Sunday, August 3, 2008

THE MISSING LINK (Atheist Tales)



The Missing Link

A young archaeologist, who happened also to be an atheist, had many and sundry religious friends. Knowing that he was both an archaeologist and an atheist, they took great and constant glee in pointing out how the gaps in the fossil record disproved Darwin’s theory of evolution. “Without the missing link,” they chortled, “you have nothing!” Although he had a sensible response to their gleeful accusations, the response was complicated to deliver, not wholly convincing, and typically met with gales of knowing laughter. So usually he made no reply—hardly a satisfying outcome!

Sometimes he dreamt that the perfect fossils had suddenly appeared all at once and answered every question. It was a lovely dream, usually set in a cream-colored desert that was also, as was possible in dreams, a lush savannah full of lions and gazelles. The dig and find were scrupulously recorded in every conceivable way so that no one could doubt that the fossils had been extracted from virgin earth. It was the perfect setting, the perfect dig, and the perfect result. The young archaeologist would smile in his sleep and not feel the slightest twinge of envy that he hadn’t been the lucky—and soon-to-be world famous—archaeologist of record.

One evening he found himself hanging out in a seedy archaeologist bar not far from the university. Lost in thought, he sipped his wine and dreamed of fossils that no one had ever seen and the creatures those fossils recorded. A tap on his shoulder startled him. A man he didn’t know, who looked like one of those all-but-dissertation thirty-five-year-old faded graduate students, was breathing in his face.

“May I join you for a second?” he said.

“Certainly.” The young archaeologist waved him to a chair.

“You come highly recommended,” the man said, sitting down and pulling his chair close. “I’m in sociology. I’ve been studying the worldwide harm done by religions. I’ve spent fifteen years at it. I keep thinking: can’t they be stopped? One day last week a light bulb went on. I had a brainstorm. But I need an archaeologist to pull it off. I asked around—and people recommended you.”

The archaeologist felt a tingle run down his spine. Flattered, intrigued, and excited, he learned forward.

“What’s your idea?” the archaeologist said, his voice lowered.

“You know the missing link thing?” the man said.

“Do I ever!” the archaeologist exclaimed. “I get smacked around with that all the time!”

“Let’s make believe we found it!” the man whispered. “You will ‘find’ it and I’ll enlist other archaeologists to corroborate the find. Maybe we’ll ‘find’ several missing links at once, like an underground meteor shower! Maybe we can get hundreds of archaeologists in on the gag and have missing links found in every country on every continent! Aren’t you tired of being bludgeoned by the gap argument? Let’s ‘find’ a ton of missing links, all the missing links anybody could want, and then we’ll lock them away like some religious relic and not let anyone else see them. We could pull this off!”

The archaeologist, disappointed at being presented such a ludicrous and unsavory scheme, nevertheless pondered the man’s idea. “Of course, we’d be lying--” he began.

“They lie with their every breath, going on about gods!” the man interrupted. “It’s just tit for tat!”

“More importantly, that’s not the way science operates.”

“Science has to get down off its high horse and fight in the trenches. There’s a war going on!”

The archaeologist bit his lip. “I appreciate your argument and almost don’t disagree,” he said. “Almost.” His head swam. “But I couldn’t do it.” Suddenly his mind cleared. “And you shouldn’t pursue this,” he said. “It’s a bad idea. It’s beneath us.”

“Should I run through a litany of the horrors of religion?”

“Save your breath,” the archaeologist said, turning away. “I’m not interested.”

The man shrugged. “Some archaeologist will join me,” he said, getting up. “Of all the archaeologists in all the archaeologist bars in all the university towns the world over, some archaeologist will join me.”

“I wonder,” the archaeologist replied, turning away from the stranger.

The man’s plan disturbed him. He understood the argument that sometimes you had to fight fire with fire. Sometimes you had to pull off dirty tricks to achieve a righteous outcome. But that truth, while undeniable, was still a souring one. It meant that the battles and wars would never end. It let in everything you wished would one day vanish from the face of the earth. He finished his drink and left the bar in a bad mood.

That night he had bad dreams. Devilish fiends were making false finds in a coal-black landscape, cackling at their tricks, pulling out bones that never were and never could be and parading with them in monstrous dances around bonfires from hell. The archaeologist sat up in bed and shook himself; but as soon as he fell asleep the nightmare returned. It seemed that the man had ruined his beautiful dream of a righteous find.

About two weeks later the young archaeologist was having a drink with a colleague at the seedy archaeologist’s bar.

“Did you fall for that sting?” his colleague asked.

“What sting?”

“That thing that was going on here? That guy from the Freedom from Evolution Foundation, posing as a sociologist? They were trying to see how many archaeologists would be willing to falsify the fossil record!”

“No!” the young archaeologist exclaimed.

“He couldn’t find a single one. Not here, not in any archaeologist bar anywhere. There were some close calls—a fellow in Ann Arbor almost bit, and one in New Haven came this close. But ultimately no one agreed!”

The young archaeologist nodded. After a while, he found himself smiling. Yes, they would always use such tactics; they would fabricate, trick, lie, and scheme. On his side, the side of science, many unsavory activities would also occur: falsified research, unholy marriages with business, and more. But at least this time, in archaeologist bars in university towns everywhere, no archaeologist could be found to falsify the fossil record and provide the world with an unearned missing link.

That night his sweet dream returned. He dreamt that the perfect fossil had appeared and answered every question. It was the same lovely dream, set in a cream-colored desert that was also a lush savannah. The dig and find were scrupulously recorded, so that no one could doubt that the fossil had been extracted from virgin earth. It was the perfect setting, the perfect dig, and the perfect result. He smiled in his sleep; and in the morning he returned to work, a proud and happy archaeologist.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

A great tale, Eric. The very idea that we abandon our ethics to outdo someone with fewer ethics is a bad idea. I've gotten crosswise with some of my Liberal friends who posted an untruth but defended this post: but the bottom line is. . . .
For me the end doesn't justify certain means, and your story is a perfect example of that.
Thanks, Nancy Day

Frish said...

Being trained as an archaeologist, and currently as the Fearless Leader of the Los Angeles Brights, I found you story humorous but "funny" in a different way.

Each of us represents the "missing link", there is not necessarily any major event in the fossil record that needs to be uncovered.

Evolution happens quite gradually.

The fossil record is sparse, with very few examples of individuals from widely varying times and locations.

So what?

Each individual is a current representation of the state of evolution.

Not having every individual's skeleton or DNA from the beginning of time doesn't invalidate the evidence.

Evolution works over a great deal of time, very difficult for many to comprehend how long 100,000 (let alone 1,000,000 or 1BN years is!).

Finally, what I love to point out to the "intelligent designers" is that they have the perspective all wrong!

They think we are the "pinnacle" of creation, all of creation sure looks like it was placed here just for us!

If one looks at it properly however, we are not the Entree, we are the Leftovers, having over time simply gotten through all of what the environment has thrown at us.

No wonder the world looks like it was engineered just for us, since it did the engineering!

TheEO said...

I hate to be a pedant - no I don't - but should your man not be called a "paleontologist".

It is a good story but from my interpretation of modern evolutionary
thinking we would not expect such a creature as the missing link to have ever existed.

Anonymous said...

Does our culture use the words 'person of integrity' to refer to people who stick to their guns even though they are holding to a position that our culture deems wrong?
Or, does 'person of integrity' mean both sticking to their guns and holding to our culture's precepts?

Anonymous said...

Be very careful with these tales. I can see true believers reading this, completely missing the context of these stories, and misquoting you all over the intertube.

Anonymous said...

a more satisfying ending, more what I would expect of traditional fables, might be that he finds a "missing link", and the fundies simply claim that there are now twice as many gaps. (teaching the lesson not to bother engaging them)