Humanist Voices in Verse: “Who Said Science Isn’t Poetry?”

This week’s poem is by Joshua Preston. He is a 2013 graduate of the University of Minnesota-Morris where he earned his degree in political science and history. Currently, he is a Research Fellow at Baylor College of Medicine’s Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. He was a student researcher for the American Humanist Association’s A Jefferson Bible for the Twenty-First Century (published by Humanist Press, 2012) and his poetry is forthcoming in MAYDAY Magazine. His website is www.JPPreston.com.

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Who Said Science Isn’t Poetry?
A Chromos(p)oem on the occasion of Darwin’s 204^th Birthday

From so simple
a beginning
endless forms most
beautiful
and most wonderful
have been,
and are being,
evolved.¹

Natural selection
is the only theory that is
in principle

capable

of explaining

the existence

of organized

complexity.²

Instead of a tree,
we got a bush
where many branches
sprout close together.³

The million, million, million
to one chance happens

once

in a million, million, million

times

no matter how surprised we may be

that it results in us.⁴

We are glorious
accidents
of an unpredictable process
with no drive to complexity,
no yearning to produce a creature
capable of understanding
the mode of its own construction.⁵

This is the assembly of life.
It has eaten the storms,
folded them into its genes
and created the world that created us.⁶

We must, however, acknowledge
that man with all of his              noble qualities
still bears in his bodily frame
the indelible stamp of his          lowly origin.⁷

Human beings are splendid
in their array of moral equipment
tragic in their propensity to misuse it,
and pathetic in their ignorance of the misuse.⁸

The tabula of human nature was never rasa
and is now being read.⁹

—Joshua Preston

Still, man should not be ashamed
to have an ape for his grandfather.¹⁰