Living Witness (54 page)

A second later, Gregor saw the bridesmaids, Donna in that expensive dress Russ had complained about. It was a very beautiful dress. Bennis did not seem to be of the opinion that bridesmaids ought to look ugly. After Donna came Linda Melajian. After Linda Melajian came a woman Gregor didn't know—a cousin, the last female member of Bennis's family alive and young enough to be here. Bennis's
brothers would be in the crowd somewhere. Gregor thought he would deal with them later, or just get Chris in a corner and pretend the rest of them didn't exist. Especially the one who was just out of jail.

Then there was Bennis, all the way at the back, with a huge bouquet of flowers in her hands. She was not being walked down the aisle by anyone at all, which made sense, but made Gregor feel a little disoriented. She was wearing a spectacular dress, the top part of which seemed to be made entirely of off-white beads that sparkled in the sun. She had her hair up and back. She was wearing pearls that had belonged to her mother. That was because “wearing diamonds before dark is tacky.” She had told him that. Gregor felt dizzy. She was, he thought, a remarkably beautiful woman, and the beauty had not drained away because she'd passed the age of forty. He was finding it a little difficult to breathe.

Then she was standing right next to him, and handing the bouquet to Donna Moradanyan Donahue. John Jackman picked up the book he'd been holding in one hand and said:

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today—”

It was the Episcopal wedding service. Why was he using the Episcopal wedding service? John was a Catholic. Gregor had been baptized in the Armenian church. Bennis had been an Episcopalian once, but Gregor was sure she wasn't one anymore. At least, he'd never seen any sign of it.

Gregor looked over to Bennis, who was staring straight ahead, ignoring him.

And then she turned her head very slightly, bit her lip to control a grin, and winked at him.

 

 

Months ago, in the middle of working on the long series of corrections and cuts that I do in the final phase of writing a book, I told my editor that I was going to need at least four or five pages for the acknowledgments section. I needed them not because of all the people I had to thank, although I have a lot of people to thank. I needed them because I wanted to rant, without being compromised by the filter of a character's point of view, on the American obsession with the theory of evolution.

Comes time to write this final word, and I find that I don't have a rant left in me. All the things I knew to be true when I started writing, I still know to be true. In fact, my knowledge has been perfected, because I have read my way through books and articles not only by scientists and others supporting evolution, but by scientists and others supporting everything from Intelligent Design to young earth Creationism. I've read Behe as well as Prothero, Johnson as well as Eugenie Scott. I sat down with books called
Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters and Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
and pasted them full of Post-It notes in an attempt to compare and contrast them. I spent hours on the Web sites of TalkOrigins (
www.talkorigins.org
) and The Discovery Institute (
www.discovery.org
). I went to see Ben
Stein's movie
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
and then read through the information debunking it at the National Center for Science Education's dedicated site,
Expelled Exposed
(
www.expelledexposed.com
).

So what do I know to be true?

First, I know that evolution is a fact. There is also something else, called the “theory of evolution,” which attempts to explain this fact, but evolution itself remains a fact. It's the same with gravity—there's the fact of gravity, but there is also the theory of gravity—and with the germ theory of disease. It is a fact that germs cause many diseases, in spite of our habit of calling that fact the “germ theory.”

Second, I know that evolution is not what most of the people fighting it are really fighting. Oh, some of them are. There are still a few young earth Creationists out there who believe that the Bible gives them a time frame for the creation of the earth. The dating always seemed to me to be a little squishy—nowhere in
Genesis
does it say anything about 10,000 years—but there are people who believe that proof of anything else would make their religion untrue, and who fight that anything accordingly.

Most people who reject evolution, however, are not young earth Creationists, and evolution itself is not their problem. What is their problem is far more complicated. It begins with the question of whether or not science is a suitable judge of all human values. And here, they have my sympathy. There's been a fad recently in some quarters to declare that something is either scientific or it is “superstitious,” either scientific or not worth anything. It is a view that blocks a lot out of human experience besides religion: literature, for instance, and art, and all those areas where human beings have traditionally worked to learn to understand themselves. I still think Shakespeare knew more about human psychology than Freud. He knew light-years more about human psychology than the present run of psychological “experts” who testify in our courts and make our educational policies.

But the problem is this: fighting the “scientization” of everything by denying the fact of evolution is a recipe for defeat in the long run. Evolution really
is
a fact, and it's a fact that isn't going to go away.
What's more, it's a fact about which more and more supporting evidence piles up every year. Trying to pretend it doesn't exist will not return literature, art, philosophy, and religion to their position as authorities on human living and human morality. It will just make all those things look silly, outdated, and wrong.

If you're still not convinced, start by heading over to the National Center for Science Education's Web site (
www.natcenscied.org
). They're the only organization in the world dedicated to defending the teaching of evolution in public schools, and they've accumulated a vast array of materials to help you understand evolution and the American debate about its place in education. The deputy director there, Glenn Branch, gave me great help finding all kinds of things (like a statement of the theory of evolution for one of the epigraphs) that I was having trouble finding on my own. I want to thank him and all the people he works with, and especially NCSE's director, Eugenie Scott, for all the work they do on behalf of science education.

I'd like to thank a lot of other people, too. First, Carol Stone and Richard Siddall, who introduced me to Edelweiss, and who kept my life viable throughout the writing of this book in ways too numerous to list. They're good friends of a kind and degree that most people never have the privilege to have. I'm lucky to have met them.

I'd also like to thank my agent, Don Maass, and my editor, Keith Kahla, and all the people at St. Martin's Press who have worked on these books over the years and on this one in particular.

And finally, my sons, Matthew and Gregory, whose contributions to my life have been vast and incalculable, and whose primary mission is to remind me that it's not good for me to sit at the computer so long when there's the latest superhero movie to see . . .

 

—
Litchfield County, Connecticut
May 2008