I don’t believe in evolution.

Every time I speak these words, the people around me shudder. They treat me as if I am an intellectual pariah whose very ideas, if spoken out loud (it never occurs to anyone that print is a possibility for one who doubts evolution), might return us to the dark ages. But I’m from Indiana where no one believes in evolution. Oh, sure, we say that we do when we want to impress our friends from California or New York. We say it to show that we’re keeping up with the Joneses. (We’re up on the latest trends.) We teach it in our schools, but we really don’t want to. It’s not much of a secret but, as long as we pretend that we believe in evolution (sort of like Georgia or Mississippi and racial equality), nobody gives us too much trouble about it. They just attribute it to our fundamentalist Christianity and even heresy is all right if it’s done in the name of Christ. However, while there are a great many bizarre things in Indiana that can be laid at Christ’s door, our failure to accept the doctrine of evolution is not one of these. The fact is that we live in Indiana. We see evolution not happening every day of our lives. Things around here, if they change at all, tend to go backwards.

I hear the obvious argument that just because Hoosiers are not evolving, it doesn’t disprove the theory of evolution. It has been suggested by numerous politicians as they cut our education funding (we were just going to be told about evolution, anyway) and ship our jobs off to other countries that Indiana is a casualty of evolution’s survival of the fittest. We’re all lost and bewildered because we haven’t managed to keep up with humanity’s forward motion and now we’re a bunch of nineteenth century hilljacks caught in the 21st century, unable to reconcile our mental processing speeds with the internet, jet travel and daylight savings time. There is a preponderance of evidence to support these claims, but there is no evidence that Hoosiers are dying out. Au contraire! While the sophisticated elements of the country now view fertility clinics a required part of child-conceiving foreplay, all we Hoosiers require is someone else’s wife and a six-pack of Budweiser. Hoosiers are being jailed for committing acts with children and livestock while the rest of the country requires Viagra just to get it up for members of their own species.

The point is, Indiana’s jobs are more long-forgotten myths than reality, our education system is second to none, but forty-ninth to most, health care workers flee our state, tax money never finds its way into our borders for any sort of improvement project, but, we’re flourishing. Hoosiers don’t learn. We continually vote for the same politicians that exchanged industry for Wal-Mart. We voted for George Bush not once, but twice. Evolution dies here, but the Hoosier strain doesn’t. Give me a drunk high school girl in a cornfield and I’ll give you the next generation. Darwin thought he went far afield when he landed on the Galapogos islands, but he never made it to Indiana. Spend a year in Indiana and then see if you can sneer at my rejection of evolution.