Three bottlenose dophins suddenly appear and protect a swimmer attacked by sharks, and a female gorilla named Binti-Jua scoops up a little boy–whom careless parents had left on his own to accidentally fall into the gorilla closure–and, cradling it protectively, maternally, in her arms, takes it to the zookeeper’s door where it is rescued, all indeed wonderful, yes, “mysterious” tales with happy endings.
But, as the editorial asks, “What could account for such behavior?”
To say that these animal events only seem human but are, in fact, “decidedly not human,” being enacted by animals after all, is really missing the point: They certainly are decidedly mammalian, and who will doubt that we, too, are mammals?
Who knows exactly how such innate behavior was instinctually released in these extremely intelligent animals when they–mistakenly–took care of one of us humans as one of their own? But that their animal behavior is close enough to our own human behavior we can both understand and yet marvel at, as do the hundreds who gather by the monkey house each Sunday at the Madison Zoo, to watch our relatives and recognize the monkeys’ antics as their own. We and they are all mammals, the result of evolution over hundreds of millions of years and, not surprisingly, we share basic genes, maternal ones included.
Ever since Darwin in 1859, biological research has brought us year after year ever closer to understanding the mechanisms of evolution by natural selection, to appreciate in awe and respect not that “these mysteries . . . manifest among creatures great and small” can be understood only with recourse to the blind belief that a “lord God” was the creator, but as evolutionary adaptive behavior. As the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky admonished biology teachers to always remember, “nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution.” And, animal behavior, including our own, is proof enough of that.
Environmentalists who fight to preserve nature, the plants that feed us and the animals that mirror our human behavior, and so help us understand ourselves better, know that evolution has to be taught in every school at every level if we are to produce a citizenry that understands, admires, learns to love and so is moved to actively protect the marvels of nature, both our ecological habitat in which we evolved and to which we are adapted, but which we are destroying at out peril, and the animals and plants that live in it.
Finally, and unfortunately, in hundreds of religious schools, students are taught biblical fairy tales of the origin of life and by humankind, not solely as moral allegories but as biological fact. This is a tragedy, and that these groups now expect with help of “well-meaning” politicians to garner public funds to thus support the teaching of this “creation science” in the name of “school choice,” is a travesty. This is one among many reasons, and one as important as the separation of church and state, why public funds should never be used to support religious education.
Let us rather perfect our public schools. Let us make sure that no citizen will ever grow up in ignorance of the evolution of which we are a part, mysterious and incomplete in many ways as that knowledge still is.
While we do know “that from the captive gorilla Binti-Jua to the wild dolphins of the Red Sea, these mysteries are manifest among creatures great and small,” they are not, as the editorial said the work of a “lord God [that] made them all,” but rather of the processes of evolution by natural selection. If we can learn to understand our evolutionary past, it may, with luck, allow us to intelligently plan a sustainable human future.
The writer, emeritus professor of botany, taught biogeography and evolution for 40 years at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
