Q. You have written that humankind is an afterthought, a cosmic accident. Why?
A. Only in the sense that every species is. Since evolution has no inherent or predictable direction, if you could play life's tape again from any early point, you would get a completely different result that wouldn't include human beings. In that sense, every species' appearance is not random, because after it happens it is perfectly explainable, but it's unpredictable. The reason I call humans even more of an afterthought than others is that our lineage is so young and so small. The splitting point between human ancestors and those that gave rise to chimps and gorillas is 6 million to 8 million years ago, and the human species, Homo sapiens, is probably only about a quarter of a million years old. So humans in current form have been here only a quarter of a million years, which may sound long, but is a geological second.
Q. So the view of evolution as a ladder with humankind on the top rung is incorrect.
A. It is nothing more than a representation of our hopes. We have certain hopes and cultural traditions in the West, and we impose them upon the actual working of the world.
Q. Why do we do that?
A. Oh, for the simplest and most obvious reason: the world is a pretty miserable place for many people. If we can reconstruct the history of life as somehow inherently directed toward us, it is a very comforting thought. It is an old one too. It is embodied right in Genesis 1. We are not willing to give it up easily.
Q. What do you think of the creationist groups that disagree with you?
A. They are fairly marginal. They represent but a tiny minority of religious people in America.
Q. Is the battle with creationists over?
A. It will never formally end as long as there are millions of them out there with lots of money. I think the important point is that with the Supreme Court victory Edwards v. Aguillard, we destroyed the strategy that has been their focal point since the 1920s, namely the attempt to force legislatively the mandated teaching of this oxymoronic creation science of theirs in the classroom.
Q. So you don't feel threatened by them.
A. No, not as much as I did. They are never going to go away, and locally they are very powerful. Before local school boards they can lobby. The Supreme Court said you can't force the teaching of creation science, but it didn't say that if individual teachers happen to want to teach it they can't. If an individual teacher is teaching creation science, then it is the problem of the local school board. They hired an incompetent.
Q. If our presence is a fault of nature, what then is the reason for our existence?