Why I took so long to accept evolution

I was blown away by the Darwin exhibit at the Chicago Field Museum; wait, I already told you that.

And of course, evolution has been on my mind lately; it has even influenced me to the point where I am writing a mathematical article motivated by it.

But, when I was young, I actually embraced creationism. I remember the first time I admitted to “believing in evolution”; I was a senior at Annapolis (a First Class Midshipman) and one of my aunts asked me what I believed about the origins of the world and of humankind. She asked “do you believe in evolution or in creationism” and I said “evolution”, almost without thinking.
(I was a Roman Catholic at the time, who still practiced the Church Rituals).

I don’t know when I first changed.

But in grade school, I believed in a sort of creationism.

What did I think of the scientific theories? Believe it or not, I thought about it this way: “a good scientist has to look for the natural causes for things; a scientist who said “oh, it was a miracle that caused that” would be a bad scientist. Hence, they HAD to believe in natural origins, and I thought that my god would give them special dispensations because the scientists were good, honorable people who just didn’t have the special revelation that us non-scientists had.

True, a Roman Catholic could safely believe in evolution at that time (when I was a kid), but neither I nor my mom knew that.

I do remember the footnotes in my Douey-Rhiems Bible saying something to the effect that one had “to choose” between believing “modern theories” or “God’s word”. (note: The Douey-Rhiems Bible was the one that was a translation from the Latin Vulgate, or a “translation of a translation” that had all of the Latin-like names to the various books).

I remember my 4′th grade teacher introducing “evolution” to us in the classroom; we saw a series of drawings that depicted an ape like creature, some “sort of ape, sort of human” creatures, and then finally a human.

I kept wondering the following: “ok that is well and good and I can see the similarities. But why did the species change at all? Why?

And, as my dad (who was non-religious) said “if we evolved from apes, why are there still apes?”

Also, I remember talking with my aunts, listening to all of those Bible stories (totally true, by the way) and reading some of her creationist books (little books).

And, because my last biology class was in 7′th grade (!), I never understood what caused evolution to happen.

I don’t remember when the egg broke and I embraced evolution all of the way, but it had something to do with

• hearing the term “natural selection and survival of the fittest”
• seeing moths evolve into spotted ones that better hid in sooty areas
• hearing of bacteria which evolved to be resistant to current anti-biotics

So, that is my story; of course, part of what helped me along was actually reading the Bible in high school, being horrified by much of it (especially the Hebrew Bible, commonly called the Old Testament), and losing my bibilical literalism (thanks to Priests and good footnotes).

But, my taking so long to embrace evolution had something to do with the way it was first explained to me: no one told me WHY species might “improve” over time, and Lamarkian improvements never made sense to me. It was the “mutation that happend to be benefical” idea that sold me, but I didn’t hear that until much later in life.