Perched on the edge of my hard, wooden kitchen chair, I didn’t know what to say.
Two of my children, my oldest, Sara, nearly 10 years old, and Zachariah, 8, were on the bench across from me, our pizza dinner nearly completed. The statement that left me speechless moments before had come from the mouth of my 8-year-old, who had recently been baptized into the LDS church.
“Dad, that’s nonsense.”
Seeing my shocked expression, and obviously misinterpreting it for a lack of understanding, he added helpfully, “What you’re saying. We believe in Jesus. You don’t. What you were telling us just now? We think it’s just nonsense.”
I was stupefied. I could not fathom what it was that would cause my otherwise bright, insightful son to reject out-of-hand scientific facts I was attempting to discuss with him. Comprehension eventually dawned upon me, but it’s not something that I could really wrap my head around until several days later.
The conversation had begun innocently enough. As is common with my kids when we’re alone, the conversation swung around to science, through mouthfuls of pizza at the kitchen table. We discussed flying remote-controlled model airplanes (my latest hobby), bugs, and eventually got around to talking about what it means to be human, what intelligence is, and that kind of thing. I decided it might be fun to re-use a line from “Contact”, one of my favorite movies of all time.
“We live in a galaxy with billions of stars, each surrounded by at least a few planets. Maybe trillions of planets. With all those stars, and all those planets, if we are the only intelligent life in the galaxy,” (here I paused for dramatic effect before uttering the fateful line), “it seems like an awful waste of space.”
“Yeah,” muttered my daughter, obviously impressed by the numbers I’d just thrown out.
“But Dad,” replied my son, “aren’t we the only ones?”
“The only ones what?” I responded, not quite catching his drift.
“The only people.”
I dug idly, with my tongue, at a chunk of pizza stuck between my teeth as I thought about his pronouncement. “Well,” I replied, “it depends on how you define ‘people’.” I continued, “There are instructions inside each of the cells in your body called ‘DNA’. Have you heard of DNA before?”
“Yes,” replied my daughter.
“No,” replied my son.
“OK,” I continued, “DNA is basically the program for your entire body. It’s what makes you a human being instead of a bird or a fish. For instance, the chimpanzee and the human share 96% of exactly the same DNA. That’s a lot! That means that there’s really very little difference between us. The biggest differences,” I tapped my head, “are up here. We have highly-developed language abilities, allowing us to communicate effectively. We have a bigger brain. At some point in the past, we stopped being as furry as many of our animal cousins. Our arms are a little shorter in comparison to our bodies. There are several hundred other differences, large and small. Out of the millions of pairs of DNA that make up our genetic code, though, those differences are very slight.
“If you shaved a chimpanzee and put clothes on him,” I said, “he’d look an awful lot like a really ugly little man!”
Both of my kids laughed hard at my obvious joke. I drove onward, though, not quite done. “But is a chimp a person?”
“No,” giggled my daughter.
“No,” chortled my son.
“Right. A chimpanzee and a human are two different species. We can’t reproduce together. Although,” I added with a smile, “that would be a very funny-looking baby!”
Again, the appreciative laugh.
“Chimps are the closest living relatives to ‘people’. Even with that, they can’t talk, and they can’t be educated much beyond the equivalent of a kindergarten education. But your little brother, Elijah,” (here I gestured toward the basement, where the aforementioned preschooler was watching a movie) “is a person, isn’t he? Even though he doesn’t talk well yet, and even a chimpanzee would have no trouble keeping up with him?
“So it’s kind of tough to define exactly what ‘people’ are. I would expect that, even though we’re the only ‘people’ we know of, that there are probably ‘people’ who live elsewhere, too. At least they may be as smart as we are. But they probably wouldn’t look much like us.”
“So if there were people on other planets,” my daughter interjected, “have they come and visited us?”
“That’s a topic for another day,” I replied. “I really don’t know. But what I do know, and what every biologist works with every single day, is that all the mammals on our planet carry a similar genetic heritage. They are more similar to us than we think! At some point in the past, it seems likely we shared a common genetic ancestor. And even today, new species come about over time, in response to changes in their environment.
“The easiest example is bacteria. The germs that make you sick. You’ve heard the commercials about taking all your medicine? That’s because, if you only take part of your medicine, you’ll allow some of the bacteria which are more resistant to the medicine to live. If they live, they’ll reproduce, and pass on their resistance to the medicine! Eventually, this will mean the medicine is no longer effective, because the bacteria will be immune to it.”
“Animals change the same way,” I concluded. “We’re the only ‘people’ we know of today, but who’s to say if some other species might be the ‘people’ on the planet a hundred-thousand years from now?”
“Dad, that’s nonsense,” came the comment from my son.
“What is it you are saying is nonsense?” I asked, somewhat lamely.
“That people are related to animals,” he said. “We’re totally different. God put us here just the way we are, and if there were people on other planets, He’d tell us.”
I think I finally understood. At some point, some trusted instructor had gotten ahold of my son’s brain, and attempted to innoculate him against reason, common sense, and imagination. I was upset by this mental vaccination of tomfoolery my son had received, but tried hard not to let it show.
“Zach, have you heard the word ‘Evolution’ before?”
“Yeah,” he replied, “you’ve talked about it before.”
“I mean, from someone other than me.”
“I think so,” he said with a quizzical frown, “but I can’t remember who.”
“OK,” I responded as I shelved the drawn-out lecture I wanted to give in favor of the short sermon he was going to receive. “I need you to listen very carefully. There are many scientists — both Mormon and non-mormon — who use the theory of evolution every day in their careers. It’s the cornerstone of modern biology and pharmacology. In other words, it’s how we understand how living things work, and how we develop new medicines which actually work to keep us living longer and healthier lives.
“There are many scientists, both Christian and Mormon,” I continued, “who are able to use the scientific facts related to evolution in their careers, and still be believers in Jesus. The two don’t necessarily preclude one another. It just means that they accept that we don’t have all the answers yet, for either religion or science.”
“Whatever, Dad,” said Zach, “but I still think what you were saying is nonsense.”
I guess my challenge over the coming weeks is to find ways to pry open my son’s brain, which some well-intentioned but ignorant instructor has attempted to nail shut. With our shared mutual interest in flying airplanes, I think we’ll start with Bernoulli’s principle (the reason airplanes fly), and find ways to tie that in to other science.
Nevertheless, the situation makes me upset. I just want to grab whoever it is that planted that idea — and that particular “nonsense” response — in my kid’s brain, shake them hard, and tell them to stay the heck out of my child’s education. Kids have a hard enough time distinguishing fact from fiction at this age. Teaching them that an entire branch of science is “nonsense” because of one’s religious beliefs is an unconscionable act of well-intentioned villainy.
— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: Famous quotations: ” ” — Charlie Chaplin
” ” — Harpo Marx
” ” — Marcel Marceau
Peaceful and gentle, lambs have been used in religious imagery for millennia. Lambs are baby sheep, an animal tended by shephards since the dawn of history. As a lamb, you tend to stay together in a flock and graze on grassy land. Lambs don’t mind being led and tend not to go off on their own.