The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, August 8, 2000

The New Fundamentalism
By Gregg Easterbrook

   If John Scopes were alive today, he might be arrested for speaking
against evolution in a public school, rather than in favor of it.

   Scopes stood trial in Dayton, Tenn., 75 years ago this summer for
using  "Hunter's Civic Biology," a textbook containing a paragraph on
Charles Darwin, in violation of a state law prohibiting the teaching of
natural selection. The Tennessee law was embarrassingly wrongheaded.
Evolution unquestionably occurs and is essential to understanding biology.

    But today the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, with
everyone from the Supreme Court to establishment media holding that
students should hear only Darwin's side of the debate. This situation is
just as preposterous as the situation in Tennessee in 1925  and just as
bad
for freedom of thought. Once you weren't supposed to question God. Now
you're not supposed to question the head of the biology department.

   Consider the reporting on the actions of the Kansas Board of Education.
Last year, when the board voted to delete some requirements for the
teaching of evolution from the state's nonbinding guidelines, the reaction
was as if Galileo had been hauled back before the Inquisition. Headlines
proclaimed Kansas had "banned" the teaching of Darwin, when the board's
action was strictly advisory. Local school districts were free to ignore
the guidelines, and almost all did.

   Last week, when the board members who had voted for the new guidelines
were defeated in the state primary, assuring that proevolution guidelines
will be restored, news accounts treated this as a lastsecond victory over
the forces of darkness. They didn't add that because of a copyright snafu,
the 1999 guidelines were never actually promulgated. Not only had darkness
not fallen over Kansas, from the standpoint of the classroom nothing had
happened at all.

   The 1999 guidelines did not endorse or even mention creationism. In
1986, the Supreme Court correctly ruled that public schools must not teach
creationism because it is effectively a religious doctrine. The version of
creationism that supposes that Earth was formed a relatively short time
ago, and that man has no evolutionary antecedent, is a Biblical contention
without any scientific support.

   What Kansas's board did do was suggest schools teach only part of
natural selection theory. It advised that children be taught that living
things evolve in response to changes in their environments. The evidence
on
this point, as Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould has noted, is as strong as the
evidence that Earth orbits the sun. But the board advised against teaching
that life began through a totally natural, undirected process. The board
was wrong to try to edit contemporary biology in this way. Even if a
wholly
spontaneous origin of life turns out to be incorrect, it is today's
mainstream science and children need to learn it.

   More objectionable, perhaps, was the board's advice against teaching
Big
Bang theory. Big Bang theory enjoys almost unanimous support among
cosmologists and even has moderate theological backing, for instance from
the Vatican Observatory. This theory may or may not stand the test of
time  all previous theories of the origin of the cosmos are now thought
wrong, so don't hold your breath for the Big Bang  but kids cannot
understand astronomy without knowing the ideas behind it.

   Yet though the Kansas board was wrong on some points, those who
denounced it skipped the valid substance behind its thinking. There is a
lively scientific debate these days on the absence of explanations for the
origin of life. Evolutionary theory is commonly misunderstood to explain
the origin of life; actually, it applies only to how organisms that
already
exist respond to their environments. All theories on origins, most
recently
the "RNA world" hypothesis (that life began with a chemical relative of
DNA), are extremely conjectural. Darwin himself said he had no clue how
life began, and considered creation an impenetrable mystery.

   Inability to explain how life began hardly disproves natural selection.
The question is simply outside the theory's perimeter. But because today's
dogma assumes science can already explain everything, most of those who
denounced the Kansas board didn't seem to know that the origin of life and
how life evolves are two entirely separate issues. The Kansas board was
right to suggest that the origin of life is a huge unknown, and to be
skeptical of applying what Mr. Gould has called evolutionary
"fundamentalism."

   One small bit of editing by the Kansas board has been overlooked. The
board changed the definition of science from "the search for natural
explanations"   the wording preferred by the National Academy of
Sciences  to the search for logical explanations. When it comes to
intellectual rigidity, there's little difference between the national
academy declaring that only natural forces may be considered, and the
church declaring that only divine explanations may be considered. The
quest
for logical explanations for the world is a much richer and more engaging
goal.

   These concerns intersect at the evolving new theory of "intelligent
design." Unlike creationism, intelligentdesign theory acknowledges that
the
universe is immensely old and that all living things are descended from
earlier forms. But the theory goes on to contend that organic biology is
so
phenomenally complex that it is illogical to assume that life created
itself. There must have been some force providing guidance.

   Intelligent design is a sophisticated theory now being argued out in
the
nation's top universities. And though this idea assumes existence must
have
some higher component, it is not religious doctrine under the 1986 Supreme
Court definition. Intelligentdesign thinking does not propound any
specific
faith or even say that the higher power is divine. It simply holds that
there must be an unseen intellect imbedded in the cosmos.

   The intelligent design theory may or may not be correct, but it's a
rich, absorbing hypothesis  the sort of thing that is fascinating to
debate, and might get students excited about biology class to boot. But
most kids won't know the idea unless they are taught it, and in the
aftermath of the Kansas votes, proevolution dogma continues to suggest
that
any alternative to natural selection must be kept quiet.

   But then, just as in 1925 opposition to natural selection was not
really
about the theory but about sustaining a status quo in which people were
not
supposed to question clergy, so today's evolutionary fundamentalism is not
so much about the theory but about sustaining a new status quo in which
people are not supposed to question scientists. Yet this discourages
students from engaging in one of the most fascinating  if not the most
fascinating  of questions: Why are we here?

   The obvious solution is to teach the controversy. Present students with
the arguments for and against natural and supernatural explanations of
life, and then let them enter into this engaging, fertile debate. Yet many
school systems are steering away from teaching intelligent design,
believing it to be an impermissible idea under the Supreme Court ruling.
Editorials and columnists prefer not to mention the new theory, hoping to
tar all non-Darwinian ideas as mere creationism. This isn't freedom of
thought  it's the reverse. Where is the new Scopes who will expose the new
dogma as being just as bad as the old?
 

   Mr. Easterbrook is a senior editor of the New Republic and
BeliefNet.com. His latest book is "Beside Still Waters" (Quill, 1999).

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