Some days Lake Michigan is a blank on the mental map, a flat piece of blue that fits itself exactly to the city shoreline. But its shifting surface and subtle colors often draw my gaze. I notice the wind, the waves thrown back in fierce confusion in a Northeaster, the blue ripples from an offshore breeze that build up as they head for the Michigan shore, giving a barely noticeable tooth to the horizon.
This week, early in February, the ice floes that crushed for weeks against the shore have moved away, opening a mile of clear water. One morning a cold fog froze that water to the sky, like an eyelid stuck shut.
For all I observe the surface, I struggle to imagine the depths. Fish and weed, mud, mussels and microbes are busy in the cold and dark, but my mind can’t roam down there, the way it can walk along LaSalle Street, or hike up a mountain.
Science is like that. What I see, touch, and hear–waves and ice, my steering wheel, the electronics in the CD player–are modeled or made with theories that seem to work pretty well. I studied them, years ago, study that has left me with a piecemeal grasp of processes but no solid sense that I have “been there.” Nevertheless, I am glad for the glimpses. My life is richer for having a few handholds on its elusive mysteries. I have never seen a virus or a proton, a quark or a black hole, but I believe. I am also a skeptic. I know that all theories are provisional, necessarily flawed. But they help me wonder about and grapple with my world. They are essential.
Evolution is one of these enriching ideas. I don’t understand it completely, and it’s not a complete theory. But what an idea! Under the surface of hectic, distracted, everyday life something slow and deep is at work, something structural that has made the world as it is, that drives its changes. A dumb, purposeless principle that started with mud and made mind.
Evolution tells me two big things about myself: that I am part of an endless flow of chance, like a chunk of ice on the lake’s surface; and that beneath those daily chances I am connected to, and of a piece with, every animal, vegetable and mineral. Even though I can’t imagine how it all started or where it will go, I find these thoughts immense and calming.
What of those who turn away from a theory of such breadth and power and penetration? Two questions come to mind. Are their beliefs rich and satisfying to them, as mine are to me? I certainly hope so. Should they try to prevent others from knowing and exploring these concepts? That doesn’t sit so well.
This debate is not so much about the merits of beliefs, or about that slippery notion, truth. It is about access to ideas. In a nation founded on freedom of beliefs and of speech, it cannot be right to censor fundamental ideas from the public school curriculum.
Creationists may say that they do not get equal access for their views in public schools, but one can find a church every few blocks in most communities. Institutions that teach profound, non-doctrinal ideas, as well as how to think critically about them, should be similarly common. Public schools should be those institutions.
Yes, I don’t have to think. But if I miss the chance to wrestle with concepts too big for me, to dive to unfamiliar, uncomfortable places, to root in the rich mud of ideas, my life is diminished. It would be wrong to deny that opportunity to a generation of Americans–to let them grow with their eyes stuck shut, a blank place in their minds.
