To the Editor:

I don’t have much to say today about the validity of religion or the debate between religion and evolution. Nor do I want to join the conversation between religious folks and secular dudes in recent Hustler columns. For one thing, I am confident that Vanderbilt students are able to think rationally on their own (certainly not the PJ Jedlovec sense, however) to discern good logic from plain stupidity. Also, I just don’t care about these things.

So I will just end this short rant with a paragraph I read on my anthropology book the other day. I thought this paragraph would be more inspiring than a pointless refutation on stupid arguments.

“Ignorance or disregard of our evolutionary heritage, and of the fundamental biological, emotional, cognitive and social similarities on which much in everyday human life and thought depend, can lead to speculative philosophies and empirical programs that misconstrue the natural scope and limits of our species-specific abilities and competencies.

“The intellectual and moral consequences of this misconstrual have varying significance, both for ourselves and for others, for example, in the ways relativism informs currently popular notions of ‘separate but equal’ cultural worlds whose peoples are in some sense incommensurably different from ourselves and from one another. Relativism aspires directly to mutual tolerance or irreducible differences. Naturalism — the evolutionary-based biological and cognitive understanding of our common nature and humanity — aims first to render cultural diversity comprehensible. If anything, evolution teaches us that from one or a few forms wondrously many kinds will rise.” — Scott Atran In Gods We Trust

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Wynne Lam
Senior, Arts and Science