Section:
SCIENCE'S COMPASS
ESSAYS ON SCIENCE AND SOCIETY
NOT (JUST)
IN KANSAS ANYMORE |
In August of 1999, after months of wrangling,
the Kansas State Board of Education passed its state science
education standards. Against the recommendations of a committee of
27 scientists and teachers, the board voted to strip from the
standards all mention of the Big Bang, the age of the Earth, and any
reference to organisms having descended with modification from
common ancestors: in other words, evolutionary astronomy, geology,
and biology. Teachers were informed that evolution would not be
included in the state high-school assessment exams, greatly
decreasing the likelihood that the subject would be taught.
The New York Times, the Washington Post,
Associated Press, and other national media covered the story widely.
Nature, the Economist, the BBC, and other British media--as they
tend to do when antievolutionism makes the news--presented their
usual spin of "aren't the colonials an odd bunch?" As the media
probed for more stories, the National Center for Science Education
(where I work) informed the sometimes incredulous press that, yes,
indeed, antievolutionism is a widespread problem in American
kindergarten through high school or "K-12" education. The experience
of the committee that wrote the Kansas science education standards
is mirrored in many other states; such committees are regularly
lobbied by antievolutionists either to include some form of
creationism or to omit, decrease, or set apart the teaching of
evolution from all other sciences. Months before the Kansas school
board acted, Nebraska watered down evolution in its science
standards. A few years ago, Illinois adopted science standards that
ignored the e-word, and Arizona and New Mexico include evolution in
their current standards largely because scientists, teachers, and
other citizens fought for revisions of these documents after initial
passage of what can only be referred to as substandards omitting
evolution. Many other states treat evolution in only a cursory
fashion.
Even though the Supreme Court has ruled that
teaching creationism and creation "science" are unconstitutional, we
still get calls from parents, teachers, or school board members
asking whether some impending resolution in their district requiring
"equal time" for creationism is appropriate. We get a disturbing
number of questions about teachers who give equal time to
creationism and evolution, even though their districts do not (and
cannot) require them to do so. We are still being consulted about
school assemblies where, in the name of "fairness," a creationist is
invited to tell students that the scientifically well-accepted idea
that living things shared common ancestry is a "theory in crisis"
with many "serious flaws"-and also that the world is only 10,000
years old. Some of these assemblies violate the U.S. Constitution's
requirement that schools be religiously neutral, by providing a
forum for a speaker who openly proselytizes students to reject
evolution in favor of a literal Biblical interpretation of history.
More frequently, we are asked for help when
school districts are considering leaving out the teaching of
evolution ("if they can't teach both, they won't teach either;' as
one board member put it), or limiting or separating out evolution as
somehow different from other scientific fields. Disclaimers that
teachers must read to students or paste into textbooks are becoming
more popular. Typically, they declare that evolution is "only a
theory" (in other words, a guess, hunch, or half-baked idea) and
therefore by implication nothing that students should take
seriously. Shortly after the Kansas incident, Oklahoma's textbook
commission voted to place in biology textbooks a disclaimer
identical to the one currently in Alabama textbooks, which states
that evolution is a theory, not fact, because "no one was present
when life first appeared on Earth." No other subject in the science
curriculum is so disclaimed.
Whereas "balancing" evolution with Creation
science was advocated before the Supreme Court struck down laws
requiring equal time for creation and evolution, the neocreationist
approach is to balance evolution with "evidence against evolution."
Scientists unfamiliar with such "evidence" soon discover that
evidence against evolution is just a euphemism for creation science.
In fact, as I write this, a law is making its way through the
Arizona legislature that would require that evidence against
evolution be taught along with evolution. Don't be misled: Such
evidence-against-evolution regulations are not proposing that
teachers present controversies about how evolution occurs, but that
teachers pretend there is a serious debate taking place among
scientists over whether evolution occurs. A lawsuit scheduled for
trial in Minnesota State Court this spring concerns a high-school
teacher who wishes to teach an evidence-against-evolution curriculum
indistinguishable from creation science. Only the terminology has
been changed in order to circumvent the First Amendment's
prohibition against establishment of religion.
The degree of public acceptance of evolution
in the United States differs sharply from that within the scientific
community. In a 1996 survey of a sample selected from American Men
and Women of Science, Witham and Larson asked scientists the same
Gallup poll questions regularly asked of the general public.(*)
Whereas in 1997, 47% of Americans answered "agree" to Gallup's
question about whether humans were created in their present form
10,000 years ago, only 5% of scientists did. (I for one was
surprised it was that high!) To Gallup's question on agreement
whether evolution occurred without God's involvement, 45% of
scientists answered affirmatively, but only 9% of nonscientists.
Disproving the idea that all evolutionists are atheists, scientists
and nonscientists had the same response to the "theistic evolution"
question (evolution occurred, but was guided by God): 40% agreed. So
while fewer than half of Americans accept evolution, an overwhelming
majority of scientists do.
The United States stands out among developed
countries in its low acceptance of one of the major organizing
principles of science. I believe these statistics reflect the unique
settlement and religious history of our nation, in which frontier
communities set up their own school systems largely independent of
state and federal influence, much less control. The decentralization
of American education is a source of wonder to Europeans and
Japanese, for example, who have state curricula that are uniform
across all communities in their nations. In the United States, even
schools within the same district may not teach the same subjects in
the same order, or even in the same year!
American religious history reflects an
equally decentralized, "frontier" orientation. We were initially
settled, after ail, by religious dissidents, who formed
congregational rather than hierarchical religious systems in which
decisions largely were made locally. The United States also has been
the nursery for a wide variety of spontaneously generated,
independent sects, often inspired by charismatic leaders. It was in
the United States that the Seventh Day Adventists, the Church of
Latter Day Saints, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science, and
extinct sects such as Shakers and Millerites were founded,
reflecting our decentralized, nonhierarchical religious past. But
perhaps the most important reason modern antievolutionism developed
here rather than in, say, Europe, was the founding in 1910-1915 of
Fundamentalism, a Protestant view that stresses the inerrancy of the
Bible. Fundamentalism was not successfully exported to Europe or
Great Britain, but it formed the basis in the United States for the
antievolutionism of the 1920s Scopes trial era, as well as the
present day.
Because of its deep religious and historical
roots, creationism will not go away any time soon. "Young Earth"
creation science organizations such as the Institute for Creation
Research (ICR) and the newer (but almost as large) Answers in
Genesis ministries have been joined by scores of local and regional
organizations. Their constituency is literalist conservative
Christians, an estimated 30 to 35% of the American public. But
nonliteralist Christians (about 50% of the American population) are
being reached by a newer creationist movement, "intelligent design
creationism" (IDC), that advocates the idea that evolution (and
modern science in general) are stalking horses for philosophical
materialism and atheism. IDC stresses existential issues, claiming
that if evolution is true, there is a substantial price to pay in
loss of purpose and meaning of life. Although they rarely express
traditional creationist positions on a young age of the Earth, IDCs
echo their predecessor's claims that evolution is a theory in
crisis, which scientists are rapidly abandoning.
Some IDC proponents are also deliberately
targeting intellectuals. IDC leader Phillip Johnson has published
opinion pieces (opposite the editorial page or "oped") in the New
York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other major national media.
An IDC think tank in Seattle, the Center for Renewal of Science and
Culture, supports several postdocs who organize conferences on
university campuses and write op-ed pieces and books in an effort to
persuade the intellectual elite that IDC and "theistic science" are
legitimate scholarly enterprises.
Although IDCs agree on the philosophical
issues, when it comes to the scientific issues, they are vague--and
very much disunited. Some support a 10,000-year-old Earth; others
accept the Big Bang, an old earth, and radiometric dating, but
reject biological evolution's core idea that living things descended
with modification from common ancestors. Two ideas not already
present in creation science have emerged from IDC: biochemist
Michael Behe's "irreducible complexity" (developed in his book,
Darwin's Black Box) and philosopher William Dembski's "the design
inference" the subject of his book of the same name. Behe argues
that natural selection is incapable of explaining certain kinds of
complex molecular structures that supposedly would not function
without a minimal number of interacting components; hence, we must
seek an "intelligent" (divine) explanation. Dembski claims that a
logical procedure heavily dependent on probabilities can filter out
designed phenomena from those produced by either natural processes
or chance.
Scientists and philosophers have examined
these concepts and have found them wanting. Biologists have rejected
irreducible complexity,(A) and philosophers have been similarly
unresponsive to the design inference.(B) Although IDC proponents
seek validation by university colleagues and intellectuals, they
have not yet produced scholarship accepted in scientific
circles.(Section) Just as creation science was rejected by the
scientific community, but accomplished its goals politically by
"equal time" laws, IDC is being promoted to school boards for
inclusion in the science curriculum without having contributed
anything substantial to our understanding of either science or
philosophy of science.
Scientists and educators have been calling
for improvement of both college-level and precollegiate science
education. This necessarily involves assuring that local schools and
school boards do not further weaken evolution education. According
to the neutralist principle in biology, a mutation will eventually
replace the wild type unless it is opposed by natural selection. It
is an unsubtle metaphor: if scientists do not oppose
antievolutionism, it will reach more people with the mistaken idea
that evolution is scientifically weak, and further, that scientists
are clinging to it only because of a previous commitment to
atheism--and perhaps a selfish desire to keep the grant money
flowing. The subsequent further reduction of scientific literacy (to
say nothing of a decline in confidence in the scientific community)
is not something we should passively let happen.
The author is at the National Center for
Science Education, 925 Kearney Street, Et Cerrito, CA 945302810,
USA, E-mail: scott@natcenscied.org
(*) L. Witham, Washington Times, 11 April
1997, p. A8.
(A) See, for example, N. W. Blackstone, Q.
Rev. Biol. 72, 445 (1997); J. A. Coyne, Nature 383, 227 (1996); R.
Dorit, Am. Sci, 85, 474 (1997); A. H. Orr, Boston Rev. 21(6):28
(1997).
(B) See, for example, B. Fitelson, C.
Stephens, E. Sober, Philos. Sci. 66, 472--88 (1999); E. Eells,
Philos, Books 40(4) (1999).
(Section) G. Gilchrist, Rep. NCSE17(3), 14
(1997).
~~~~~~~~
By Eugenia C. Scott
Eugenie C. Scott, a physical anthropologist,
is executive director of the National Center for Science Education,
Inc., a not-for-profit membership organization that works to improve
the teaching of evolution and of science as a way of knowing. It
opposes the teaching of "scientific" creationism and other
religiously based views in science classes. She is a coauthor of the
National Academy of Science's, Teaching About Evolution and the
Nature of Science, and has consulted with the NAS on the revision of
its "Science and Creationism" booklet. |