Here’s the transcript of the NPR interview with Vonnegut that I mentioned yesterday on this blog:
Mr. VONNEGUT: But anyway, it’s obvious through human experience that extended families and tribes are terribly important. We can do without an extended family as human beings about as easily as we can do without vitamins or essential minerals. Where you can see tribal behavior now is in this business about teaching evolution in a science class and intelligent design. It’s the scientists themselves are behaving tribally.
INSKEEP: How are the scientists behaving tribally?
Mr. VONNEGUT: They say, you know, about evolution, it surely happened because their fossil record shows that. Look, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn’t possibly have produced such machines.
INSKEEP: Does that mean you would favor teaching intelligent design in the classroom?
Mr. VONNEGUT: Look, if it’s what we’re thinking about all the time; if I were a physics teacher or a science teacher, it’d be on my mind all the time as how the hell we really got this way. It’s a perfectly natural human thought and, okay, if you go into the science class you can’t think this. Well, alright, as soon as you leave you can start thinking about it again without giving aid and comfort to the lunatic fringe of the Christian religion. Also, I think that, you know, it’s tribal behavior. I don’t think that Pat Robertson, for instance, doubts that we evolved. He is simply representing a tribe.