Curtain Call
After finally mastering the art of the all-nighter, I stood in the lab and toyed half-heartedly with the Taung Child BoneClone, tempted to re-enact the Raymond Dart impresssion. 'Dr.' Reeves was giving his fossil lab mini-lecture for about the third time as more people were filling the room and I was just exhausted. I wasn't really paying attention to his movements, yet suddenly he seemed to be taken over by rage and began to furiously sieze craniums from around the room, constructing a new timeline in the middle of the careful evolutionary tree some better medicated professor had dutifully assembled. "I don't get it! I just -- I just don't get it! How -- how can deny there are intermediate forms? Look at this! What are these if not intermediate forms?" The new line in the middle of the table showed a haunting progression. He had culled the line of human descent down to six well chosen skulls. They sat before us like eerie stills from a flipbook; certainly if Reeves just passed them through his hands quickly enough they would animate and I could watch WT-17000 morph and melt into my face. At the end of the illustration, Reeves was not satisfied with the human child skull and held it aloft as he finished his thought more calmly for those who had been unable to keep up. It was a very, "Tobeornottobethatisthequestionwhethertisnoblerofthemindtosuffer" kind of moment. I wandered to the edge of the room and sat down, watching, anticipating, not ready to leave.
"How's it that we found all these fossils but never found Adam and Eve?"
He too had sat down at that point, opposite me, the specimen table between us, and shot me a look that said something between "She has got to be fucking kidding" and "Don't laugh; she's your peer." His reply could have been any number of evasions or platitudes, but instead he replied he hadn't the foggiest idea how to explain it as Adam and Eve had clearly never existed. He curtailed the snarkiness in his tone abruptly and asked her if his class had ever forced a belief on her. She said no. Was it contrary to her beliefs? She no longer was certain of those beliefs. The beliefs she was raised on, though, did his course challenge those? She told us her parents told her it was a sin to even be in this class, much less rationally considering them. Reeves replied, "That's sick, it's repulsive." He explained that he had gone to an ultra-conservative school and it wasn't until high school he ever questioned. He had been assigned a paper in which he was to refute the geological time scale with Christian "proof." "I realized as I was presenting my paper to the class, 'This is bullshit. This doesn't make sense; I don't believe a word of what I'm saying.' And that was it, I started down an irreversible path." Faith is certainty, it is confidence, and often it is easy, comfortable answers, he explained, while the academic world is rife with the discomfort of confusion. The pursuit for knowledge may be the noblest of quests, but it is one of unease and complexity. Conservative America, he continued, wants to continue stupefying you, removing all challenge and replacing truth, fact, and all that is good and true about science with indoctrination. We need to fight, he concluded, fight tooth and nail to preserve the integrity of academia.
I had never heard anyone speak like that before. Perhaps a friend in a car or cafe, but never a man in a position of authority, never a man in the midst of those whose opinions and loyalties were utterly unknown. While he made it explicitly clear that he loves his family and respects the need for personal autonomy, especially in the realm of creed, there was no "I respect their beliefs" bullshit, for in the end we all knew. This was a man of science defending everything he treasured; not some politician on a soapbox in an avant-grande ideological gesture, but a professor finally, blessedly professing. And curtain. I wish I could say, as I read the "Voice of the People" that it constitutes a happy ending.
posted by EmilyPrice @ 12:39 AM
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