“A woman who loves freedom is better off in an atheist’s world,” concludes the narrator and director of the film The Nature of Eve, a passionate exploration of natural history focusing on areas where science, religion, and philosophy blend. Produced by the French National Film Board, this bilingual film is the result of the often personal quest of its narrator, Fabienne Lips-Dumas.
Originally a cultural journalist from Paris, Dumas was attracted to the vulnerability of science, where mistakes can be made and questions do not have easy answers. “The living world is the world that is questioning,” she explains.
Questions of freedom, identity, and religion initially sparked Lips-Dumas to investigate evolution. As a young adult she “fell” into religion, as she describes it, but found the images paralyzing, suffocating, and full of guilt.
“I realized that science had some surprises in store that could transform my idea of myself…to think of everything as planned, prophesized, is to be condemned, whereas in science there is a taste of freedom,” she said. For her film she spoke with half a dozen experts in paleobiology and evolution.
“We muddy the waters of debate if we fail to acknowledge that the process of evolution has metaphysical implications for us,” claims Simon Conway Morris. Yves Coppers, professor at the College de France, agrees, claiming, “When the first humans became conscious, they had inherent to that consciousness the existential angst of knowing [from] whence they came, where they were going, who they were…thinking matter is religious.”
Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford has a more negative perspective. “Children need to be born with a brain that believes what it’s told,” says Dawkins, “It should believe its parents when they say ‘Don’t eat the red berry cause its dangerous’…the rule built into brains by natural selection is to believe whatever your parents tell you…once you’ve got that rule the brain has no way of differentiating useless information like ‘sacrifice a goat at the full moon to god and he’ll stop a drought.'” It is the gullibility of children that is responsible for laying open their brains to superstition and religion, says Dawkins.
Nobel Laureate in medicine Francois Jacob sides with Dawkins. He relates a story from his childhood: “One day at synagogue seeing people around me were clearly play-acting and [not believing a word of it], I said to myself, ‘Clearly this was invented to help us endure the hardship of life and death.'”
“It requires a really strenuous effort on the part of individual humans to grow out of this tendency to automatically believe all the superstitions that are passed down,” says Dawkins.
Yale’s Derek E.G. Briggs explains that there is a great debate on whether the development of intelligence is convergent or contingent, with proponents of the first stating that evolution must eventually lead to humanity (or at least intelligence), and those who favour the latter arguing that such a development is merely a happenstance of conditions along the way.
“Evolution has these inevitabilities,” says Morris. “[The] emergence of a sentient species which can look at evolution or the surrounding natural world and say this is wonderful is very probable indeed.” He is quick to add that this is not a very popular view.
It is especially unpopular among supporters of Stephen Jay Gould, former curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, now deceased. He attested that the emergence of intelligence is hardly the ultimate goal of evolution. Life started simply, and although some groups evolved to be more complicated, Gould doesn’t consider that a trend. “It’s just a funny little dripple away from what has always been the most successful form of life: bacteria,” he said.
Gould claimed that the accidental nature of evolution is inherent in the unpredictable routes the process has taken. The change of dinosaur scales to feathers was initially precipitated for heat-insulation, but the process took off and led to wings and the creation of an entire class on the tree of life: birds.
Another clue that evolution is a long, slow process are the imperfections in physical form. A certain nerve that extends from the brain to the larynx takes a detour around a major artery in the chest, a highly inefficient process in a large-necked animal like the giraffe. These imperfections, often vestiges of earlier species, indicate a long history rather than divine design, Dawkins attests.
But many religious leaders find it hard to accept the concept of evolution, an idea that seems to reduce the importance of the human species. “But I think that’s a good thing, because think of all the trouble we get in to when we overvalue ourselves in cosmic terms,” said Gould. “Every time our arrogance is set back by science we also gain.”
“The whole of our body, although individual, has free will and consciousness, and also has within it four billion years of history permeating it through and through,” explains Morris.
This vision of human existence might be one of the few points on which Morris and Dawkins are in agreement. “The reality of geological time, the universe, astronomy, evolution, the details of the interior of our bodies, are strange and wonderful beyond any fictitious fairy tale that I’ve ever known,” Dawkins says.
This conclusion, according to Jacob, is far more uplifting than it is demeaning. “The idea of being created is much less satisfying than being the product of the world, the Earth, everything-being an integral part of nature.” With an increasing appreciation of the connection of humanity to the planetary ecosystem there is a drive for animal rights, environmental protection, and climate control, as our species starts to understand its true role.
“I find it beautiful to be small,” Lips-Dumas concludes.
