Denyse “Buy my book” O’Leary thinks that evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gists are just like reli­gious folk. Among the deep par­al­lels she finds: Sci­en­tists and the reli­gious both give book­lets to chil­dren, cel­e­brate birth­days of impor­tant fig­ures, claim that cer­tain things are facts, and seek offi­cial recog­ni­tion. Finally:

- sacred bones. Chris­t­ian church­es have the bones of the saints; Bud­dhist stu­pas the toe-nail-clip­pings of Bud­dha; evo­lu­tion is built on sacred bones, that the evo­lu­tion­ists read mean­ings into in the way that the pagan priests of Cae­sar’s time read mean­ing into scat­tered bones.

What is the dif­fer­ence between sci­ence and clero­man­cy?

As always, the details mat­ter. It is one thing to claim that some­thing is a fact, anoth­er to con­duct empir­i­cal research to deter­mine whether a cer­tain state­ment is true or not. It is one thing to cel­e­brate a birth­day, and anoth­er to wor­ship the per­son pur­port­ed­ly born on that day. And so forth.

But what about those bones. Do “evo­lu­tion­ists” tru­ly read mean­ings into bones as if they were Chris­tians at a reli­quary? The chains shown here are alleged to be those used to bind Saint Peter in prison. Peo­ple claim that even relics like this, referred to as “sec­ond-class relics” because they mere­ly touched a saint and weren’t part of his body, can per­form mir­a­cles if you pray to them or touch them. Indeed, third-class relics, cloth touched to a reli­quary, are said to pos­sess mys­ti­cal pow­ers as well.
By con­trast, con­sid­er the role of bones in a dis­cus­sion of whether Homo flo­re­sen­sis is a micro­cephal­ic human or a new species:

The limb bone ratios [of H. flo­re­sen­sis] are unlike those of any apes or humans. They are also very robust: in spite of their small size, hob­bits would have been remark­ably strong. The arms are too long for humans, and they had unusu­al­ly large feet…. The low­er jaw lacks a chin, a fea­ture found in all humans (even peo­ple who look chin­less), and that is also true of a sec­ond jaw which has been found. The upper end of the humerus has a twist not found in mod­ern humans, but which was then found in the Turkana Boy Homo erectus/ergaster skele­ton once it was looked for. Groves’ con­clu­sion: all of these fea­tures make it over­whelm­ing­ly unlike­ly that the hob­bit was just a small micro­cephal­ic human.

Espe­cial­ly note­wor­thy is the com­ment that the obser­va­tion of a par­tic­u­lar fea­ture in the skele­ton of H. flo­re­sen­sis pro­duced a testable pre­dic­tion which was in turn con­firmed by exam­in­ing anoth­er fos­sil. That process of exam­in­ing mul­ti­ple spec­i­mens is fun­da­men­tal to sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies. Phy­lo­ge­net­ic stud­ies, or mor­pho­log­i­cal stud­ies in ecol­o­gy, draw on dozens, hun­dreds, or even thou­sands of spec­i­mens. That’s why reports of declin­ing rev­enues for nat­ur­al his­to­ry muse­ums are so wor­ry­ing. The pub­lic exhibits in those muse­ums sup­port the col­lec­tions behind the scenes, col­lec­tions which sup­port research on every­thing from evo­lu­tion to the his­to­ry of pes­ti­cide accu­mu­la­tion in birds. Those muse­ums con­tain the last remains of extinct species, and of ancient pop­u­la­tions of extant species.

My first incli­na­tion when I read com­ments like O’Leary’s is that she knows that sci­en­tists don’t actu­al­ly use bones in muse­ums the way that Chris­tians wor­ship relics in shrines. Sure­ly she is mere­ly exag­ger­at­ing in the typ­i­cal­ly mis­lead­ing man­ner of IDol­a­tors. But then I remem­bered an old post I wrote about thau­matur­gy – the study of mir­a­cles – and cre­ation­ism. I quot­ed John Hol­bo para­phras­ing Isa­iah Berlin to the effect that “those who put their faith in some immense, world-trans­form­ing thau­matur­gy, like the final tri­umph of white mag­ic or vic­to­ry over the Dark One, must believe that all polit­i­cal and moral prob­lems can there­by be turned into mag­i­cal ones.” This is the reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tive modus operan­di. Evo­lu­tion, and sci­ence in gen­er­al, are trans­formed from the sort of “immense, world trans­form­ing phe­nom­e­non, like the final tri­umph of rea­son” (Berlin’s orig­i­nal phrase), into thau­matur­gy. Where Berlin denounced those who “believe that all polit­i­cal and moral prob­lems can there­by be turned into tech­no­log­i­cal ones,” we now must also con­front those who see only meta­phys­i­cal problems.

Denyse O’Leary may not be able to con­ceive of a world in which peo­ple look at bones, or any­thing else, for rea­sons oth­er than reli­gious devo­tion. For­tu­nate­ly for soci­ety, there are peo­ple who can do that, and can learn use­ful things about life, it’s his­to­ry and its diver­si­fi­ca­tion, by look­ing at bones, trees, fields, clouds, and chick­en entrails with­out mysticism.