Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
for novelty—that most fundamental value of modernist ideology—that the
emerging scientific movement could exploit.
Bacon's efforts to situate science in prophetic history may at first appear
to be a mere anomaly having nothing to do with the scientific identity in
our time. But if we attend to what these messages suggest in the abstract,
apart from the concrete religious referents that made them compelling for
his immediate audiences, we can recognize a pattern that clearly persists
within evolutionism. Perpetuated now in the notion that the discoveries
of contemporary science (and of evolution especially) have fundamentally
redefined our historical situation is something akin to the traditional mil-
lenarian idea that history has an ordained structure and that it is only in the
final stage of human life that its true character has been discovered. To be
modern (or even postmodern, since that term expresses the same epochal
reasoning) is to be uniquely attuned to the sanctioning significance of the
disclosures that define the present epoch. Although this now manifests in
manifold ways, evolutionism stands apart as the effort to suggest that the
disclosures of evolutionary science have some supremacy of place in this
process. We can trace this theme, for instance, in a recent guidebook for sci-
ence educators published by the National Academy of Sciences. The topic's
introductory chapter, “Why Teach Evolution?” is mainly an effort to outline
the educational importance of its subject, but in its closing paragraph it also
invokes the broader epochal notion that evolutionary knowledge in particu-
lar gives the present age its distinctive meaning. Evolutionary knowledge is
needed to enable today's children to adapt to modern life.
All of us live in a world where the pace of change is accelerating. Today's
children will face more new experiences and different conditions than
their parents or teachers have had to face in their lives.
The story of evolution is one chapter—perhaps the most important one—
in a scientific revolution that has occupied much of the past four centu-
ries. The central feature of this revolution has been the abandonment
of one notion about stability after another: that the earth was the center
of the universe, that the world's living things are unchangeable, that the
continents of the earth are held rigidly in place, and so on. Fluidity and
change have become central to our understanding of the world around
us. To accept the probability of change—and to see change as an agent of
opportunity rather than a threat—is a silent message and challenge in the
lesson of evolution.
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