One example that has been much on my mind of late is the way the theory of evolution has been manhandled into a surrogate mythology. The reason it’s been on my mind is simple enough: whenever I discuss peak oil at a lecture, book signing, or some other public setting, it’s a safe bet that someone will raise a hand and ask what I think about the possibility that the approaching crisis is part of our transition to a new evolutionary level. I am always left wondering what to say in response, because this sort of question is almost always rooted in the notion that evolution is a linear movement that leads onward and upward through a series of distinct stages or levels – and this notion is a pretty fair misstatement of the way evolution takes place in nature.
Few things in the history of ideas are quite so interesting as the way that new discoveries get harnessed in the service of old obsessions. When X-rays were first detected in 1895, for example, one of the first results was panic over the possibility that the new rays might make it possible to see through clothing; the New Jersey state legislature actually debated a bill to ban the use of X-rays in opera glasses. Wildly inaccurate as it was, this notion was rooted in profound fears about sexuality, and so it took many decades to dispel -- when I was a child, ads in comic books still claimed to sell “X-ray glasses” that would let you see people naked.
Something not that different happened to the theory of evolution, and thus nearly all of today’s popular notions about evolution are shrapnel from the head-on collision between Darwin’s theory and the obsessions of the era in which that theory emerged. Social class rather than sex was the driving force here; as religious justifications for the English caste system faltered, the manufacture of scientific justifications for social hierarchy became a growth industry, and by the time the ink was dry on the first copies of The Origin of Species, evolution was already being drafted into service in this dubious cause. The resulting belief system was very nearly a parody of George Orwell’s Animal Farm in advance -- all living things evolve, but some are more evolved than others.
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Dec. 3, 2008 (Archdruid Report) -- Back in 1904, sociologist Max Weber proposed that the modern period was witnessing “the disenchantment of the world” -- a process which traditional mythic ideas that wove meaning into human experience were being replaced by the alienating and dehumanizing worldview of materialist science. There’s some truth to Weber’s thesis, but I’m not sure he anticipated the inevitable backlash: the Procrustean stretching and lopping of scientific ideas in the popular imagination that has turned many of them into substitute myths.
