우리 유래*

* = our origin

A snowy day in Seoul means I have only left the apartment for food and to pay bills, and I almost slid down a hill and straight into a street full of heavy traffic.  I've invested in three pairs of boots since I got here, but inevitably almost always wear the boots that I think look the prettiest.  I recall one time JM's mom telling me over the phone to stop thinking about my appearance and dress practically.  That's hilarious advice - does anyone in this country do that?  As I trudge to school wrapped up in a bright blue muffler and a shapeless down jacket, I pass girls wearing extremely thin pea coats (that were probably only appropriate to wear in November, maybe early December at the latest) and heels.  Heels!  Given that Seodaemun-gu has done such an awful job of clearing snow and ice in a timely/safe fashion that it's almost noteworthy, I really don't understand how a leg cast doesn't accompany the ensemble.  But, it must be said, at the very least they look much better than I do.  And there must be some secret to being able to pull this off and not freeze to death or crack one's skull open after falling down a hill.

Anyway, I want to talk about a point of curiosity that's been on my mind for awhile.  I would like to stress the following caveats:
1) This is not based on official data.  This is based entirely on conversations with people that I have met.
2) I mean to make no assumptions or implications about people based on the beliefs that they hold.

That being said, the topic of today's post is 진화 - jinhwa, or as it is known in English, evolution.

Without generalizing, I'll say that I know very, very few Americans who do not believe in evolution, and those people were almost without fail extraordinarily strict Christians, generally of the evangelical/charismatic variety.  That being said, I also know a number of extraordinarily strict Christians who believe in evolution, although they probably lean towards the intelligent-design end of the evolution spectrum.  But I get the impression that in the United States, if you are a fairly liberal and educated individual (who probably lives, hails from, or studies on either the east coast or the west coast), you believe in evolution because you have studied it in school, understood the logic of the theory, and are somewhat practical about the limits of religion to explain science.  You probably also do not understand how people who are properly presented with the evidence can't - or worse, don't - believe in or understand evolution as the mechanism that has made us who we are today.

Fast forward to Korea.  I encountered my first Creationist while speaking at ALEC 2010, the conference run by Jinju Full Gospel Church (a brief explanation is available at the end of this long-winded post).  I was discussing some of what we were studying in my Level 4 Korean class with one of the conference's organizers, a 25-year-old student at Seoul National University, which is easily the most prestigious university in the country (and damn near impossible to get into).  At the time, my Korean class had just finished reading the 단군 신화 (the Dangun story, aka the Korean "founding story" myth that, like all founding myths, offers a cock-and-bull explanation involving ridiculous and fantastical events of a people's origin).  The (very abbreviated) version of the Dangun myth is: there is a god who lives in the mountains.  A (talking) bear and tiger approach him one day and tell him they want to be people.  The god tells them that in order to accomplish this, they must live in a cave for 100 days and eat nothing but garlic and mugwort (I don't know what this is).  The tiger wimps out, but the bear prevails and becomes a woman.  She marries the god and gives birth to a son named Dangun.  He is the founder of Korea.  Anyway, after mentioning that I was studying this myth, the student scoffed and said, "That story is so ridiculous.  Who on earth would believe that we came from a bear?"

"Yeah!" I replied.  "We didn't come from a bear, we came from a monkey!"  I then (as I am often wont to do) laughed at my own hilarious joke (I still think it's funny).

Student, however, did not find this funny.  "No," she said.  "No, we did not."

Our conversation caught the ears of the two Yale grad students sitting near us, both of whom are on the PhD track in biology.  What followed was a conversation in which reasonable and hardly disputable scientific claims regarding evolution and prehistory were presented and then rejected based entirely on the Bible.  Some of the conversation literally went like this:
Bio PhD student from Yale: "What about the fossil record?  How layers of sediment have fossils that correspond to certain time periods that change over time..?"
SNU Student: "Maybe heavier fossils sunk and that's why there are different layers."
Bio PhD: "...okay, what about dinosaurs?"
SNU Student: "Well, the Bible alludes to mythical creatures, so those were probably them."

According to biblical dating, this would mean that dinosaurs were around 5000-6000 years ago.  Okay.  And this is from a student who goes to the best university in Korea.

But I decided to just write it off as religion.  There is no point in arguing with religious fanatics.  You will never win.  Instead, I finished the conference, came back to Seoul, and promptly met with a much-loved friend for coffee.  While recounting my experience at the conference, I expressed my shock at the SNU student's disbelief in evolution, expecting my much-loved friend - who I have always regarded as intelligent, free-thinking, and fairly non-judgmental, despite a conservative upbringing - to take my side and share in my surprise.  Instead, she looked at me as though I had suggested that Bigfoot had moved into the apartment next to hers and said, "Do you really believe that we came from monkeys?"

I gaped at her with my mouth hanging open for a second and a half before telling her the conversation was over, and that if I were going to continue being her friend, it would be best if we never, ever broached the topic of evolution again.

Yeah, I could understand the extremely religious SNU student not believing in evolution, but even though I know that my friend is a Christian as well, I never expected her to subscribe to Creationism.  And even though I promised myself I wouldn't talk to her about it again (and haven't), I became curious about the wider distribution of people I knew in Korea - did they believe in Creationism, too?  In the US, it's almost a mark of education to dismiss Creationism, but here I was encountering well-educated, well-off Koreans who, on the other side, completely dismissed evolution.

And so I started asking people that I met.  Unsurprisingly, nearly all of my Korean Christian friends believed in Creationism.  But I also found a number of people who were either Catholic or nonchalant about going to church (even if they did), who believed in Creationism as well.  The chief defense, expressed in mixtures of Korean and English, was generally, "We did not come from monkeys."

At this point, a few more caveats are in order:
1) Korea is not really a Christian nation.  Wikipedia tells me that 29.2% of Koreans are Christians, and most of them are Protestants.
2) I can't say this for sure, but I am willing to bet that there's a decent correlation between wealth and Christianity in Korea.
3) Most of the people I know are wealthy and Christian.
4) Being wealthy often translates to access to Korea's best educational resources.

So what does that leave me with?  I have a bunch of wealthy, extremely well-educated, highly intelligent Korean people who are telling me that evolution is a groundless theory.  As Ask a Korean! (I know, I just love that guy) pointed out in an entry dealing with racism, it is always wrong to assume that a group of people are stupid without understanding them.  So, assuming they aren't stupid (which I know they are not), what gives?  Really, what gives?

Since it's entirely possible and more likely even probable that the people I have met are not representative of the population of Korea as a whole, it's hard to explain this here.  But I have a few thoughts:
- The easy answer - I just happen to know a lot of Christians, and Christians don't believe in evolution.  But the thing is that it doesn't just seem as though these people just believe in Creationism - rather, they treat the idea of evolution as completely implausible.  It's always like, "Oh, that monkey thing?  Completely ridiculous."  But if you study evolution, the thing is that it's not.  It's a compelling theory, and if you are going to reject it in favor of Creationism, it should be because your faith in God and faith in the Bible's veracity outweighs your belief in the plausibility of Darwinian evolution - not because the idea of people once having been monkeys seems stupid to you.  And also, if your understanding of evolution is as simple as "people came from monkeys," then either you were not paying attention in school or your high school biology class failed you in some critical area.
- Which leads me to a question: how, exactly, is biology - particularly evolutionary biology - treated by the average Korean school?  I really don't have an answer to this - the best I can offer is that a friend of mine shared with me that Seoul Arts High School  (Christian in origin), which many of my friends (being musicians) attended, gives evolution a cursory chapter in their textbook - it's taught, and then they move on.  A far cry from the entire half-a-year that ecology and evolutionary biology were given in my freshman biology class at my Catholic high school.  So is it possible that Korean schools are just not emphasizing the teaching of the mechanisms of evolution to students?  I wonder.  Of course, I haven't met nearly enough people and have absolutely 0 understanding of what goes on in most Korean schools beyond a cursory knowledge of English language education policy...so I certainly can't say for sure.  But it is something to think about.  And if I am right, and schools are just not teaching evolution properly, then I will add that to my list of Things That Korean Schools Should Teach More, right next to reproduction and sexuality.  I actually had to explain the menstrual cycle to a 25-year-old Korean woman once.  No joke.