John Hawks is an evolutionary thinker who seems to think clear and to speak honestly. I’d recommend his weblog, John Hawks Weblog for anyone wanting an intelligent take on evolutionary biology from the viewpoint of an anthropologist who has done highly regarded work on the genetics aspects of his field.
In a recent entry about a conference of scholars gathered to discuss the question, “What makes us human?” — Don’t ask the experts if they can’t agree on the question, he had this to say about what ties us together into the human race:
One thing is shared by all humans, and cannot be taken away: our evolutionary history. Each of us bears some — but none has all — of the marks of this history.
It is our history that connects us to our distant relatives, not our genes. Even with a close relative like a twentieth cousin, there is a decent likelihood that you will share no genes at all because of your shared kinship from your most recent common ancestor. By the fiftieth generation, it is a virtual certainty. You are a genetic stranger to your ancestors.
Modern science in general has been forced to speak in terms of stories. Astrophysics discusses the development of galaxies as a reality and not just as part of the unpacking of a pre-fabricated universe. Darwin himself seems to have realized the importance of movement through time in a geological context (the Patagonian highlands) before ever he arrived at the Galapagos Islands. Within human history, those who produce better-quality thought in my opinion recognize that the various aspects of human civilizations — such as political freedom in the West or ‘unqualified’ respect for human life in Christian cultures — are the result of specific sub-plots in the human story.
The Bible also is a story and many stories. Like the universe, the Bible is more than it contains. (See A Universe is More than it Contains.) Like the Bible, the universe is a story being told by God. When we see the universe as a story being told by God, that is — morally ordered as a narrative, I call it a world. The story that is the world has a chapter yet unfinished which is the evolution of man.
After years of contemplating the mystery, I still can’t quite understand why so many Christians refuse to see that evolutionary thinking, a narrative based understanding of human nature is easily reconcilable with our understanding of the Bible.