And I thought it couldnʼt happen here…

By Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

A classic view of human evolution

I used to be smug that the ridiculous ‘controversy’ in North America about the Theory of Evolution was confined to the opposite side of the Atlantic. I really believed that the more secular societies of Europe would laugh the ideas of biblical literalists and creationists out of public discourse. It just couldn’t happen in a place like the UK.

Okay, I once overheard a man taking his granddaughter round the musuem where I work and explaining to her how “they’ve got it all wrong” in our Palaeolithic and Mesolithic display “because the world didn’t exist so long ago”. I struggled with my conscience: should I step in and say why her grandfather was talking nonsense or just leave it? I decided to leave it, probably correctly, but I still feel guilty for missing an opportunity to counter a religious viewpoint that has no basis in reality. That was an isolated incident and I know that our public museums don’t bow to sectarian beliefs and that our education system rightly teaches the Theory of Evolution by Common Descent as the best available explanation for the diversity of life on earth. I also know that religious creation stories are taught in religious education lessons.

Nelson McCausland MLA, Culture Minister for Northern Ireland

So when I learned that Nelson McCausland MLA, the Minister for Culture in Northern Ireland, had written a letter to the governors of The Museum of Ulster, asking it to include references to special creation, I was staggered. It was worse than I thought, though. According to his blog, the letter “asked the trustees to consider the representation of the Orange Order and othen (sic) fraternal organisations”, complained about “the omission of any mention of the Ulster-Scots” as well as “the consideration of alternative views on the origin of the universe and the origin of life”. According to a report carried by the BBC, Mr McCausland has complained that the letter “had been leaked to the media by a “malign” individual” who “had “showed a lack of respect” for the trustees of the museum and the institution itself”. To me, the greatest “lack of respect” is Mr McCausland’s, who seems to think it appropriate for a government minister to interfere in how things are displayed in a national museum.

Alas, he’s not the first Northern Ireland Minister to try this tactic. Mervyn Storey MLA tried another creationist tactic in August 2008, when he said that it would be “ideal” if evolution was not taught at all in science classes. In February 2009, he threatened legal action over a display at The Ulster Museum dealing with Charles Darwin, calling for an “alternative exhibition” promoting creationism to be staged alongside it, using equality legislation as his weapon of choice. He has also criticised noticeboards on the 550,000,000 year old Giant’s Causeway for not giving the ‘alternative’ view that the earth is only a few thousand years old.

The Ulster Museum includes discussions of evolution among its displays of zoology. This is only sensible. To pretend, as a correspondent to the Belfast Times does, that there is “strong scientific evidence for the Christian position according to the Bible” is either misinformed or a deliberate lie. There is no such evidence. However, Mr McCausland seems to have been influenced in his views by Wallace Thompson of The Caleb Foundation, who wrote to him that The Ulster Museum’s displays demonstrate a “lack of balance which had tipped sideways so far, it had fallen right over and was “absolutely appalled” at “wholly misleading propaganda” aimed at “[t]hose who visit the Nature Zone, including impressionable young children, [who] will be seriously misled and misinformed”.

The Giant’s Causeway (Antrim, Northern Ireland)

A quick perusal of The Caleb Foundation’s website shows it to be a self-proclaimed fundamentalist evangelical protestant organisation. It has a special page dedicated to the Ulster Museum and a form letter complaining that the display at the Giant’s Causeway is “discriminatory” in only presenting geological data about its age.

Although these statements have produced little more than criticism from museum professionals and other educators, there is the danger that this is the thin end of a very dangerous wedge. Nelson McCausland MLA and Mervyn Storey MLA are speaking for a sizeable proportion of the population of Northern Ireland and their statements will have resonance among others with a similar conviction in biblical literalism. Their use of equalities legislation to try to force museums and teachers to present “alternative viewpoints” is worrying. Is not the point of education – and I include museums as an element in education – to confront people’s prejudices, to show them uncomfortable truths and to explain that the world isn’t quite as simple as some Iron Age goat herders living three thousand years ago in the Middle East believed it to be

Tool use in non-human creatures

By Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

The BBC’s science pages have been reporting the discovery that chimpanzees in the Nimba Mountains (Guinea) use cleavers to chop their food into smaller, bite-sized chunks. The discovery was made when Kathelijne Koops, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, was undertaking fieldwork for her thesis. Together with her supervisor, Professor William McGrew, and Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa of the University of Kyoto, she has published a preliminary account of her discovery in the journal Primates with an alacrity that shames the average archaeologist.

A chimpanzee using a hammer stone and anvil to open betel nuts

It was as long ago as 1960 that Jane Goodall first showed that chimpanzees use tools in their food gathering strategies. In recent years, Professor McGrew’s work has shown that chimpanzee tool use is determined by cultural considerations: groups in different parts of Africa have quite different tools. This distinguishes them from other tool using animals except humans.

So why should we be surprised at this? Chimpanzees (both Pan troglodytes, the common chimpanzee, and Pan paniscus, the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee) are our closest living relatives, with geneticists estimating that our two lines diverged around six million years ago (although the fossil evidence suggests that it may have been as long ago as eleven million years). Archaeological evidence points to tool use by human ancestors at least two and a half million years ago, at a level then that was more developed than chimpanzee tool use, which probably implies that there was a long period before that of unattested tool use, using wood and bone objects that have not survived (back in the 1920s, the South African anthropologist Raymond Dart suggested that we should call this culture osteodentokeratic, after the hypothesised use of bone, tooth and wood).

For far too long, we have defined humanity through its use of tools (witness Kenneth Oakley’s popular book Man the Toolmaker). Of course we use them, but we are constantly discovering more and more species that also use tools. In their book, The Material Life of Human Beings (1999), Mike Schiffer and Andrea Miller argued that it is humans’ relationship with material culture that makes us different from all other animals. We don’t just make and use tools, only to discard them once they’ve performed their functions: we depend on them, we treasure them, we use them as a means of communication. A Porsche says certain things about its owner; a Morris Minor says something different. Our entire lives are lived among the material culture we create and use.