Cartoon explained here.
A time back, I used to get anonymous hate mail. One thing the person didn’t like about me had to do with evolution. Evolution was bad and I was therefore bad because I was a scientist. It was weird. The theory of evolution by natural selection was first proposed in 1859. It’s old. Civil War Era Old. Why do people still hate it?
The theory of evolution upset the status quo by promoting human equality. You may ask yourself why people of the past thought nothing of killing Native Americans, stealing their land, and owning slaves. Sure, they did it for profit but the added religious justification more simple than you think: these were not regarded as true humans by those who abused them. They were not equal in the eyes of white-male god. That is, until Darwin’s Tree of Life model classified all people as simply humans, the same species, which could mate a reproduce.
Some people did not want to see slaves as brothers. They wanted to own them instead. But in 1863, shortly after the Theory of Evolution was published, the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by Lincoln.
People DID believe in evolution in those Civil War and before days but conveniently, in their theory, the Great Chain of Being, the white ruling class was the most evolved. Women, people of color, poor people--they were all lower beings who had a lower rung, meant to serve even worship those above. It was regarded as against God's will to move out of your place. Those above you had the God given right to use you however they wished. The Divine Right of Kings was taken as fact. Darwin’s theory of evolution was a real threat to the status quo.
The Great Chain has been around since they days of Aristotle (b 384 BC). It’s not based on any studies and clearly came before DNA testing. All I can say is, old habits die hard. Evolution only became more believable with more information about genetics. But since the Great Chain had been along for so long, people became accustomed to “punching down” and keeping everybody in their place. Some today still see it as a virtue.
Ironically, Social Darwinism was nothing at all what Charles Darwin would have supported. He was the first to say that diversity is good for a species. And the idea that the "fittest" is the biggest and strongest was against his principles. The man saw earthworms as being "fittest." After all, they are highly adaptable,, hermaphrodites so all you need is two to reproduce twice, and they form soil so they could bury us someday.
As for the Great Chain, it’s simply a bad idea that’s had its day. It's long been known that inequality makes a society unhappy. It makes whole countries less happy. Investing in your population as a whole makes a country stronger. These days, biologists even say that cooperation is the key to evolution.
Here in the US, we’ve endured the new version of Divine Right of Kings--tax cuts for the rich for over 40 years. It’s brought unhappiness. We have in every sense re-branded The Great Chain of Being to The Great Chain of Trickle Down Economics or maybe The Great Chain of Prosperity Gospel with the rich holding themselves above us, doing what they see as best for us in a most patronizing way. People believe in dumb stuff like this because it gets said over and over. It doesn’t make it true.
The Great Chain (above) places the rich and powerful closer to god and the earth and animals below even the women, making environmentalism unpalatable to the Great Chain believers.
Sadly, I met with resistance to the theory of evolution again when (in Iowa) I taught Science for Elementary Teachers as a stand-in. Evolution was a unit, and I was surprised to find that a couple students who had sat silently and not even asked a question during lecture didn’t answer the test questions about evolution because they said their pastor wouldn’t like it. Well, no answer means zero. I got a couple bad reviews because of it. I find it disappointing how willingly the young students, females, embraced their place in the Great Chain, below the male pastor. Yet it’s not surprising. As actor Tom Wilkinson explained it in an NPR interview, “The upper crust clings to the past because it’s been good for them.”
Yes, back in the day, people accepted their place in the chain--before the theory of evolution. It was good for some and still is. As this article says, most of the world has moved on. Yet we still have the “Kings” and their loyal, lowly subjects working hard to suppress the truth—equality and diversity are best for a species. The Kings might not be biologically better but they think they are. It’s an oft repeated lie but it’s a lie.
In the end, I took all the evolutionary hate mail to the Post Office. The postmaster said they’d investigate if I requested. I mentioned this to the chair of the local Democrats who mentioned it to the chair of the local Republicans. The hate mail stopped. Science has stood up to old ideas that kept people in their place before. We all have to keep on doing it. In fact, science has shown that arguing back against science denialism works. And there’s going to be plenty to argue about, I’m afraid.
Interesting as a teacher in the Pella public school I had very few people ever question my teaching of evolution but I'm sure some of them belonged to churches that might have been preaching against the idea. Pastor Pries asked me to preach a sermon on the acceptance of evolution at Peace Lutheran and it did not cause several members to drop out and form a different congregation. I think a lot of people just have no idea of what evolution really is nor that there are a variety of ways to interpret biblical verses.