Feminist Addendum on Evolution of Evolution

By Heidi Hileman

Queen Elizabeth - Charles Darwin

Queen Elizabeth I of England ascended to the throne in 1558. The last women of sole political power had been a Greek Egyptian Pharaoh named Cleopatra in the mid-1st century B.C. She reemerged in the 16th century as Elizabeth I. This century is marked by the break away of Protestant churches from the authority of the Pope, whose Catholic authority had been instituted by the sword of the French King, Charlemagne, in the 8th century. Elizabeth was raised during intense religious strife between the Catholics and Protestants. As Queen she managed to pass a unification act that created a single Church of England that excluded papal authority. Elizabeth, however, seemed to be more enchanted with the arts encouraging the works of Shakespeare.

Elizabeth has to be one of the luckiest Queens who ever lived. While being a caring monarch, she had inherited a destitute country torn by religious civil war and her country desperately needed time to heal. The Spanish were not happy with England's break with the Catholic church. Initially Henry VII broke from papal authority and established the Church of England. His daughter, Mary I, whose mother was Spanish royalty, had reinstituted Catholicism in England. Elizabeth I reinstituted the Church of England. The Spanish eventually had had enough when a revolt broke out in the Netherlands aided by the English. King Phillip II of Spain dispatched a fleet of ships, the Armada, in June of 1588 to dethrone the Queen of England. Despite gives and takes by both sides, the deciding blow came with a terrible storm in August that broke Spanish moral and sent only 67 ships out of 130 back home to Spain.

How different life might be if the Spanish had won or even if a long seize had blocked the harbors so that those going to America had to go through Spain. It was during Elizabeth's reign that the English began settling North America. Would North America be a predominately English speaking people, or would both Americas be Spanish. I doubt the United States as we know it with its constitutional democracy would have been created by the Spanish for they had a strong faith in divine order. It was their belief in Catholicism that had driven the Moors out and reestablished Spain as a world power, creating a Spain who had become extremely wealthy having previously sent ships to America and beyond. The Spanish had lost more than sunken ships that could have easily been rebuilt with their wealth, but it was a loss of faith in the power of providence to protect the defense of their faith. Least the protestants claim in was an act of God on their behalf, Queen Elizabeth reign had been spared, and hers was a reign of the worldliness and individuality, a journey that had begun with the signing of the Magna Charta in 1215. The United States Declaration of Independence has a stated belief in "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"; as such recognizing varying kinds happiness that individuals seek. Perhaps it would be wise not to assume it was a libertarian wind either. Life and order are also virtues.

It certainly was the way Darwin saw the evolution of life in the 1850's. Life was an accident. A roll of the dice from which fitness would determine the outcome. How picky have his critics been over his choice of the word fitness. Certainly goodness should have been stated rather than fitness. But what is fitness? It could be goodness. But Jesus died despite his innocence with the advancement of the Roman military might; even though Rome too eventually crumbled, but for them it was corruption from within. What of England, are they the most fair of all people because God had destroyed their enemies with a mighty storm? Or are we, as English Darwin saw it, a connected human race, connected through our ancestry with the apes.

In the next century, what happened to the social reforms of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire that were at the turn of the 20th century knighting Jews such as John von Neumann's father, and allowing Jewish men such as Albert Einstein to rise to world respect; only to have the U.S. and England defeat the Germans with the browning repeating rifle made in Ogden, Utah, by John Browning who had learned to make fine rifles in the defense of his people the Mormons against the wrath of the Protestants. In the wake of the fall, the Jewish people who had first risen on the kind winds of ruling Hapsburgs, suffered in the counterpull of Hitler. While the U.S. prides itself on having defeated Hitler, U.S. viciousness in bombing their way to Berlin where entire cities where destroyed: men, women, children and refuges burnt in a single night as massive bombing continued through the night, making Hilter's blitz of London look like child's play. Finally the U.S dropping the nuclear bomb on the Japan lead to the distrust of the Russians and the possible annihilation of the human race through nuclear warfare.

In the last fifty years we have had to learn to acknowledge individual differences and different political paths. A very Darwinian thing to do. Maybe it is up to us as humans to decide what is fit and what is not, so that we can truly become the masters of our own fate.

Aristotle - Alexander the Great

The formal scientific debate over evolution began in the 4th century BC. Alexander the Great was the Greek conquerer who extended the Greek empire through out the middle east. Conquering, however, might not be the right word. The Persian army literally allowed Alexander to defeat their king in single combat, then they willingly picked up their swords to follow him into Egypt. Egypt's New Kingdom dynasty had previously collapsed and easily feel into his hands.

So why did the Persians so willing follow a foreigner? Intellectuals are fond of pointing out that Aristotle, a scholar trained by Plato of Athens, was Alexander's tutor. After Alexander's rise to power, Aristotle became a great teacher in Athens with a school he called the Lyceum whose purpose was to classify nature. Aristotle was an innovative scientist, having begun the classification of species that has been improved upon to this day. A natural question with such classification is: Where did the different species come from? Aristotle said perfect patterns were set in the beginning by an unchanging heaven and as such cats would always be cats, dogs would always be dogs, and men would always be superior to women, as kings were to the common man.

Aristotle had a very different view of the heavens, not at all like the tradition stories handed down by Athens. The pantheon of gods ruled by Zeus and Hera were seen as the planets, a word which in ancient Greek meant vagabonds, because they wondered aimless through the night sky without any apparent rhyme or reason. Or so it would seem if Earth was the center of the universe. The planetary patterns are very predictable when seen as revolving around the sun. Two centuries before, the Pythagoreans of Italy speculated the planets revolved around the sun, as the sun revolved around a fiery center of the cosmos. Pythagoras first revealed the formula for the right triangle that set off a revolution in trigonometry and navigation, but their instincts about the cosmos were not trusted. The conservative Greek geocentric view was accepted instead. The Greeks not only saw Earth as the center, but Greece as the center of the Earth, which in turn would make them the center of the cosmos. Apollo's temple at Delphi had a rounded stone, Apollo's priests proclaimed as the very navel of the Earth.

As the years rolled by, Aristotle could see no changes in the heavens. The planets continued to be unruly, as the sun remained constant as the giver of light, as cats continued to be cats; dogs, dogs; men, men and women, women. And so based upon observation, Aristotle proclaimed the heavens and all patterns set in the beginning by the heavens as timeless. Only humans experienced time and as such were capable of falling from grace destroying that which was set in the beginning, but such changes were never for the better. Ironically enough, the word heaven began in honor of the women Hatshepsut, a Pharaoh of Egypt, the first great women of power in recorded history in the 14th century B.C., who like the Pharaohs before and after, were seen as descendants of the Gods. It was rumored, however, that her nephew Thutmose III, heir to the throne, impatient of having to wait his turn; had her killed. The Greeks picked up the martyred Pharaoh and made her Hera, Goddess of Heaven.

The early stories of perfection, The Garden of Eden from which man fell, originally came from the Tigris Euphrates river valley. Perhaps such a lush valley was always being overrun by invaders and each time was a loss of Eden. Abraham of Ur originated in this fertile valley before he moved to what was soon to be called Israel. The early Greek myths, however, are more like the Egyptian myths about bringing order out of chaos. Aristotle was adopting a middle east view point when he choose to believe in perfection. Though I personally wonder, if the Greek saints embellished the first chapters of Genesis to make it sound like their Greek Aristotle. So in the end they were the same.

There was nothing new in Aristotle's view of universe to have fascinated the middle eastern Persians who already had such myths, even if they had heard of Aristotle. There is another possible answer for the Persian fascination with the Greeks. For the previous four hundred years, the Greeks had been hosting the Olympic games in the name of Zeus, their father God. Perhaps the Persians were more interested in playing games than in fighting wars. Life is a beautiful gift of grace. Our struggle for life and the gentle graces that accompany such a struggle are what I believe make us truly human.

If the beginnings of interracial games was so powerful why was Alexander a king, instead of democratic leader? Athens was the birthplace of democracy. But Plato was upset when his teacher Socrates was sentenced to death by an Athenian democratic jury. According to Plato, Socrates in the market place of Athens, had taught the importance of listening to one's inner voice to find one's inner truth. This upset the priests of Athena's temple who feared Socrates would become more powerful and take away their followers. The priests incited the people to put Socrates to death for insulting their city and its temple. After Socrates death, Plato took it upon himself to chastise Athens for their cruel behavior and insist upon freedom of academic thought. Plato, however, did not trust democracies and taught that a righteous king who cared for his citizens was the best of all possible governments.

Plato taught Aristotle. Aristotle taught Alexander the child who would become King of an extensive Greek empire. Alexander's new capital was Alexandria in Egypt. It was in Alexandria, the geometer Euclid in the beginning of the 3rd century BC, combined the knowledge of Egyptian building with Greek theory, to become the father of scientific reasoning and theoretical geometry. Euclid, however, remained silent on the nature of the solar system. Alexandria flourished as an intellectual capital until it fell victim to the Christians. At the turn of the 5th century, a women mathematician and inventor named Hypatia lectured in the Museum founded by Euclid. She claimed to be a neo-Platonist, a pagan and a follower of Pythagorean works (which would have been a statement of belief in a heliocentric solar system). She was dragged by a mob of Christian monks into their church where she was killed as they scraped her flesh from her bones and her flesh burnt. Orestes, a former student of Hypatia and at the time of her death, the Roman Prefect of Alexandria; demanded an investigation. The investigation never took place. Orestes resigned and left Alexandria.

Johannes Kepler - Sophie Germain

Beliefs of timeless, unchanging constancy became a part of both science and Christian theology. Thus it remained until the 16th century when Nicolaus Copernicus in his youth observed an eclipse by the moon of the star Aldebaran in 1497 and wondered about Aristotle's changeless universe. Copernicus had seen a change in the heavens which lead him to muse on the irregular paths of the planets. In the sunset of his life, he reintroduced in 1543, in his book The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, the Pythagoreans heliocentric model. Then in the 1609, Johannes Kepler published Celestial Mechanics using a detailed mathematical analysis he proved that Mars revolved around the sun and extended his proof to theorize that all the planets revolved around the sun. Galileo openly supported Kepler's heliocentric model and was tried by the Pope, who along with Catholic church authorities was encouraged by academic followers of Aristotle, for heresy. Galileo would have been burnt alive as a heretic but choose to rescind his beliefs and died under house arrest. This problem had only been compounded by the fact that a Lutheran owned press had initially printed Copernicus's work. The current catholic pope has acknowledged it was a mistake to have tried Galileo.

In 1859, Charles Darwin published an abstract entitled On the Origin of Species using domestication of animals and animal evolution in the South Seas to promote his theory of evolution, he set off a roar of controversy. Darwin had insulted human arrogance by proposing that man had evolved from apes, which was in direct contradiction of Aristotle and Genesis. Humans were no longer a product of a perfect pattern set in the beginning, but were evolving through natural selection. This time it was the protestants groups who found evolution more difficult to accept and still have an active creationism movement that intends to show that man was created through divine order. The current Catholic Pope has officially accepted that humans evolved from apes. Actually Darwin was quite an optimist compared to Rudolf Clausius who shortly thereafter defined the concept of entropy as one way linear flows that might ultimately destroy the universe. At least Darwin took cycles for granted, leaving open the possibilities of recreation. Along with an evolving earth, science has continued to insist upon evolving heavens, though the ultimate fate of the universe is still unknown, with Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity and the Big Bang theory which developed through through the efforts of a number of different scientists throughout this century. (See Cosmic Spirals which can be reached through the connection at the bottom of this page.)

Finally in the turn of the 19th century during Napoleon's campaign to educate his citizens in engineering and mathematics, a women mathematician reemerged as Sophie Germain. Women were not allowed to attend institutions of higher learning and so Germain taught herself mathematics by borrowing lecture notes from male students. In particular she read notes from a class on analysis taught by Joseph Lagrange. She submitted a paper to Lagrange under a male name. Lagrange was so impressed with her paper he asked to talk to the student who wrote it. Her male friends relayed the news. She went to talk to Lagrange and even though it was apparent she was a women, he encouraged her to continue. Germain continued to study outside the classroom and became fascinated with the work of Carl Gauss published in 1801. (So later would Albert Einstein use Gauss in his General Theory of Relativity.) During the French campaign in Germany, Sophie asked the French general to send an emissary to make sure Gauss was kept safe, which he did. Germain was awarded the French Academy of Science Grand Prize in 1816 for her work on analysis of vibrations in plastic surfaces. Women had once more reemerged into the world of science.

© 1999 Heidi Hileman

References

Net Advance of Evolution

1999/04/24