in this country believe in the literal truth of the bible – and I just don't understand that. I have no issues with faith and belief in something larger than ourselves – but I can't grasp why it is so important to believe that the world started 6000 years ago. That woman sprung from a rib, that there is such thing as a virgin birth, that snakes talk. Why can't these be Bronze Age (or Iron age) attempts at trying to make sense of the world without any scientific knowledge? Why can't this be an oral tradition – legends and stories – that were passed down long before they were written down – symbolic stories filled with metaphors in a time when nothing else would have made sense? I don't see that as a break of faith. I see that as complex thinking – holding on to a faith in god and allowing the world to be the miraculous place that it is. So what if we understand the "how" of many of those miraculous occurrences – it doesn't make it any less amazing. I suppose, however, that for many, if you begin to open the door on a larger picture of the meaning of life – you open the door to tolerance, new ideas, other viewpoints.

Maher is brash, insulting and pushing his own beliefs on many of the people that he is interviewing. I think, in some ways, he was mimicking the entrenched intolerance that is seen coming out of fundamentalism. He is righteous and angry and yes, very funny. The most disturbing part of the film, to me, was not when he was interviewing various people, but his filming of certain institutions – the Holy Land amusement park in Orlando, Florida. The Genesis museum.

Sarah Palin can insult Barack Obama all she wants – but she is a fundamental Christian who believes in the Creationist theory. There is so much intolerance in that stance, so little room to be a person who can expand her thinking to include what the best and brightest in our scientific community supports as facts. Let's not even talk about the other side of fundamentalism – that the End of Days is drawing near. If the Rapture is coming – who really cares if we destroy this planet? Paradise is on the other side not in this life time. There is a statistical 1 in 6 chance that Palin would be called upon to serve out the end of McCain's term in office. That scares me. I'm a moderate liberal and that scares me beyond anything else in this campaign. It amazes me that there is even a chance that a person who really believes that the world began 6000 years ago (plus or minus) could run this country.

So I covered history, religion and politics all in one post. And this is what is on my mind. It was a though provoking day that had great relevance for me in the current climate of our country. Go see Lucy for yourself and let her tell you a much more amazing story of survival then any religious text.