Denying History: Does it Really Matter How Old the World Is?

The other day, the Gallup polling organization released the results of its biannual survey of American beliefs about creation and evolution. Since 1982, they've been asking people to pick between three views:

Over the last 32 years, the percentage of people who believe the world was created less than 10,000 years ago has stayed pretty constant--between 40 and 47 percent. The main change has been an increase in the number who believe humans evolved with no input from God--that's doubled in the last three decades, while the percent who believe humans evolved with divine guidance has decreased in the last few years. The people who believe in evolution and an old earth are growing more secular, while the young earth creationists are sticking to their guns. It looks like yet another case of growing polarization in this country.

Geologic Timescale. United States Geologic Survey

But polarization isn't what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about that 42% of people who believe everything was created a few thousand years ago, and whether they can truly understand science and nature while believing that. When I talk to those people, I find they aren't usually very insistent on the dates. They say things like, "Well, I wouldn't put any particular number on it...a few thousand, a few million...I'm not saying I know exactly how old it is." I get the idea they don't think it matters much. What difference does it really make, anyway?

The answer is: a gigantic difference. Imagine that someone from another country wants to learn about the United States. He wants to understand its geography, its culture and how it changes from place to place, its values, and so on. The only catch is that he doesn't believe in Jamestown, or the American Revolution, or the Progressive Era, or the Cold War, or that different groups of people settled in different places...none of that. He thinks that was all made up by godless historians. In fact, he thinks, the United States isn't a few hundred years old at all. It was created more or less as it is. All at once. About eight hours ago.

Is that person ever going to really understand what makes the United States tick? Of course not. In the same way, you can't truly understand science and nature if you think the world is 10,000 years old. That's exactly like saying the United States is 8 hours old (I did the math).* Nature has a history, just like the United States does, only much, much longer. To understand it, you have to understand how it's come to be. If you want to understand why South America and Africa look like matching puzzle pieces, you need to understand that they once fit together. To understand why Australia's only native mammals are marsupials, you need to know that Australia has been isolated from the other continents for a long time, so its mammals evolved in a different direction than elsewhere. To understand why Long Island is there, or why there are big boulders and deeply scratched bedrock in Central Park, you need to know that mile-high ice sheets once plowed across Manhattan, and left Long Island behind as a terminal moraine when they retreated. All these things happened on timescales longer than a few thousand years. Much longer, in the first two cases.

It makes far more sense to accept that the world is ancient and evolving, and that what we see today is the reflection of a long history. If you want to say God started the process, and maybe even tweaks it from time to time, I don't have a problem with that. Maybe that's even true--I can't prove it isn't. But I do have a problem with people saying it was all created all at once just a few thousand years ago. To say that is not just denying evolution or the big bang. It's denying some of the central discoveries of physics, astronomy, geology, biology, and even archaeology. It's saying that much of the history of these sciences has been one of delusion; of smart people collecting clues and painstakingly piecing together a coherent history of the universe...and being completely, utterly wrong. It's saying that, while God created the world all at once, he seems to have gone to a lot of trouble leaving false clues to fool scientists into thinking it has a long and fascinating history.

To see the world as being that young, and to see nature having so little history, is just such a shallow, intellectually-unsatisfying view. It's like looking at the twisting streets of some old city that built up over ages, and thinking, "Why did they lay it out like this? And why does it look old if it was built yesterday?" It's like trying to understand the whole of American music when you've never heard anything but what's currently in the Top 40. In other words, it simply won't work. You'll never truly understand science or nature that way. And that's why the age of the earth matters.

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* I picked 1607, the settling of Jamestown, as the beginning of American history. It really begins long before that, of course, but I had to pick something.

First image Copyright © 2014 Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved.

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted May 8-11, 2014, with a random sample of 1,028 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

Those Lovely Greek Islands: The Time One Exploded

The other day I opened a big coffee-table book called the Eternal Sea. It's full of gorgeous photographs of the world's oceans, but what really blew my hair back was an aerial view of an ancient-looking village perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. "Where is THAT?" I thought, "and how can I get there?"

The image below isn't quite as stunning as the one in the book, but it gives the basic idea. It looks like the kind of place where you could trip walking out your front door and tumble a thousand feet into the sea.

#130857806 / gettyimages.com

When I looked up more information on the town, I realized I had seen it in many pictures before, but not from that angle. The town is Thira (sometimes called Fira), one of those gorgeous whitewashed villages in the Greek islands. But most images of it it aren't as dangerous-looking as the one I saw. I guess they want people who are afraid of heights to visit, too, though I'm guessing some of them cower in their rooms when they get there. Most images look more like the one below, which shows the more-photographed town of Oia, also on Santorini:

#173255209 / gettyimages.com

The wide-angle images give a different, and rather jarring, perspective on these idyllic Greek villages. They're perched on the rim of a volcano. The semi-circular cliffs of Santorini are the rim of a caldera--an ancient volcano whose center erupted, and then collapsed and filled with water. The satellite image below shows that most of Santorini made of this caldera. The two islands in the center are newer volcanic formations that have risen in historic times. The Roman historian Cassius Dio recorded the formation of the smaller one in 47 AD, writing, "This year a small islet, hitherto unknown, made an appearance close to the island of Thera." The bigger island is an active volcano which declares its presence every few decades with a minor eruption. But those are just baby blasts. The caldera itself was formed by a series of massive, cataclysmic eruptions over the last few hundred thousand years.

The scenic little towns on Santorini, then, are precarious in more ways than one. They aren't just at the edge of cliffs. They're built on one of the world's biggest natural bombs.

The last of Santorini's major eruptions occurred around 1600 BC. At that time, the Minoan civilization was a major maritime power in the eastern Mediterranean. Based on the island of Crete and already over 1000 years old, the Minoans seem to have gained their power through trade instead of warfare. Crete was well-placed to be a trading center; a sort of Singapore of the ancient Mediterranean. Today most people know the Minoans from their graceful, naturalistic art, which sometimes depects a mysterious bull-jumping ritual. These scenes reminded the archaeologist Arthur Evans of the Greek legend of the Minotaur, so he named them "Minoans", but we have no idea what they called themselves. We do know they were a wealthy people, and their art gives the impression that they were peaceful and happy, but it's hard to know if that's really true, because hardly any of their writings have been deciphered.

It's interesting to speculate about how western civilization might have developed if Minoan civilization had lasted longer. What if they had retained their dominance and prevented the Greeks from forming the foundation for so much of European culture? What would our architecture be like now? Our philosophy? Religion? There's no way to know, but could have turned out that way quite easily. What kept if from happening may be one single event: the eruption of Santorini, then known as Thera.

The Thera eruption devastated Crete and utterly destroyed a Minoan settlement on Santorini, now called Akrotiri. It was a cataclysm on an almost unimaginable scale. Before the eruption, Santorini was an nearly complete ring, with a central volcano much bigger than the one today. This ancient volcano is what detonated in one of the biggest explosions in history. Imagine a cube of rock with sides 2.4 miles across. That's how much rock, lava, and ash were blasted into the sky. Some of it ascended 22 miles into the statosphere, forming a giant, fiery thunderhead that flashed lightning and rained boulders. The falling ash and pumice covered and preserved the village of Akrotiri (whose inhabitants had prudently fled.)

This initual eruption was followed by scorching clouds of gas and rock called pyroclastic flows, which raced across the surface of the island at hundreds of feet per second, obliterating any life in their path. Bizarrely enough, they even raced across the surface of the sea, covering shorelines many miles away with hot debris (the same thing happened when another island, Krakatoa, exploded in 1883.) Having ejected so much material out of its core, the volcano collapsed in on itself, taking parts of the older Santorini caldera with it. This caused a huge tsunami which smashed the northern coast of Crete, knocking buildings off their foundations and devastating the heart of the Minoan civilization.

It would never recover. The Minoans lost influence in the Mediterranean, and were finally overrun around 1400 BC by the more warlike, Greek-speaking Myceneans. Some people think the Minoans were the inspiration for the ancient myth of Atlantis, but there's no real proof of that. Besides, the geography doesn't match--Atlantis was supposed to be beyond the Pillars of Hercules, in the Atlantic Ocean. Personally, I can't get that excited about the Atlantis connection. For all we know it's just a legend. The story of Santorini and the Minoans is a fact, but it's as a story as epic as any legend.

Nature is Packed with Chemicals and Wants You Dead

OK, maybe that second part is a bit of an overstatement. Only some things in nature want you dead. Hungry polar bears, vultures, freshly-trodden-upon cobras--they have more use for you dead than alive. "Wants you dead" is just so much catchier than saying  "doesn't want to heal you", which is what I'm actually going to talk about. That, and the chemicals. As the title may indicate, this one may be something of a rant. I apologize in advance for this, but sometimes it just can't be helped. I'll try to at least make it entertaining.

All week long, I've been seeing memes like this:

And this:

And they've been eating at me. They (especially the first one) represent two simplistic, starry-eyed myths about nature that simply must die. These myths are:

1. Natural products are "chemical free."

2. Nature is designed to heal us.

The first is entirely, stupendously, howlingly wrong. The second is only mostly (but obviously) wrong. Both of them, I admit, drive me bonkers. Part of the reason, I think, is that I'm much more of a liberal than a conservative, and this thinking seems a little more common among liberals. I hate that, because it's a blow to our credibility; adding to the "starry-eyed, wishful-thinking, self-indulgent liberal" stereotype. Besides, such thinking can be downright dangerous. Anti-vaxxers who think vaccinations are bad because they're "unnatural" have caused outbreaks of whooping cough and measles, often in liberal enclaves like Boulder. It's really quite scary, and it's a direct result of this kind of thinking.

First, the chemicals. A while back I saw a tube of "all natural" sunscreen labeled "Chemical Free." Listed right next to that astounding statement were its main active ingredients: zinc oxide and titanium oxide. That's right--this "chemical free" product works by using zinc (chemical symbol Zn, element 30 on the periodic table), titanium (symbol Ti, element 22), and oxygen (symbol O, element 8). Titanium is quite non-toxic, but zinc and oxygen can both kill you at the right doses. Oxygen is an especially dangerous chemical. It tends to rip electrons from other atoms, and is responsible for corrosion and building fires. It even caused the first major worldwide extinction, around 2.4 billion years ago, when bacteria evolved the ability to photosynthesize. Photosynthesis releases oxygen as a by-product, and soon the atmosphere was filling with it, poisoning everthing. Life eventually adapted, as life does, and incorporated the caustic gas into the process of respiration. That's why oxygen is vital for us--our distant ancestors adapted to a massive, global, and all-natural poison.

The people who make "chemical free" sunscreen are simply lying. They know very well that nothing made of ordinary matter (atoms) is chemical free. I don't want to say everything is made of chemicals (light isn't, for example) but every material thing we encounter is. We're made of chemicals, our food is made of chemicals, and the air is made of chemicals. We can't avoid chemicals. We ARE chemicals. The organic strawberries in the meme above aren't just made of "strawberry" for heaven's sake...they're made of chemicals, and a lot of them. That wonderful strawberry smell is the product of a cocktail of scary-sounding chemicals, as the picture below shows (pardon the blurriness, it's the best I could find).

Aldehydes? Terpenes? 5-hydroxy methylfurfural?! Those are can't be natural, can they? Yes, they can. And I'm glad they are, because I love the smell of strawberries.

Of course, people will respond, "Yes, but if all these chemicals are natural, then they can't be bad. It's the artificial chemicals that will get you." And that brings us to the second myth: that nature wants to heal us, or wants us to be healthy. To hear some people tell it, nature is full of herbs, essential oils, and even (among the kookier sorts) crystals that were put on this earth just to heal us.

They almost certainly weren't. If the theory of evolution is true--and it's stood the test of time for over 150 years now--every living thing evolves whatever features help it survive in a tough world. They aren't there to serve a purpose, as you often hear. They're there because they found an evolutionary niche and filled it, by any means necessary. Herbs didn't evolve to heal us, or even to be eaten by herbivores. In fact, most plant compounds with medicinal properties originally evolved as as deterrents; to keep animals from eating them. They can be pretty nasty about it, too. For example, a lovely flower called the California corn lily will cause sheep who eat it to give birth to monstrous, one-eyed lambs.

Looks kind of unnatural, doesn't it? It's not. Because of its effects, the chemical that produces it is called cyclopamine. It turns out that cyclopamine may be useful for treating certain kinds of cancer, and that's wonderful. But here's the crucial thing: California corn lilies don't make cyclopamine to cure cancer. They don't give a damn about us. Most likely, they make it to attack herds of mammals that try to eat them, and horrible attack it is.

Now, it's true that plants have evolved to have certain parts eaten by animals. This usually has to do with sex. Flowers produce nectar so that bees and hummingbirds will visit them, pick up pollen, and then pollinate another flower. But some flowers are "deceitful." They just smell enticing to pollinators, but they don't actually have nectar. Others entice insects with smells and then trap and dissolve them--which can't be a pleasant way to go. Similarly, many fruits are "meant" to be eaten by animals, because they contain seeds the animals will spread, depositing them with a nice little dollop of fertilizer. That's why so many fruits are so tasty.

However, most plants emphatically do not "want" to be completely devoured, and that's why so many of them are poisonous, at least in partially. Tomatoes are delicious, but if you eat the green parts you'll be in trouble. That's not the part with the seeds that need dispersed. Even many common foods today are only edible because they've been selectively bred for centuries. Ancient people in Peru, who first domesticated the potato, had to eat clay to counteract the poisons in the ancestors of today's nourishing Idaho potatoes. Many wild animals do the same thing so they can eat plants that don't want to be eaten. Cassava, which is a staple for many in the tropics, has to be processed extensively to be edible. Otherwise, it's toxic. Wild almonds will straight-up kill you. It's no coincidence that cyanide smells like bitter almonds.

Nature is neither benevolent or malevolent. It just is. What's going to happen in nature happens, regardless of whether it causes joy or suffering. In Rocky Mountain National Park, there's a sign to remind hikers that they can die out there if they aren't careful. It says, "The mountains don't care." It's a good lesson. People think that because nature is so beautiful, and fits together so intricately and well, that it must also be benevolent. It isn't.

As I mentioned above, this should be obvious. Some of the nastiest, most deadly things on earth were produced by nature: arsenic, strychnine, ricin, leprosy, influenza, liver flukes, pinworms, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis...the list goes on and on. People somehow manage to ignore all this; plugging their ears and chanting, "La la la, rainbows and herbal remedies, la la la la la." Why? Maybe it's because of the human tendency to see things in simplistic, black-and-white terms. People want to put clear labels on things, to categorize them as all good or all bad, even though most things can be both. Nature contains most things, so nature is obviously both. To steal Walt Whitman's phrase, it is large. It contains multitudes.

That's really my main point here. I'm not saying artifical chemicals are always good, or that nature is always bad. I love nature as much as anyone I know. Some artificial chemicals are very bad. And "natural" foods (by which I mean the small subset of foods we have learned are safe, or made safe through breeding) may be more healthy than foods covered in artificial pesticides and fertilizers (or natural pesticides and fertilizers, for that matter). Those foods are tried and tested, so we know they aren't toxic, at least in normal amounts, to most people. All the chemicals in nature have in some sense stood the test of time. If they're destructive chemicals like oxygen, nature has neutralized or adapted to them. Synthetic chemicals haven't stood the test of time, so there's always the chance that a new chemical will have nasty unintended effects on our health or the environment. Ozone-destroying fluorocarbons are a good example.

So yes, oftentimes natural is better. Artificial chemicals can be more dangerous than natural ones. But sometimes nature kills and artificial chemicals save lives. What we have to do, then, is think about these things in more nuanced terms, and stop saying ludicrous things like, "I only eat chemical-free foods" or "nature wants to heal us." We have to be smarter than that. Mother Nature is beautiful, creative, ancient, and subtle...and will kill you if you don't respect her. Seeing her in simplistic, romanticized terms is not at all respectful, and if we keep doing it--as the anti-vaccination movement is starting to demonstrate--we'll pay a high price.

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Further Reading

Mother Nature is Trying to Kill You / Dan Riskin

Wicked Plants / Amy Stewart

Overview of Plant Defenses / Brian Freeman and Gwen Beattie