NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE
Local battles to force fundamentalist creationism into public schools are evolving into a national f
It's easy, from the comparative safety of the West Coast, to make light of the recent evolution hearings before the Kansas State Board of Education. Easy to laugh off their attempts to introduce God into the high school biology curriculum as the latest eccentric ravings of a bunch of anti-modern heartland hicks. But here are a few reasons to take their initiative in deadly earnest.
First of all, it's not just Kansas. Similar fights have broken out in Ohio, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and a clutch of other states. In Georgia, the superintendent of schools came close to pushing through a change in the Peachtree State's science standards that would have struck the word "evolution" altogether and replaced it with "biological change over time."
In Texas, there was a similar close call over an attempt to force textbook authors to revise "factually incorrect" statements about evolution before their books would be approved for purchase. And Texas is a big deal. As the second biggest education market in the country after California, the word of its state regulators and education advisory boards is usually forceful enough to determine whether or not a textbook will be economically viable for the publishers - in any of the 50 states. (Ever wondered why school textbooks are so bland? It's because the unbending fundamentalists in Texas and the equally unbending politically correct liberals in California have to agree on every sentence.)
Secondly, contrary to many of the media reports, this is not the Scopes monkey trial all over again. It's not even 1999 all over again - the last time Kansas attempted to inject a dash of creationism into its science curriculum and had to endure such ridicule that it reversed course less than two years later. We are no longer dealing with the media-created cliché - freshly scrubbed rubes seeking to convince the world that God made the world in six days, or that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, or that everything in the book of Genesis is literally true, right down to Noah living to the age of 950.
No, the anti-evolution brigade has, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, evolved with amazing rapidity. They no longer talk about creationism or biblical literalism but rather about Intelligent Design - a much more sophisticated argument that merely seeks to leave open the possibility that science, on its own, cannot account for the full story of life on Earth and that therefore some designing consciousness (for the sake of argument, God) must have been involved.
The most public proponents of Intelligent Design have Ph.D.s from universities, often quite prestigious universities, and some are even scientists with direct experience in genetics and other evolution-related fields. True, they are also, without exception, practitioners of rather extreme forms of religion who tend to pour scorn on both the "methodological naturalists," as they call mainstream scientists in the Darwinian tradition, and also on their less-extreme religious scientist brethren who have no problem reconciling evolutionary theory with their personal faith. (Phillip Johnson, one of the founders of the ID movement, has called such liberal Christian scientists "worse than atheists.")
The ID-ers also talk a good talk. After a day of listening to their arguments at the Kansas state hearings, in which they chipped away at the less easily provable assertions of the neo-Darwinist mainstream, the correspondent for The New York Times acknowledged that she found them pretty convincing. (This even though three of the more prominent witnesses that day said they didn't accept the idea that humans are descended from ape-like prehominids.) A second correspondent, for the Times' Sunday magazine, was equally enthused by at least some of their arguments against scientific orthodoxy, and was certainly a very long way from dismissing them out of hand.
It's not for me to impugn the intelligence of Times writers, especially ones who know a lot more about science than I do, but I would say they are guilty of what is known philosophically as a category mistake. In other words, they are not believing lies so much as allowing themselves to be misdirected.
Nobody can seriously claim that all questions in evolutionary science have been resolved, or that the finer points of microbial development are not subject to debate and disagreement. But it is one thing to critique various schools of cutting-edge evolutionary theory; quite another to say that because certain questions remain unresolved that they are unresolvable, except by invocation of a higher power.
The ID-ers have a phrase that they are fond of, "irreducible complexity," which they use to describe phenomena they believe too intricate to be plausible by means of natural evolution alone. This, though, is a profoundly anti-scientific notion - that just because we don't know how something works we have to conclude that we will never know. It took a while for humankind to figure out that the Earth was round, and a lot of people, especially influential church leaders, found the notion utterly ridiculous even once the proof was thrust under their noses.
Another manifestation of the misdirection of the ID movement is the ludicrous notion that high schools are the appropriate venue for intricate debate about the finer points of evolutionary science. Any public school science teacher will tell you it's already a minor miracle if a 16-year-old can accurately summarize The Origin of Species, or pinpoint the Galapagos Islands on an atlas. Raising questions about the cellular structure of the flagellum is unlikely to exercise most students until grad school.
The only reason for raising such questions before state education authorities is not to deepen the scientific understanding of teenagers but rather to sow deliberate confusion. It is about denigrating mainstream science as biased against religion - which it is not; it merely regards questions of the supernatural to be outside the realm of scientific inquiry - and by extension bringing God and open avowals of faith into the public school system.
The hearings in Kansas made that abundantly clear. The state school board members who sat in on the witness testimony - Christian fundamentalists all - were so ignorant of the subject matter it was laughable. Board member Connie Morris talked about the Darwinian notion of a prebiotic soup like a patron in a restaurant who decides to launch an irrational boycott campaign against mulligatawny. "There was a speck that landed in the soup?" she asked one witness. "What was that? Was it a cell?" Her colleague Kathy Martin admitted on day two she hadn't even read through the competing science standards documents before her.
The interest of such elected officials is not Darwin so much as what he represents - the ultimate wedge issue in the culture wars pitting what they see as decent, hard-working, god-fearing heartland Americans against snobbish heathen elitist big-city liberals. This, though, is not a war about the tastefulness of Hollywood movies, or even the morality of abortion, on which reasonable people can disagree. It is, much more seriously, an attack on rational thought itself, an insane attempt to promote the political ambitions of biblical literalists and their sympathizers over and above the advance of world civilization.
As I say, it's not just Kansas. At my children's elementary school, an avowed creationist has just put himself forward as a candidate for the site governance council. At the school carnival a few days ago, a group of fundamentalists was caught distributing flyers and ejected. And that's in the liberal bastion of Santa Monica. The fundamentalists don't expect to win there, merely to shake things up and inject themselves into the conversation. Anyone who cares about human knowledge - whether secular or religious, conservative or liberal - needs to take care they don't succeed, on the Great Plains, the West Coast, or anywhere else.Published: 05/19/2005
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