Debora MacKenzie
Unnatural selection
Creation science is far from extinct. On the contrary, says Debora MacKenzie,
it's mutating and spreading
IN THE BEGINNING, there wasn't that much fuss. Charles Darwin published
On the Origin of Species in 1859. By 1900,
mainstream Protestants had adapted their theology to it. More conservative
Christians had misgivings. But nearly all agreed
that the Earth is millions of years old, and there was no organised opposition
to the teaching of evolution.
Now, a century later, the US is the world's leading scientific nation.
Yet 47 per cent of Americans--and a quarter of college
graduates--believe humans did not evolve, but were created by God a few
thousand years ago. Nearly a third believe
creationism should be taught in science lessons (see below).
|
Most teachers avoid trouble by not teaching evolution. Some teach that
there is scientific evidence that the Earth was created less than 10 000
years ago, that fossils are the result of Noah's flood and that dinosaurs
existed until recently.
What happened? And why has it--so far--happened mainly in the US? Opinions
are varied. Douglas Futuyma, an evolutionary biologist at the State University
of New York at Stony Brook, blames anti-intellectualism in a frontier nation
that viewed intellectuals as an elite opposing the spirit of populism.
"The attitude that spawned the creation science movement is the same
one that made America a leader in world science: a healthy disrespect for
authority," says Kenneth Miller, a cell biologist at Brown University in
Rhode Island. Brent Dalrymple, a geophysicist at the University of Oregon,
Corvallis, says creationism offers people in a mobile, insecure society
reassurance of their own special status. |
However it started, creationism is now being encouraged by
right-wing political groups, which are exploiting people's
misgivings about science to boost their membership and pursue
wider goals. This is spreading the belief far beyond the US
(click on thumbnail graphic below ). And in the US, it is on the
rise.
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The history of creationism in the US is intimately tied up with
the country's social and political development, says historian Ronald Numbers
of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. At first, even literal readers
of the Bible were largely reconciled to evolution. They assumed that the
six "days" of creation in Genesis were simply very long, or that most of
evolution fitted in between the first verse--"In the beginning God created
the heavens and the Earth"--and the rest of the story. But even so, says
Numbers, the origin of humans has always been the sticking point. |
Creationists, he says, have two main problems. If humans
were not created in God's image, but descended from animals,
why should they behave any better than animals? And if
people could evolve by the working of natural laws alone, what
need is there for God?
This had little political effect until rapid urbanisation in the
1920s in Europe and North America radically changed social
structures and caused anxiety about moral standards among
conservative Christians. In Europe, people found political or
ethnic targets for these anxieties.
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But in the US, conservative Christians blamed belief in "godless evolution",
says Numbers. In 1925, Tennessee prohibited teaching "that man has descended
from a lower order of animals". |
The American Civil Liberties Union, a
campaigning group, asked John Scopes, a physics teacher in
Tennessee, to test the law. It is not clear whether Scopes
ever actually taught an evolution lesson, but a state court
found him guilty nonetheless. The ACLU planned to appeal,
sure that the law violated the US Constitution. However,
before an appeal could be lodged, the verdict was overturned
on a technicality.
Even so, the trial had a tremendous impact. "Scopes was the
O.J. Simpson of his day," says Numbers. For the first time, the
entire proceedings were broadcast on the radio. It was the
world's first media circus.
Partly as a result of the publicity surrounding the case, 20
states debated similar anti-evolution laws. Successful
counter-pressure from scientists defeated them in all but
Arkansas and Mississippi. But the trial fostered popular
suspicion of evolution, and it steadily disappeared from school
textbooks.
The next upheaval came in the 1950s, when a hydraulic
engineer named Henry Morris was troubled by the apparent
conflicts between science and fundamentalist religion. A
believer in both, Morris reasoned that as Genesis was literally
true, there must be empirical evidence for it. So he set out to
find it.
The result was The Genesis Flood, published in 1961 by Morris
and a Bible scholar, John Whitcomb. It asserted that the entire
Universe was created in six literal days less than 10 000 years
ago. The second law of thermodynamics started operating only
with Adam's sin in Eden. The fossil record, and geological
formations such as the Grand Canyon, were created in a year
by the planetary cataclysm of Noah's flood. Empirical evidence
was cited for everything.
Morris's ideas are utterly unscientific, says Miller. "They
started with a conclusion--Genesis--and collected facts that
appeared to support it, discarding or misinterpreting any that
didn't fit." This included most of the evidence for evolution.
The account was made to look scientific, he says, by
scientific-sounding terminology and misused data.
For example, Morris claimed Noah fitted the ancestors of all
species (including dinosaurs) onto the Ark by taking two
juveniles each of 17 500 "kinds". His view permits limited
natural selection, while denying it can lead to really novel
variation. So two dogs on the Ark gave rise to all modern
canids. But they would have had to do it in 4300 years--much
faster than any known rate of genetic change.
The book was an enormous success, though, because it
appeared at an opportune time. After the Soviet launch of
Sputnik in 1957, embarrassed American scientists demanded
better science education for Americans. As part of this drive
for science teaching, a new text book that heavily emphasised
evolution was issued by the government-funded Biological
Sciences Curriculum Study and bought by half of the school
districts in the US.
"There were howls of protest from conservative Christians,"
says Numbers. "They felt their tax dollars were being used to
undermine their religious beliefs." At the same time, Morris's
"young-Earth creationism" seemed to reconcile religion and
science. "It flooded the fundamentalist world," says Numbers.
It also suited a new effort to promote religion in public
schools. Although laws against teaching evolution became
impossible in 1968, when the US Supreme Court said the
Arkansas law violated the First Amendment to the
Constitution, which forbids the State, and thus state-funded
schools, from promoting a particular religion. But while religion
couldn't be taught in schools, science could be. So in the
1970s, Arkansas and Louisiana passed laws requiring science
classes to give equal time to Morris's "creation science" and
evolution.
Natural law
The Supreme Court overturned the Louisiana statute in 1987,
ruling that creation science was really religious belief, so could
not be taught as science. Critical to the decision was the
active intervention of scientists, who wrote the court a
definition of science. Creation science did not meet
requirements such as starting with a falsifiable hypothesis.
So in the 1990s, creationists abandoned law and focused on
the school boards, which set teaching requirements in state
schools. They convinced several to require teachers to
describe evolution as "theory rather than fact". Alabama added
a disclaimer to texts describing evolution, labelling them as
"controversial". A similar statute in Louisiana was overturned
by a local court in 1997, a decision now being appealed to the
Supreme Court.
But despite these successive courtroom defeats for creation
science, no law actually prohibits a teacher from teaching
creationism and few school boards bother, says John Wever, a
public school science teacher in New York state. A teacher in
his school persists in teaching creation science, even though
the school authorities told him to stop. "Given the religious
nature of the area, and the fact that school boards are
elected bodies, it is unlikely the district will pursue an
expensive court case," says Wever. "I teach the students
science after the creationist teacher does."
When Wever describes evolution, his students ask "How can
that be when God made all the animals at the same time?" or
"How do you know, were you there?"--a favourite creationist
challenge. Wever tries to explain the nature of scientific
evidence, but he is rare. "Teachers constantly tell me they
gave up teaching evolution years ago," says Miller
Last August, the Kansas State Board of Education--which
included several fundamentalists--rejected the school
curriculum standards written by its scientific advisers. The list
it adopted in its place was secretly written by Tom Willis of
the Creation Science Association of Mid-America.
It deleted all references to evolution or the big bang, and
inserted fundamentalist material. For instance, the original
standards defined science as seeking "natural" explanations.
That was changed to "logical", which can include supernatural
explanations. The revision also says-- incorrectly--that
"natural selection . . . does not add new information to the
existing genetic code". Willis believes that dinosaurs lived in
the US until late in the 19th century, and his school standards
ask students to "analyse hypotheses about extinction of
dinosaurs" and "show the weaknesses in the reasoning".
Lee Alison, a geologist at the US Geological Survey in
Lawrence, Kansas, hopes the fundamentalists on the school
board will be defeated in elections in August. "Scientists must
remain alert to what is going on in their local community," he
advises. "And if something like this happens, they must get
involved."
The events in Kansas have inspired a nationwide outcry from
scientists, a refusal by national science agencies to let Kansas
use their science standards in other areas and a software
firm's decision not to locate in Topeka. This has not gone
unnoticed in four other states, where various anti-evolution
proposals have been dropped. But similar proposals remain
alive in four more.
One thing these defeats in the courts have done is to split the
creationist camp. When the Louisiana equal-time law was
overturned in 1987, young-Earth theorists could no longer sell
creationism as science. "Morris went the way of the dinosaurs
after that," says Michael Cromartie, director of evangelical
studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a religious think
tank in Washington DC.
Instead, many creationists favour "intelligent design", a way of
trying to find evidence for God without being wed to Morris's
ideas. In his 1991 book Darwin on Trial, Phillip Johnson, a law
professor at the University of California at Berkeley, did not
propose his own theory or estimate the age of the Universe.
"Like a good lawyer, he just tries to create a reasonable doubt
about Darwin," says Miller.
For instance, he insists that mutation is always damaging and
cannot generate the variations required for natural selection,
and that fossil species appear too suddenly to result from
selection. Miller, whose 1999 book Finding Darwin's God
examines all the creationists' theories in the light of scientific
research, says that science has clearly disproved this.
But that is not Johnson's main concern. "It (evolution) means
that all living things are the product of mindless material
forces," he wrote in The Wall Street Journal last year. "God is
totally out of the picture." Johnson, like many creationists,
believes there must be empirical evidence for God--and if
orthodox scientists deny this it must be because they too are
pushing a religious agenda, a godless one.Eugenie Scott of the
National Center for Science Education, a California-based
group that supports the teaching of evolution, says that this,
not scientific nitpicking, is the appeal of creationism. "Johnson
uses evolution to get people into the argument about theism
versus naturalism. He says evolution means you have no
purpose or meaning. People don't care about good or bad
science, but they do care whether their life means something."
This, she says, attracts the majority of Christians who are not
Biblical literalists or young-Earthers. "It pushes the debate to a
much broader audience."
This includes the 40 per cent of Americans who believe that
evolution was God's way of creating life. Miller, himself a
Christian, says creationists attract such people by creating a
false choice between creationism and atheism, which they
equate with orthodox science. It doesn't help, says Miller,
when some scientists, such as Richard Dawkins, agree. Nearly
half of all Americans, according to recent polls, think children
should be taught both evolution and creationism "so they can
make up their own minds", as though the two were competing
explanations.
And yet, says Miller--and many other scientists who are
Christians--religion and science don't compete. They ask
different questions and inhabit different arenas. Miller even
feels that trying to prove Genesis makes God look bad. Carried
to their logical conclusions, he says, the various schools of
creationism make God a charlatan, a magician or a mechanic.
Scientists, says Scott, must take that message to the
religious majority, those who don't--yet--think creation should
be taught as science, but who worry that science challenges
their beliefs. "An attack on evolution is an attack on all of
science," she says. "Discredit that, and the next generation
may wonder why they should support science at all."
More on creationism:
Take me to your leader: Tom Willis
was an atheist who trained in the hard sciences. So how did he become one
of America's leading creation scientists? According to the book: The battle
over evolution has spawned many millions of words. From creationist tomes
through to biology textbooks, here's New Scientist's highly adaptive selection
You asked for it: Creationists may be dogmatic and arrogant, says Bryan
Appleyard but so are some scientists The word is . . . : In The Battle
for God Karen Armstrong proposes that the success of science in the modern
world is, paradoxically, a cause of fundamentalism in religion Not a believer
: Michael Shermer's How We Believe is a rigorous examination of how and
why we believe what we do
From New Scientist magazine, 22 April 2000.
© Copyright New Scientist, RBI Limited 2000
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