JERRY: That Darwin guy never got a Nobel Prize, did he? If he's so great, how come he don't get no Nobel?

HOST: I think you have a very good point there, Jerry.

Such a conversation did occur, and the host was not being ironic. But Jerry's point is not quite the knock-down argument he thought it was. Charles Robert Darwin died in 1882. The first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901.

Of course, well-meaning people are often ignorant about fine points of historical detail, and it is unfair to hold that against them. But it is perfectly fair to hold something else against them: the host and his guest didn't have their brains in gear. After all, why were they having that discussion? Because, as every God-fearing southern fundamentalist knows, virtually every scientist views Darwin as one of the all-time greats. It was this assertion, in fact, that Jerry was attempting to shoot down. Now, it should be pretty obvious that winners of Nobel prizes (for science) are selected by a process that relies heavily on advice from scientists. And those, we already know, are overwhelmingly of the opinion that Darwin was somewhere near the top of the scientific tree. So if Darwin didn't get a Nobel, it couldn't have been (as listeners were intended to infer) because the committee didn't think much of his work. There had to be another reason. As it happens, the main reason was that Darwin was dead.

As this story shows, evolution is still a hot issue in the Bible Belt, where it is sometimes known as 'evilution' and generally viewed as the work of the Devil. More sophisticated religious believers - especially European ones, among them the Pope - worked out long ago that evolution poses no threat to religion: it is simply how God gets things done, in this case, the manufacture of living creatures.