Remember the Republican presidential candidates — Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback and others — who pandered to the religious right last year by saying schools should teach intelligent design, a pseudoscience based on the biblical version of creation?
Now that scientists have identified the remains of one of their 4 million-year-old relatives in Ethiopia, it will be interesting to see if the next crop of candidates is as enthusiastic about supporting this fake scientific alternative to evolution. My guess is that many of them will.
Our new found ancestor is known as Ardi. She was 4 feet tall, weighed 110 pounds, had short legs, long arms and spent most of her time in trees. But when she hit the ground, she was able to stand on her own two feet and walk upright, though not quite as well as Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty or Bobby Jindal.
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I single out these three particular descendants of the 4.4 million-year-old skeleton excavated from the Ethiopian desert for a reason. They are potential 2012 presidential candidates who still claim that the version of creationism known as intelligent design is a theory as legitimate as evolution, even though evolution is beyond scientific dispute.
Ardi is an ancestor of both humans and chimpanzees and is a link to the yet-to-be-found remains of a common ancestor to both, believed to be at least 2 million years older than Ardi. The “last common ancestor,†as this fossil is known, will also probably be found in Ethiopia, which is now recognized by many scientists as the cradle of humankind, thanks to the discovery there of Ardi and bones from 35 of her friends and family as well as Lucy, a 3 million-year-old descendant discovered in the same area earlier.
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But this immense scientific breakthrough will not deter millions of Americans from persisting in their belief that the biblical accounts of creation are literally true, along with Jonah in the whale and Noah in the ark.
This belief is especially popular among Republicans, according to Gallup polls that have been conducted on the subject for more than 25 years. Last year, Gallup found belief in the creation myth — that God created the earth 10,000 years ago and populated it with human beings just as they are today — is endorsed by 60 percent of voters who identify themselves as Republicans. This belief is shared by 40 percent of those who say they’re independent voters and 38 percent who call themselves Democrats.
The Republican 60 percent resides comfortably in the party’s far right base, along with the birthers, the Limbaugh listeners, the gun nuts and the disappointed advocates of anti-abortion, school prayer, flag-burning and other conservative crowd-pleasing amendments to the Constitution that will never happen. But it is important for Republican candidates to keep them interested.
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That may be why Jindal, the governor of Louisiana and a biology major at Brown, for crying out loud, has pushed through a law in Louisiana that gets around a Supreme Court decision that declared the teaching of creationism in the public schools unconstitutional.
Palin’s views are similar. She points out her father was a high school science teacher who taught “both sides†in their home and she respects Darwin, but she respects local schools determining their own curriculums even more. Minnesota Gov. Pawlenty sees creationism as “plausible and credible and something that I personally believe in†and he, too, is in favor of letting the kids decide for themselves after being exposed to the falsehood that evolution and creationism are separate but equal theories.
Another Republican considered presidential timber before he evolved from monogamy, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, also questioned evolution and had some pseudoscience to prove it.
“I think there are real chinks in the armor of evolution being the only way we came about,†Sanford told an interviewer. “The idea of there being a little mud hole and two mosquitoes get together and the next thing you know you have a human being is completely at odds with, you know, one of the laws of thermodynamics.â€
We can be thankful his other interests have undermined his presidential ambitions.
John McCain was an unapologetic Darwinian, but the president he hoped to succeed, George W. Bush, said he believed in the “both sides ought to be properly taught argument,†although he didn’t say so publicly until after his election to his second term.
At the time, Congressman Barney Frank called Bush’s statement “further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party.â€
Sixty percent of the Republican Party, to be precise.
Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.
