David Horton: The Birds and the Huckabees

I imagine Mike Huckabee, relaxing after giving up on his dream of ruling America under Christian law (and having Chuck as VP, how cool would that have been?), listening to a little Christian rock music, and reading a newspaper in which there is an article on the new Encyclopedia of Life free online project to catalog all 1.8 million species that make up life on Earth.

Now I know this is not a question that ever occurs to fundamentalists like Mr Huckabee, but the obvious question is why? Not why make an online Encyclopedia, but why are there 1.8 million species? Keep that question in mind.

Just as every article on global warming will generate a response that mentions ice caps on Mars, or ice age theory from the 1970s, so every one on evolution will generate an utterly predictable response. Some fundamentalist will write in, with the air of someone who has discovered something that no one else in the world knows, to tell us that of course everybody knows that species change over time but no one has ever seen one species change into another. "A dog is still a dog" they will say. I've even seen this proposition taken to the bizarre lengths as to suggest that Darwin, poor deluded fool, was only writing about change within a species, and that's what the title "Origin of Species" means.

In different guises, this confusion, indeed complete ignorance, about the difference between, but also relation between, evolution and speciation, seems to me to be at the heart of the creationism nonsense. And you have to ask, given this confusion, how on Earth are children being taught biology these days? What was young Mike taught? Never mind, I'm here with a free make-up lesson for him.

"Just imagine you are god" I say to him "it isn't hard to do. There you are on what, day 5? If it's day five you should be creating the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, or however the saying will go. Only one more day and you have to create the first two members of the species Homo sapiens sapiens, who will then proceed, with unthinkable genetic consequences, to populate the world with 6 billion descendants. Busy busy busy, now, what are this pair of naked apes going to need?"

So god gets on with it, some tree species for shade, fruit, wood; some plants for fruits or seeds, or edible leaves or roots (and some for medicine, although surely it would have been simpler to create a better immune system); and some animals to provide meat, milk, eggs, furs (although why you just wouldn't make the naked apes hairier ... oh well, no-one ever said god was perfect, did they?), transport, protection. There, that's pretty much it, isn't it? Maybe some bees as an afterthought to fertilize the flowers and provide honey. There end of day 5, finished. What have we got - twenty, say 30 at the most, plant species; ten, say 20 at the most animal species.

I don't know what Mr Huckabee's math is like, but I make it about 1,799,950 excess species. What are they for? Is it just like god was a wood carver who just couldn't stop whittling once he got started? And do note, yes Mike, I can see your hand up, I know what you are going to say, god moves in mysterious ways, and all that, do note what I am not saying. I am not saying that god thought of all kinds of things that I haven't mentioned - such as how delicious oysters and lobster would be, oh, sorry, that's right, people weren't allowed to eat them. Oh well, whatever. I'm not saying that you might not need a whole lot of extra species to provide other things, or to interact with each other in essential ways to keep the system going (though why you wouldn't just create a system that didn't need ...). So if god thought humans might need a beetle, or a slug, or a rattlesnake, hell, who am I to argue?

No, the problem is why so many beetle species? So many species of slug? So many snake or bird or fish species? And differing by so little in so many cases. Differing indeed so little that they can't be told apart by eye in many cases, or only with great difficulty (a different colored feather here, a different arrangement of scales there)? Why in fact, so many species on the Galapagos islands, or Australia, or the Amazon forest? Why so many birds, ants, gum trees, grasses, bacteria? What on Earth are 99% of the 1.8 million for?

Well, they're not for anything of course. They came into existence because they had individual variation and because god, or continental drift, saw fit to separate continents, have deserts and rivers, ice caps, mountain ranges. Given individual variation, species have to evolve and change. No choice. Given a varied geography, species have to separate to form new species, no choice. If god wanted to create Mike Huckabee's world he would have to have made sure that every individual of every species was identical, and that the whole of the Earth was covered by a uniform garden of Eden (and even then ...). So no choice, in the real world - it was evolution and speciation, or, well, evolution and speciation. Can't argue with facts. It's like, oh, I don't know, running for president when you believe in creation - the voters won't buy it Mike, it's just inevitable that you and Chuck were going to evolve into extinct candidates. Couldn't be helped.

variable species+varied landscape = evolution+speciation

Didn't your teacher explain any of this to you Mike?

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