Living Witness(19)
“Proud of being ignorant and proud of being stupid,” Annie-Vic said out loud, because at her age she could talk to herself in her own house without being branded some kind of basket case.
There was something very wrong with people who were proud of what they didn’t know and proud of what they couldn’t understand, and there was something even more wrong with a place that encouraged it. That was what this whole thing with evolution was all about. It wasn’t about religion. Not really. Most of the religious people in town didn’t care one way or the other, or they took their problems up with their Sunday school or they sent their children to Nick Frapp’s Christian academy.
No, no, what this thing was really about was the temerity of some people to consider themselves smarter than Franklin Hale and Alice McGuffie, a pair of prime idiots at the best of times and now worse off than the Sweeney child at the other end of the road, and the Sweeney child had Down syndrome. It was the resentment, the anger, the endless carping and fury at the mere existence of people who were not only intelligent but willing to work at it, who wouldn’t sit down and pretend that being stupid was just as good.
“I’m just as good as you are,” Alice McGuffie had said, coming out of the diner this morning with her voice at full shriek.
“No, you’re not,” Annie-Vic had told her, and then gone on power-walking up Main Street while Alice went on shrieking, this time something about burning in Hell.
Annie-Vic was old enough to remember when respect was something that had to be earned, and something that could be lost, too. She didn’t believe in Hell any more than she believed in heaven, but she knew that Alice McGuffie wasn’t even just as good as Richard Nixon, who had been a vile man but not a willfully stupid one.
Annie-Vic hated stupidity more than she hated anything else on earth.
She went on through to the dining room. The swinging door with its felt covering rocked a little on its hinges. She would have to ask the proper grandnephew to do something about it before it fell on her foot. The dining room table was covered with papers having to do with the lawsuit, legal papers and informational brochures sent out by the National Center for Science Education explaining evolution in the simplest, clearest, most concise possible way, as if it were possible to get through to people like Franklin Hale, which it wasn’t.
Annie-Vic ran her hands over the mess and then proceeded to the living room. The ceilings in this house were so high they disappeared into darkness over her head. The furniture was so dark that it seemed to fade into the shadows. It had been her parents’ furniture, all of it. She should have sold it and brought something new in long ago.
She was thinking about the furniture when the attack came—not about evolution, or intelligence and stupidity, or even her lunch—and at the last minute, when her assailant stepped out of the darkness of the niche next to the fireplace and the steel pipe connected with her midsection and knocked the air right out of her, all she could think of was: That’s not who it’s supposed to be at all.
PART I
Nor should the reality of “irreducible complexity” be ignored. While presenting macroevolution as truth, the schools should at least own the fact that “since” it is true, irreducibly complex organisms must have therefore evolved via punctuated equilibrium, and that this phenomenon happened many, many times. All the interconnected parts must have emerged fully developed (or developed enough to provide a beneficial function) in an instant.
—“Ken” of the blog http://walrus.townhall.com, quoted
in Townhall Magazine March, 2008
How natural selection can drive the evolution of tightly integrated molecular systems—those in which the function of each part depends on its interactions with the other parts—has been an unsolved issue in evolutionary biology. Advocates of intelligent design argue that such systems are “irreducibly complex” and thus incompatible with gradual evolution by natural selection.
“Our work demonstrates a fundamental error in the current challenges to Darwinism,” said Thornton. “New techniques allow us to see how ancient genes and their functions evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. We found complexity evolved piecemeal through a process of Molecular Exploitation—old genes, constrained by selection for entirely different functions, have been recruited by evolution to participate in new interactions and new functions.”
—press release from the University of Oregon
ONE
1
Gregor Demarkian had not been part of the staging of his first wedding—and he would never have used “staging” to describe it, because he’d have been set on by dozens of little old Armenian ladies, wanting to know why he had no respect for the Church. He was using “staging” to describe what was happening to his second wedding, though, because it was a word even Father Tibor Kasparian couldn’t object to, under the circumstances. And the circumstances were getting more insane by the day. It had reached the point, this morning, that Gregor had been convinced he was hearing things. As it turned out, he wasn’t, and the sound of Bennis’s voice floating in from the living room was just an aspect of reality he hadn’t been smart enough to anticipate.