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Feb 24, 2009 04:50 PM | 9
Editor's Note: This post is also appearing at the American Institute for Biological Sciences' Year of Science 2009: Celebrate Evolution. For more, see our tribute to Darwin on his 200th birthday.
February 12th, as every aardvark to zebra knows by now, marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. The day before the bicentennial, a spirited discussion of Darwin and his place in history came up on, of all places, the Howard Stern radio program, on Sirius Satellite Radio. The two-minute conversation is of interest because it represents an average view on Darwin from people who are well-educated but haven’t necessarily paid a great deal of attention to developments in evolutionary science. For them, a distillation of Darwin comes down to a single salient fact: we came from monkeys.
What follows is a transcript of the discussion on the Howard Stern show, with some notes from me interspersed in brackets. Robin Quivers was in the midst of reading the news:
Stern: Anything else, Robin?
Quivers: Yes. Darwin is also celebrating an anniversary. They say that it’s the bicentennial of his birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his revolutionary On the Origin of the Species.
HS: Isn’t it funny how people, you know, they call Darwin a genius and stuff, that nobody figured out that we come from monkeys? I mean, we look like monkeys. I mean, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal that he figured that out, but yet it is a big deal.
[In fact, certain basic aspects of evolutionary theory were so self-evident once Darwin had the genius to notice them that Darwin’s friend and defender T. H. Huxley said upon reading the Origin, “How stupid of me not to have thought of that!” To hear Darwin historian and performer Richard Milner sing about Huxley’s reaction, go to the February 11th episode of Science Talk, the Scientific American weekly podcast.]
RQ: People are still arguing the point!
HS: Yeah, and you still got these religious nuts that think we, you know, didn’t come from monkeys. You know, they refuse to accept science.
[Most mainstream religious groups accept the reality of evolution.]
HS: They actually have skulls where we evolved from monkeys.
RQ: Well, even if we didn’t evolve from monkeys, if God made everything, he kept basing everything on the same model. And so the model was a monkey.
HS: We certainly didn’t come from fish, we don’t look like fish.
[Wrong! Not only do we come from fish, our anatomy reveals our deep connection—as Neil Shubin explains in his book Your Inner Fish. For a short treatment, see his article “The Evolutionary Origins of Hiccups and Hernias,” in the January issue of Scientific American.]
RQ: Yeah, well, they say everything started in the sea, though. I don’t know how that all worked out.
HS: I think Darwin just saw the obvious. I don’t know, I think if I had lived during those days I would have invented the theory of evolution. I would have looked at, like, Gary [Stern show producer Gary Dell'Abate, famous for his large teeth and heavy brow], and said, you know, you look like a monkey.
RQ: I think we come from monkeys after looking at you!
HS: That’s right.
RQ: That’s not nice.
HS: It’s not nice, but it’s true. I could have come up with, I would have been the father, it would have been Howardism, not Darwinism.
RQ: And you wouldn’t have given it such a nice name as "On the Origin of the Species".
HS: Howardism.
Quivers starts to read another news story when Stern interrupts.
HS: Sarah Palin and George Bush didn’t believe in evolution. I sent them a picture of Gary. And then they changed, Bush…
RQ: They changed their minds?
HS: Oh yeah, now he believes in it. [Long pause.] I’m kidding, Gary. You look good, believe me. We should all look so good. I look like a mess, too.
Howard’s right that we do look like monkeys. We look even more like apes. Because we are apes. An analysis of the relationships among the apes reveals that we are firmly entrenched within the ape grouping. We are more closely related to chimpanzees than gorillas and chimps are to each other. So we are just another kind of ape. The kind that can send satellites into space to broadcast radio comedy programs during which we spend a couple of minutes considering our origins, but apes nevertheless.
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9 Comments
Add Comment"The two-minute conversation is of interest because it represents an average view on Darwin from people who are well-educated but havent necessarily paid a great deal of attention to developments in evolutionary science"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd so always remember, kiddies,...education is never a substitute for intelligence.
Thank you Chubbee...Howard has neither intelligence nor education, proven by the fact that they gave him what, like a billion dollars of worthless stock to move his show from the public airwaves to the digital satellite network. From my recollection, Gary does look like the missing link. Happy birthday Mr. Darwin.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's Not Darwin's or Wallace's Theory
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe idea of Natural selection is universally credited to Darwin, or sometimes Alfred Wallace.However, both admitted that they did not originate the idea,and that Patrick Matthew and Charles Wells published the theory before them.Similarly,my latest research shows that all of the ideas in "On the Origin of Species"had been published before Darwin wrote his famous book(Search Google for "wainwrightscience" for more detials)These simple facts are kept from the public,by the likes of Dawkins,Coyne,Attenborough and Steve Jones;one wonders why.
Professor Milton Wainwright,University of Sheffield,Dept Molecular Biology and Biotechnology,UK.
Prof Wainwright : Very few scientific discoveries are made in perfect isolation. We are all part of a greater whole where knowledge only progresses when ideas are shared. But no doubt Darwin would have recieved a Nobel Prize for his work if they had existed in his day. And perhaps he would have had to share it too... Somebody once said we are all standing on the shoulders of others to see ahead.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor the record howard was paid 500 million to go to satellite and earned 250 million in stock after because he met subscriber quotas. When he came sirius had 600,000 subscribers and when they merged with xm they had roughly 7 million. Oh yeah he graduated with honors from BU (intelligence) and he is the single most influential entertainer of our century.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNaturally, Mr. Stern was playing his audience which mostly are not the brightest bulbs on the tree of life. He uses the vernacular in describing us as evolving from "monkeys" as it is clear as crystal to anyone with an I.Q. over 90 that we are nothing but a variant of a hairless Ape with large brains, the vocal structure capable of modulated sounds for speech, very highly developed coordination and so forth. Why everyone spends so much time on Darwin is that he is an easy target for the mindless embeciles who push their Intelligent Design nonsense. Evolutionary Science has come a long, long way in the 150 years since this broundbreaking book of Darwin was published. When President Obama gave his most recent speech to Congress, he called upon people to get educated and I suggest that you Amerians need to read up on the facts of your very existence as a starting place. It is not in the Bible. It is in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, tens of thousands of science texts published in multiple languages throughout this great civilisation that we call the Human Civilisation. It is not the parochial tribal legends found in this one little book as amusing as it is in its ancient traditions and beliefs of a tiny people lost amongst the Roman Empire. For those that are insulted by my demeaning words...Take heart. you have the child's dream of an afterlife and sitting besides the big man when you go. It must make you feel secure in your foolishness but I myself am happy to know that this is the only trip I will take along this road from birth to death but that the species will continue to grow and to evolve so long as we do not despoil the planet beyond its capability to recover.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever Darwin basic survival of the fitness does not tell the whole story. Its too slow. We are a biological feedback control system. New stimuli starts changing us as soon as it has been received (and is then passed onto the offspring).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswhy isn't there a footnote in parenthesis under the statement from Howard to correct his error: "HS: They actually have skulls where we evolved from monkeys." ? Really Howard, where? What a sad world you people make, even evolution has turned into a political point.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Razausman: your text is too short to tell, but that sounds wayyyy too much like Lamarckism for my likes. I hope you don't mean we pass on anything other than our genes to our offspring... (on the nature side, the nurture side is more complex, of course)
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