Feb. 7 issue - When Joshua Rowand, an 11th
grader in Dover, Pa., looks out from his high school, he can see the
United Church of Christ across the street and the hills beyond it,
reminding him of what he's been taught from childhood: that God's
perfect creation culminated on the sixth day with the making of man
in his image. Inside the school, he is taught that Homo sapiens
evolved over millions of years from a series of predecessor species
in an unbroken line of descent stretching back to the origins of
life. The apparent contradiction between that message and the one he
hopes someday to spread as a Christian missionary doesn't trouble
him. The entire subject of evolution by natural selection is covered
in two lessons in high-school biology. What kind of Christian would
he be if his faith couldn't survive 90 minutes of exposure to
Darwin?
But many Americans would rather not put their
children to that test, including a majority on the Dover School
Board, which last month voted to inform students of the existence of
alternatives to Darwin's theory. Eighty years after the Scopes
trial, in which a Tennessee high-school teacher was convicted of
violating a state law against teaching evolution, Americans are
still fighting the slur that they share an ancestry with apes. This
time, though, the battle is being waged under a new banner - not the
Book of Genesis, but "intelligent design," a critique of evolution
couched in the language of science. And in this debate, both sides
claim to be upholding the principle of free inquiry. Proponents of
I.D., clustered around a Seattle think tank called the Discovery
Institute, regard it as an overdue challenge to Darwinism's monopoly
over scientific discourse. "To say, as Darwinians do, that
everything has to be reduced to a chemical reaction is more ideology
than science," asserts Discovery's John West. Opponents, led by the
Oakland, Calif.-based National Center for Science Education, regard
I.D. as an assault on a basic principle of the Enlightenment, that
science must explain nature through natural causes. "Intelligent
design is predicated on a supernatural creator," says Vic Walczak, a
lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging
Dover's introduction of the concept into biology classes. "That's
not science, it's religion."
Walczak calls the Dover case,
which has not yet come to trial, "Scopes Redux 25" - the latest episode
in the never-ending struggle to reconcile the Bible, Charles
Darwin's "Origin of Species" and the First Amendment. The last round
was touched off when the school board in suburban Cobb County, Ga.,
added stickers to its new biology textbooks warning students that
"evolution is a theory, not a fact ... [and] should be approached
with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered." "If
you see that out of any context, you'd think it sounds reasonable,"
observes law professor Edward Larson, the leading historian of the
Scopes trial and its aftermath. But the wording, he says, encourages
confusion over the everyday meaning of "theory" - akin to "hunch"
- with
the scientific meaning, a systematic framework to explain
observations. Evolution, which deals with events that no one was
around to witness, will always be a "theory."
The other
salient point about the sticker, Larson says, is that it singles out
evolution for critical analysis, among all the potentially
controversial views to which students might be exposed. Marjorie
Rogers, the parent who led the campaign for the sticker, says her
motives were purely to "expand the teaching of science in this area,
and to correct bias and inaccuracy in the textbooks." But five other
parents who didn't see it that way sued the board to remove the
stickers. On Jan. 13, after a three-day trial, federal district
court Judge Clarence Cooper ruled for the parents and ordered the
stickers removed. Noting that Rogers "identifies herself as a
six-day Biblical creationist," Cooper concluded that any "informed,
reasonable observer" would know why the sticker was there, and
"interpret [it] to convey a message of endorsement of religion." The
board plans to appeal.
Ironically, this battle was
touched off when Cobb County bought new textbooks that actually
covered evolution, after years in which the subject was largely
ignored. The same kinds of struggles are cropping up in towns in
Wisconsin, Arkansas and elsewhere, as school boards try to implement
state curriculum standards mandated by Congress. All sides are
keeping a close eye on Ohio, which last year adopted standards
including an incendiary phrase about "critically analyz[ing] aspects
of evolutionary theory." Kansas, which in the November election
handed the anti-evolution forces a 6-4 majority on the state school
board, is due to review its standards in February; five years ago,
the state was widely ridiculed for eliminating evolution from the
required curriculum entirely. The only thing lacking for a
full-scale culture war is involvement by the national conservative
movement, which has treated it as a local issue. That could change,
though. Republican Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who wrote an
op-ed article supporting the Dover School Board, says he regards
evolution as one of the "big social issues of our time," along with
abortion and gay marriage.
The Cobb County decision was a
blow to the new tactic of attacking evolution with objective,
scientific language. The Discovery Institute, which sent materials
and offers of help to Cobb County but was not involved in drafting
the sticker, takes pains to distinguish its critique of Darwinism
from the Biblical fundamentalism espoused at the Institute for
Creation Research, near San Diego. The view that the Earth was
created by God within the past 12,000 years is thriving at the
institute's museum, where school groups study murals of men
cavorting with dinosaurs, before the beasts were wiped out by Noah's
flood. The institute's vice president, Duane Gish, a biochemist, has
managed to fit every observation from paleontology, astronomy and
nuclear physics into a theory derived entirely from the Book of
Genesis. The problem for Gish is that, although polls consistently
show that nearly half of all Americans believe in the Biblical
account, it has been a loser in the courts since 1987, when the
Supreme Court (with Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William
Rehnquist dissenting) struck down a Louisiana law calling for equal
treatment of evolution and "creation science."
Soon
thereafter, I.D. burst into public awareness with the publication of
"Darwin on Trial" by Phillip Johnson, a Berkeley law professor who
underwent a midlife conversion to evangelical Christianity. As a
scientific theory, I.D. is making only slow progress in overcoming
evolution's 150-year head start. Johnson and his followers seek to
overturn two of the central precepts of evolution. The first is
universal common descent, the idea that every living creature can
trace an unbroken lineage back to the same primitive life forms,
which arose billions of years ago from nonliving matter. Biologists,
armed with the powerful tool of molecular genetics, overwhelmingly
accept this view. Nevertheless, I.D. proponents are seeking to
undermine it, mostly through popular books like "Icons of Evolution"
by Jonathan Wells. Wells dissects some of the most famous textbook
examples of evolution, such as the way peppered moths adapted a new
color pattern for better camouflage after pollution killed the
lichens on tree trunks. "There is a lot of ambiguity and dissent
about the lines of evidence," insists Stephen Meyer, director of the
Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. "It's in the
scientific literature, and we think students should know about
it."
The second concept is natural selection, which holds
that the entire complexity and ingenuity of life has evolved by the
accumulation of small random mutations. Changes that help the
organism survive in its environment, like the different shapes of
the beaks Darwin observed on the birds of the Galapagos, are more
likely to be passed on. Repeated over many generations, the process
produces not just finches but naturalists to watch them. Many people
have struggled with the philosophical implications of this theory,
and entire disciplines of science are dedicated to working out its
details. I.D. proposes an intuitively appealing alternative, that
the living world reflects the design of a conscious, rational
intelligence.
The classic illustration is the eye, which
seems to depend on all its manifold parts working in concert. How,
then, could it have arisen by a series of discrete steps?
Evolutionary biologists respond that even a primitive
light-sensitive spot has survival value, and have tried to show how
a series of small improvements could eventually build the complete
organ. With the publication of "Darwin's Black Box" in 1996,
biochemist Michael Behe moved the argument to the cellular level,
using examples such as the immune-system response. They exhibit what
he calls "irreducible complexity," meaning that all their parts are
necessary for them to function at all. This, he says, is the
hallmark of intelligent design.
But I.D. has nothing to
say on the identity of the designer or how he gets inside the cell
to do his work. Does he create new species directly, or meddle with
the DNA of living creatures? Behe envisions as one possibility
something akin to a computer virus inserted in the genome of the
first organism, emerging full-blown millions of generations later.
Meyer's view is simply that "we don't know." He declines even to
offer an opinion on whether people are descended from apes, on the
ground that it's not his specialty. The diversity of life, in his
view, is a "mystery" we may never solve.
For Eugenie Scott,
executive director of the National Center for Science Education,
there's no mystery about what I.D. proponents believe: "It's another
way of saying God did it. It isn't a model of change; it isn't a
theory that makes testable claims." A 2002 resolution by the
American Association for the Advancement of Science called I.D. "an
interesting philosophical or theological concept," but not one that
should be taught in science classes. In fact, the Discovery
Institute doesn't call for teaching I.D. in school either, only the
"controversy" over Darwinism. But most scientists don't believe
there is one. The institute's "Scientific Dissent From Darwinism,"
whose operative sentence reads "We are skeptical of claims for the
ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the
complexity of life," has been signed by about 350 scientists. (AAAS
has 120,000 members.) Scott's organization has circulated a
countermanifesto asserting that "there is no serious scientific
doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is [the]
major mechanism ... " As a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the late
paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, they signed up only scientists
named Steve. At last count they had 528.
The real stakes,
though, go beyond what high-school students are taught about
Galapagos finches. To accept I.D. is to admit a supernatural process
into the realm of science. In fact, that's just what I.D. proponents
want to see happen, a revolution - or counterrevolution - against what
Johnson calls "methodological naturalism." "Is it the obligation of
the scientist to come up with a materialist explanation of
phenomena, choosing among an artificially limited set of options,"
Meyer asks rhetorically, "or just the best explanation?"
Behe
points out that while most Christians accept a God who set the
universe in motion according to natural laws, evolution raises more
difficult existential questions. People want to feel that God cares
for them personally. British biologist Richard Dawkins has written
that Darwin's theory "made it possible to be an intellectually
fulfilled atheist." But that's not what most Americans want for
their children. Margaret Evans, a psychologist at the University of
Michigan, has studied religious beliefs in children and seen the
appeal of creationism. "We are biased toward seeing the world as
stable and purposeful," she says. "I don't know what to believe,"
one parent told her. "I just want my child to go to
heaven."
Well, so does the pope, but the Vatican has said it
finds no conflict between Christian faith and evolution. Neither
does Francis Collins, the director of the Human Genome Institute at
the National Institutes of Health and an outspoken evangelical. He
wrote recently of his view that God, "who created the universe,
chose the remarkable mechanism of evolution to create plants and
animals of all sorts." It may require some metaphysical juggling,
but if more people could take that view, there would be fewer
conflicts like the one in Dover. In the debate over I.D., both sides
acknowledge that most scientists accept evolution, but they agree
that scientific disputes are not settled by majority vote.
School-board elections, however, are.
[2005/01/30] Doubting Darwin
