Evolution, gay marriage, and categories

#1There are predetermined categories, and things in this universe break up into them naturally.

#2There is utter chaos, and we humans categorize things in order to make sense of things.

Those are roughly the two views you'll see out there on what is going on when we humans perceive things to be in one category or another. To keep things simple, the former view is the older one and the latter view is the one that has come to dominate academia, which is one of the dominant reasons that people have come to resent intellectuals.

Obviously, old school religion is sticking with #1. God created categories and he creates us to fit into those categories. Period.

And a healthy understanding of evolutionary biology is only possible if you look at it from perspective #2. A lot of people "believe" in evolution but insist on looking at it from the religious point of view, which is where misunderstandings like the ones we discuss below and at Echidne's blog come into play. The notion that large breasts must have evolved to suit male desire is just a pseudo-scientific retelling of the story of Genesis. First there was man and then there was woman, created to please man. If you remember that "man" and "woman" are categories imposed by humans on ourselves to make sense out of the differences and similarities of bodies, then simplistic understandings like that fade away. After all, "man" and "woman" would be the same creature but for hormone distribution, meaning that it's very difficult to get a handle on what a secondary sex characteristic would be "for".

Many conservative arguements boil down to declaring that the definition of a category has meaning and that reality must bend towards it. Two great examples are the arguments against evolution and the arguments against same sex marriage.

Evolution is a tricky one, because so many bullshit arguments have grown up around it. But I think that two views on it can be generalized meaningfully. The pro-evolution view sees life as fluid and interconnected. Humans are another species of animal that has evolved large brains and language capacities. And of course, there is no way to logically conclude that there's a god in this worldview, not really. If you believe, well, it's because you choose to. And that's fine for Christians who understand evolution--that is the definition of faith, no?

I think that a lot of fundies, more than anything, want the old categories back. You know--the hierarchy, in this order--water, earth, plants, animals, man, God. There are two big things that this model gives us that the evolution model doesn't. First of all, humans are not animals, which is a comfort to a lot of people for some reason. And, more importantly, there has to be a God if these categories are set in stone, because someone had to create the categories and decide what goes into them and also to give the distinction between man and animal some meaning. Because humans have so much in common with the category we deem "animal" and a few differences, we take our similiarities and push them on the category "animal" and take our differences (speech, thought) and create a separate category "God" and view our category as a hybrid category. In order for us not to be animals, there has to be a god.

Institutions are a perfect example of how humans create categories and impose them on chaos. Marriage is wholly a human invention, a way to make sense out of our sexual behavior and relationships. When someone is arguing that marriage "is" a man and a woman, of course, they are arguing #1--that categories exist and we are molded to them. It's an argument that will give way over time, as most lawyers and judges are well-educated enough to understand that marriage is whatever people say it is.

The irony in all this is that gay marriage proponents have perpetuated the notion that "gay" and "straight" are natural categories with distinct boundaries in order to forward the notion that it's discrimination. And conservatives have been shoved into a mightily unnatural position of actually arguing against a categorical distinction, which is what they are doing when they deny that there is such thing as "gay" people. Their argument is still full of holes. While there are no hard and fast distinctions between gay and straight people, that doesn't mean that the categories should be discarded. There's no hard and fast distinctions between married and single people, either, but we still recognize those general categories because they have a function. One function of the categories gay and straight is to understand how one category receives privileges the other does not and rectify that situation.

Thanks for putting up with my ramblings--the things I think of while walking in sunshine! Nothing but cats, music, and bad, bad dating advice for the rest of the day, I'm sure.