Darwin Day Celebration: “Striving for a different world and lifting people’s sights”
March 10, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a Reader:
In response to a great letter in Revolution newspaper ["Call for Darwin Day Celebrations, February 12, 2014—A Letter from a Reader"] proposing Darwin Day celebrations in oppressed neighborhoods, the Revolution Club decided to celebrate with a presentation on evolution at a monthly fundraising picnic for BA Everywhere. Everyone in the club was excited about this, from someone who had read Ardea Skybreak’s book, The Science of Evolution and The Myth of Creationism: Knowing What’s Real and Why It Matters, to someone who had studied the pictures in the centerfold of that book and eagerly shared what she was learning with her friends, to a woman who didn’t know anything about evolution but was curious to learn, to a woman who had a firm educational grounding in the science of evolution and was horrified to discover that today this is contended in the schools instead of taught as fact.
The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism
Knowing What's Real and Why It Matters
by Ardea Skybreak
"This book will be of tremendous benefit to many..."
— Richard Leakey
A couple of people got together to write a flier to distribute widely to people in the neighborhood. It said in part, “Science answers the question: where did we come from? And when you understand, it opens up a whole new world for you. A whole different way of understanding things. And it’s a gateway to understanding a whole lot more. Basic things about the way the world works are kept hidden from us. With science we can understand the world and how it changes, including how we can be part of changing it. Science is not something just for a special group of people. It is not something we should be intimidated by. We’re all capable of understanding basic scientific facts and taking up a scientific method...Revolutionaries who are serious about changing the world, uphold and promote the scientific method and approach in everything that we do. We are building a movement for revolution based on the science of communism that has been further developed by Bob Avakian (BA) into a new synthesis of communism, including a strategy for revolution. This work and leadership shows how the world could be radically changed and how we can work and fight to change it. This is why we are raising big funds all across the country to popularize BA and his work.”
A two-person team from the Revolution Club went to a Black church with a progressive congregation. We talked with one younger member who had read Bob Avakian’s Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World some years ago and really liked it. We had a friendly but intense exchange with someone a little older who argued that science doesn’t encompass that people are spiritual. We read together with him quote 4:30 from BAsics, (that says in part, “Communism will not put an end to—nor somehow involve the suppression of—awe and wonder, the imagination, and ‘the need to be amazed.’”). After a discussion that involved a lot of struggle about the need for revolution to change the world in the interests of humanity (vs. people just changing things in their minds and resolving their suffering when they die and supposedly their spirits get freed), he came back to get a way to stay in touch and said he really liked that quote and wanted to find out more what this organization is about. We also talked to a newer member of the church who had been in prison for a long time. He started off incredulously, “You guys believe in evolution?!” But when we opened up The Science of Evolution book and read through the centerfold image showing myths and facts, he was very intrigued and said he was open-minded and would like to learn more about this.
On Darwin Day, a few days before the picnic, Revolution Books hosted a brief presentation and slideshow by a retired biologist. The audience was diverse, people of different backgrounds, some new to the bookstore, some in the Revolution Club, kids, older people, scientists, other revolutionaries. The biologist was great in his presentation and explanations, but the presentation was a little “in the middle of the story” for people who had never had any explanation of evolution before in their lives. We talked together after the presentation to help break things down for each other and passed around The Science of Evolution book so people could study the center pictures. There was also debate about religion, and what our orientation is towards people who are religious, understanding that all people are capable of a scientific method and struggling against what Bob Avakian has dubbed “the smug arrogance of the enlightened” (both in the form of looking down on people who are religious and in the form of avoiding ideological struggle over god and religion, faith-based vs. evidence-based approaches to understanding the world).
When the program was over, some of the Revolution Club members stuck around to meet with a physicist who had volunteered to be part of doing a presentation on evolution at the picnic. We pulled in one of the Revolution Books staffers who knows a lot about evolution and is eager to break it down to others and had already begun developing his own slideshow. We talked about the need to do a presentation that would be a basic introduction to the science of evolution and that breaks things down for people who have had no scientific training or education, and we used The Science of Evolution book and our collective knowledge of the questions we encounter when talking to people about evolution, to figure out what are the key things to get into and how.
To build for the picnic, a Revolution Club team went out to one of the high schools in the neighborhood and passed out fliers and talked with students after school. We got people to stop and engage by asking them if they think the world is OK the way it is or needs to be really different. For those who said they wanted to see a different world, we talked with them about how it is possible to change the world, but we need science to understand how and we need to raise money to get BA and his work known everywhere. Two Black students who stopped and talked for a couple minutes posed their questions in the course of the conversation: one said there are not enough people who want to change the world to be able to do anything about it, and the other wanted to know whether the movement for revolution is having an effect. We talked about these questions together and also about the science of evolution. The young woman said she had learned about evolution in school and learned that we have a common ancestry. The young guy had heard the term evolution in class, but didn’t remember learning anything about what it actually is. We also talked to a teacher’s aide who was glad to see us talking with the students about these kinds of questions and took extra fliers to give to a biology teacher he works with.
While the team was at the high school, one of the Revolution Club members who live in the neighborhood walked through the area passing out fliers on her own. When we all hooked up with each other, we went to a fast-food spot where students sometimes hang out after school and walked through talking to groups of students and others. One young guy said he didn’t believe in evolution, he believes in god and creation and at first he said he didn’t want to talk about it, because he would get too deeply into it. We told him it is good to get deep into things and debate and discuss these questions with others, it is part of how we all learn about reality, which we need to do so we can learn the basis for changing things and see the ways we can work to change things. He had some agreement that the world needs to be radically changed, so he was open a bit to going further with this conversation. We talked with him a little about evolution and showed him the center pictures in The Science of Evolution book. He didn’t say much, but was clearly surprised by what he saw there.
The next day, revolutionaries went out to a busy street corner where we regularly have a presence. We put up three beautiful color displays of enlargements of the pictures in The Science of Evolution book, as well as displays from the special issue of Revolution newspaper, “You Don’t Know What You Think You ‘Know About... The Communist Revolution...” and we had materials for the upcoming Day of Outrage and Remembrance on February 26. Everything we were doing there was controversial, with some people who consciously oppose the movement for revolution agitating to others not to engage us. Some religious people who love their belief in god more than they have a sense of fighting for justice, yelled out in opposition to what we were doing, and one guy was particularly incensed. A woman who was deeply moved that we were also speaking to the need to stand up and stop the murders of Black youth confronted him and agitated that people should be supporting and joining with this, not opposing it.
Young students, middle-school age, were upset to hear us say the world wasn’t created in seven days by god and shouted incredulously when the person talking to them said she didn’t believe in god. Meanwhile, a young Latino guy who was standing around waiting for the bus came over to see what all the fuss was about and looked at the evolution displays. He said, “This isn’t anything new here, right? I know about evolution, I don’t think god created everything.” We pointed to the controversy there to show the need to bring this understanding out to others who have been locked out of and prevented from learning about this. Many people came up to look at the displays, including a woman who took a picture of the display showing the similarities in embryos of different species and then pointed to an embryo of a bat and said, “That’s what I looked like before I was born.” An eight- or nine-year-old boy was curiously looking at the display with the human arm, wing of a bat, whale flipper, etc... homologous features showing common descent, when his father pulled him away and told him, “as long as you live under my roof, you are not getting into that!” and would not let his son take the flier. Others commented they believe the earth is billions of years old, and not what the bible says is thousands—but they acknowledged that many people aren’t very scientific about where we humans came from.
People who came to the picnic were members of the Revolution Club and the BA Everywhere Committee, together with a couple of newer people and some who were in the park and joined in. Some had never before heard an explanation of evolution. The presentation started with a sweeping view of 4.5 billion years of earth and the beginnings and then evolution of all life on earth. It was a very good presentation that drew the audience in and people jumped in comfortably with examples or comments or clarifications. It covered the descent from common ancestors, explained natural selection, and showed and discussed the evidence of evolution. It briefly touched on the evolution of human beings.
People commented afterwards that it was very interesting and they learned a lot. One person sincerely asked one of the presenters, “if we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” Another person said she felt like she was on a tour in a natural history museum but this was explained much more clearly. Some people mingled in small groups to continue the discussion on evolution, and others formed a contingent and marched to a nearby busy intersection to demand justice for Jordan Davis in the aftermath of the mistrial and to build for February 26.
In reflecting on the experience, a revolutionary commented: “Darwin Day was out of the ‘politics as usual,’ I liked it. Communists think about everything, why shouldn’t the masses be able to? Thinking about things like this is part of making you whole—a human being. People have a thirst for understanding, but the system says, ‘This is not for you.’ We should have more things like Darwin Day. It was different, challenging people, full of curiosity and wonder, and an expression of striving for a different world and lifting people’s sights.”
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