I didn’t realize that today is also Lincoln’s 200th birthday, but he didn’t add anything to science so screw him.

It would be so awesome if this were true. Of course, when I was a kid, I always imagined the first black president’s catchphrase would be, “I don’t have time for your jibber-jabber!”

“The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.”
-Theodore Roosevelt

I have an idea for a compromise with Mexico over the illegal immigration situation. If Mexico agrees to crack down on everyone trying to illegally cross the U.S./Mexico border, we’ll give them California. Of course, they have to assume any debt that goes with, but other than that it’s all theirs. The agreement to crack down on illegal immigration will also go for all the people who were formerly California, though, because frankly all the states around California are tired of Californians moving into them.

One way Mexico could help fight illegal immigration is to not publicize that California is now part of Mexico. That way Mexicans would still try to illegally immigrate there not realizing they’re still in Mexico. Ha! Jokes on you, wily Mexican!

Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, father of the unifying theory of life sciences and the cause of about half the posts at Little Green Footballs lately (seriously, did some creationist run over Charles Johnson’s dog or something?). Before his death, the guy had a massive beard which doesn’t have anything to do with anything but I can’t help but point it out.

Despite the controversy, a lot of his theories have graduated to the point where we would arrogantly say, “Well, no duh,” about them, like that antibiotics will lead to stronger, more resistant microbes if it doesn’t kill every one. I never really got the controversy about evolution, though. I always believed in God and came from a religious family, yet I can’t remember ever thinking evolution conflicted with that whenever it was I first learned about the theory. I just always took it for granted that God was scientifically unprovable, but whatever was found out in science, God was the ultimate cause of it… so there. Basically, if you did a Venn diagram of the relation of God and science, God would be this giant circle with the science circle would be completely inside it. No matter how big the science circle gets, the God circle would always be a lot bigger and all encompassing. I remember once for about ten minutes in my Sophomore year in high school my scientific understanding of the world caused me to doubt my religious views, but for my entire life minus ten minutes I’ve found the two viewpoints quite complementary.

Apparently, I do not fall within the majority on this, though.

Anyway, I hate the evolution controversy. It’s the biggest waste of time both religiously and scientifically. Religiously it’s a waste of time because I don’t remember Jesus ever lecturing on science or acting like that was something important to salvation. I believe that if you think any science conflicts with your religious views, your putting both science and God into tiny little containers that won’t quite contain them. Scientifically it’s a waste of time because what does it matter to a few scientists in the relevant fields what most people think about the origin of the species? Despite the seeming importance of evolution in how it explains all life on the planet, it’s completely an inconsequential trivial fact to 99.9% of the population. For most people, whether they go through life believing in evolution, creationism, or the flying spaghetti monster will have absolutely no effect on any of their actions. Yet everyone thinks its super duper important than everyone believe whatever is the scientific orthodoxy of the day because otherwise… something. That’s because much of science has become a belief system these days. Everyone is sure its super horrible for someone to believe the earth is flat even if they haven’t spent time to rationalize why. It’s not enough for our world views to be right, they have to be important. There’s probably an evolutionary reasons our brains work that way (and, as a crazy Christian, I’d add a reason why God wanted things to end up that way).

The thing is, science is not belief in certain pieces of data. The data is the unimportant part of science; it’s almost like its excrement. The important part is the process, the ability to analyze and evaluate that data that will keep changing and being added to throughout our lifetime. Being able to recite something you read in a science magazine doesn’t make you scientifically literate, it just makes you plain old literate. In fact, believing in evolution doesn’t make you any more scientifically inclined than someone who believes in in creationism; for most people, those are both just beliefs they read somewhere. Unless you actually apply that knowledge to do something, its not science. For the average person, whether they believe the earth is flat or round will have as much affect on them as whether they believe that black holes have a chewy nougat center. You do want rocket scientists to know the proper shape of the earth, but it’s time to understand what science is and stop acting like its super important what people believe about certain pieces of science when they won’t apply it to anything more than a Trivial Pursuit question.

Of course, that doesn’t answer the question of what should be taught in schools, but that subject just makes me want to go on a rant about how silly it is in a free country to have the government decide what your children should know. I might as well yell and shake my fist at a thunderstorm, though. If you want my view, I think evolution is the only scientific theory and that creationism or intelligent design shouldn’t be taught in schools alongside it, but we’re planning on home schooling and my wife is a creationist so I won’t get my wish. Whatevs. If my currently theoretical children are ever interested in evolution or it actually becomes relevant to something they want to do, the data is there and easily accessible to everyone. Plus, I can prove to them macro-evolution is true; I just need to put some species in an isolated region, wait seventy-million years, and shout “Hah!” when I show everyone the cool new species that arose.

Still, I find evolutionary science fascinating (look at this guy; he looks like a dinosaur, but he’s much more closely related to mammals than lizards)… kind of like I find the Grand Canyon beautiful and fascinating even though I don’t really need it for anything. Since I’m not going to use the science of evolution, it’s just a cute little story to me — like historical science fiction. It’s a neat narrative linking together bits of data, but like my most people I’m never going to go out and verify any of it because it’s not relevant to anything I do. Still, there’s something spiritually I like about it. From a cold rational standpoint, humans are nothing but a random result, just another hodgepodge of pieces originally developed for different animals over billions of years. Our purpose — what God put in us — is completely hidden from this crass, finite world. That makes us all the more special.

Or at least I’m special.