NOAH’S INVOLVMENT IN DARWINIAN HISTORY

Noah’s involvment in Darwinian history had not been satisfactorily examined. He had to make choices that may have interfered radically with evolutionary history.
Noah’s job was to preserve all the species. Two of each sex. But the problem is not whether or not Noah could tell the difference between a male snail and a female of the species. Perhaps Noah could have recruited volunteers only as couples. Male and female couples only? Well, that would cut down on the homosexuals significantly.
The more serious problem is that Noah had to make choices of what qualified as a species. Were giraffes just long-necked cows? Were rats different from squirrels? How many kinds of dolphin would you accept?
And then the big, big problem. Do dolphins count? Did Noah take on dolphins? And whales? How many pairs of whales? And frogs and turtles, and water-snakes. All the amphibians.
And what about the fish? Did he have to take a pair of every fish? Every crustacean? Or did he let them swim alongside? But what about the oysters and mussels. Even if he took them on the ark, somebody would have had to help them get aboard. And those swimming fish: just a pair of each kind? But what if the big ones ate the little ones?
It’s time for us to get some answers to these questions. They are almost as important as the question of where the Bush daughters were hidden for seven years.
How many species did Noah have on board his Ark? That is to say, at what point in genetic evolution does he intervene? We know that he forgot the unicorns;[i] what other species did he miss?
According to Jewish history, Noah comes along rather too late to save the dinosaurs.[ii] But how far along?
If we knew the number of species Noah saved, and the rate at which species divide—the Darwinian Ramifacation Factor—then we could date the Ark.
If we discover that Noah came along after the introduction of races—black, white, red, brown, yellow—is known to have happened, then we know that the Noah myth is partial, just another one of the thousand flood myths belonging to various cultures.[iii] But we don’t know who saved what in the floods experienced by other cultures.[iv]
And what do we know of the creatures who preceded Noah, and didn’t survive, weren’t rescued?
In cultures which honor the Bible, Noah is a very important ancestor. He saved us all, in this world. Jesus is referred to by Christians as the “savior”—but Christian salvation is other-worldly, not in this world. Actually, of course, Jesus—like Socrates before him—taught the Western World how to save themselves in that world, not beyond. Jesus tried to teach us how to live together.
Modern cultures throughout the world, are devoted for the most part to the saving of self, whether in this world or in the next. That’s pure perversity, of course. The heroes of the self-savers are Odysseus, who proves incapable of civilization and Cain. And Jacob, who tried to steal his brother’s birthright. And the great American gangsters, Billy the Kid and Al Capone and John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carneige and Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould.
Where is Noah? Where is the celebration of him? He’s our savior! There’s nobody around—at least according to the Biblical myth—who didn’t come over on the Ark.


[i] See the Irish Rovers, “Silly Unicorns.”
[ii]Actually, dinosaurs weren’t invented until the nineteenth century. The word “dinosaur” means fearsome lizard.
[iii] See Sir James Frazier’s The Golden Bough for accounts of various flood myths, and Napoleon Chagnon, The Yanomamo.
[iv] In Yanomamo culture, in the Amazon valley, when the great flood came all the sjmart Yanomamos climbed trees, but the dumb Yanomamos were swept out to sea and lost. Any foreigners they met had to be dumb Yanomamos.