Deidre Pike,"Evolution Revolution" (2005)

Evolution Revolution

Scientists and educators fear conservative muscle could force religious ideology into public schools

BY DEIDRE PIKE

The college biology student felt yanked in two directions - as if he were being forced to choose between the scientific evidence he was encountering in college and the religious beliefs with which he'd been raised.

He went to see his teacher, Margaret Towne, a visiting distinguished professor at Juniata College in Pennsylvania. Towne was not only a devout Protestant Christian, but a pastor's wife. Yet, oddly enough, she embraced and taught evolutionary principles to college students.

"He said to me, 'I find it's easier to ignore the church when I'm working on my biology data,'" Towne says. "I said, 'Oh no, you don't have to ignore the church. There needn't be a conflict here.'"

The idea that religion doesn't need to be at odds with the world of science on evolution is a message Christians need to hear, says Towne, a Las Vegas author and educator. These days, school districts across the nation are facing new challenges to science education. The evolution debate has shifted - from pushing equal time for teaching creationism in schools to presenting the ideas of the "intelligent design" movement or exploring the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution.

Misinformation abounds.

"The creationists - who are wonderful people - tend to communicate two positions," Towne says. "Either you're a young-earth creationist or you're an evolutionary naturalist and atheist. They don't tell people that there's a third major position, people who believe God is the creator and who also believe he took a bit longer than six days."

Theistic evolution is the idea that a higher power guided a slow evolutionary process that took place, as evidence for evolution suggests, via natural selection over billions of years. Since the existence of God can't be proven or discounted scientifically, theistic evolutionists embrace scientific facts fearlessly.

Towne has a doctoral degree in adult and higher education from Montana State University. There, she worked with renowned paleontologist Jack Horner, the scientist who served as technical adviser to Steven Spielberg on three Jurassic Park movies. With Horner's encouragement, Towne completed her doctoral thesis, Honest to Genesis, a book that melds her Christian faith with the facts of evolution. The book, intended for a lay audience, was published last year.

Towne taught biology to college students for 25 years at Montana State, Penn State and Princeton, as well as Juniata College. A few years ago, she moved to Las Vegas with her husband Vernon Towne, pastor of Mountain View Presbyterian Church. She now teaches courses like "Religion and Science" at UNLV.

Towne's religious beliefs surprise students.

"They say, 'You're a Christian and you believe in evolution? You're a pastor's wife?' This shouldn't be."

Towne is disappointed that the ideas of theistic evolutionists aren't better represented in the media. Creationists are organized and well-funded. They've learned how to market their ideas.

In a poll conducted after November's elections, CBS News found that 55 percent of Americans believed the fundamental creationist idea that "God created humans in present form." Of those who voted to reelect Bush, 67 percent believed in special creation by God - and half of the Bush backers surveyed said they'd support replacing the teaching of evolution with creationism in public-school curriculums.

As for theistic evolutionists?

"We're not organized or well- financed and we're not going out to churches and giving big presentations on our views," she says.

Towne hopes her book will help those students, parents and educators who find themselves facing what they see as a painful choice between science and religion. She offers guidance on new ways to read the Judeo-Christian Bible, along with evidence that counters creationist thinking, especially the idea that the Earth is only thousands of years old - rather than billions.

"All the disciplines of science affirm that we live in an ancient earth," Towne says. "There are questions we don't have answers for, but the evidence for evolution accrues every day. Almost every day, you can read stories about new findings in the Review-Journal."

When he was teaching science at Green Valley High School, Robert Anderson occasionally encountered students who'd challenge him during lessons on evolution. Anderson, who has a doctoral degree in education from UNLV, has the scientific grounding to set the record straight.

"To use the cliché, 'creation science' is an oxymoron," Anderson, now an assistant principal at Cimarron-Memorial High School, says. "It boils down to a [literal] belief in the first two chapters of Genesis."

More sophisticated challenges to science education in public schools come from the so-called intelligent design movement, which argues that, say, a human cell is so complex it could not possibly be the result of a chance process like natural selection. Rather than make room for evidence of evolution in their belief system the way that theistic evolutionists do, intelligent design advocates would like to see theories about "design" taught in classrooms.

"A good portion of people are now too sophisticated to [argue for] creationism," Anderson says. Intelligent design sounds scientific, but keeps the doors open for divine intervention. "This could be the biggest challenge."

Challenges to the teaching of evolution in public schools are on the table in several states, including Kansas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

In suburban Atlanta, a higher court ruling recently negated a school district's 2002 adoption of a warning sticker for science textbooks that says evolution is "theory, not a fact." In Dover, Pa., a school board directive that science teachers must inform students of the existence of "alternatives" to Darwin's theory is facing challenges.

Clark County School District officials are surprised that they haven't encountered organized efforts to change science curriculum in Las Vegas, especially since it's the fifth largest school district in the nation.

On a national level, a recent increase in political clout for religious fundamentalists might also prove disastrous to science education, say educators and community activists.

"I'm very frightened," says Mel Lipman, a Las Vegas attorney who teaches constitutional law to college students. "If [anti-evolutionists] get their political aims, it would have a tremendous negative impact on schools. We'd be graduating a generation of scientific illiterates who are going to vote, and that's a clear threat to our national security."

Failures to fully present evolutionary theory to public-school students could result in the United States failing to keep pace with the global scientific community.

"What's happening is the intelligent design or creationists are trying to make evolution a controversial issue," Lipman says. "Often, teachers find it's safer just not to teach it."

Nearly eight decades after the famed Scopes trial challenged a ban on teaching evolution in public schools, the topic is as incendiary as ever. In recent months, the subject has been covered by Time, Newsweek, Wired and the New York Times.

In October, National Geographic ran a cover story by author and island bio-geographer David Quammen headlined "Was Darwin Wrong?"

Quammen's answer: "No."

"If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say that [evolution] is 'just' a theory," Quammen wrote. He listed other "theories": the notion that Earth orbits the sun, continental drift, the existence of atoms and electricity. "Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact."

The idea that evolutionary theory is controversial or under fire is often met by a collective sigh from a frustrated scientific community. After creation scientists rounded up a spurious group of about 100 scientists to sign a statement claiming evolutionary theory was in trouble, the staff of the National Center for Science Education, based in California, decided to have a little fun with the idea.

In 2003, NCSE launched its "200 scientists named Steve agree" effort. To date, more 542 scientists with PhDs, including two Nobel prize winners and eight members of the National Academy of Sciences signed the group's statement: "There is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism of evolution. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to 'intelligent design,' to be introduced into the science curricula of the public schools."

To clearly communicate the satire -- scientific truth isn't arrived at through petitions or opinion polls -- only scientists named "Steve" or "Stephanie" signed the statement. That represents about 1 percent of the science community, or about 542,000 potential signatories, according to the NCSE.

"Creationists are fond of amassing lists of PhDs who deny evolution to try to give the false impression that evolution is somehow on the verge of being rejected by the scientific community," says Eugenie Scott, NCSE executive director. "Nothing could be farther from the truth."

Scott, a physical anthropologist, has been researching, speaking and actively fighting to keep religion out of science education for more than 20 years. She addresses legislative bodies, school boards and universities, talking about how the strategies of creationists have changed in order to gain acceptance from the scientific community and, especially, to get anti-evolutionary materials into public schools.

On the cutting edge of this effort, the "intelligent design" movement, talk of God and the Bible is absent. Proponents instead argue that the universe was crafted by intelligent orderly forces -- whether gods or extraterrestrials -- of inexplicable origin.

Scott calls intelligent design "new wine in old bottles" -- an evolved form of creationism.

After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an equal-time provision for teaching creationism in public schools in 1987, anti-evolutionists scrambled to find new ways to get into classrooms, says Scott. Now proposals for science curriculum revisions are packaged as "critical thinking" or "teaching the controversy."

Intelligent design proponents argue for the teaching of "the strengths and weaknesses of evolution." This sounds logical and not explicitly religious, Scott says.

"Ask the average person on the street, 'Should we be teaching strengths and weaknesses of evolution?' They're going to say sure. Ask them, 'Should we teach the strengths and weaknesses of heliocentrism?' And they'll say sure."

But ask a scientist about the "strengths and weaknesses of heliocentrism" -- the theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun -- and you'll get a blank stare.

"There aren't any alternatives to the Earth going around the Sun," Scott says. "Ask a biologist about the strengths and weaknesses of evolution, and you'll get that same blank look."

With intelligent design, gone are the controversies that made scientific creationism untenable.

"They avoid fact claims like the Grand Canyon being cut by Noah's flood or the Earth being 10,000 years old," Scott says. "Intelligent design proponents make virtually no fact claims whatsoever, and that gives them a more bullet-proof position."

Intelligent design advocates package their message so well that even educators misconstrue evolution, considering it somehow controversial.

"There is no debate within science over whether evolution happened, only how it happened," says Scott. "To dissemble to students that there is an actual controversy going on is mis-educating them and also lying to them."

In On the Origin of the Species, Darwin wrote: "When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei [the voice of the people is the voice of God], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science."

Though science is not democratic, appealing to a broad swath of spiritually needy humankind is what advocates of intelligent design do best.

"This is what I was made for," says William Dembski, a leader in the intelligent design community. "I'm charged. ... I enjoy the rough and tumble of debate."

Dembski, a researcher at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, has degrees in philosophy, mathematics, statistics and theology. He argues that intelligent design is not, as his critics contend, "pseudo-science" or "creationism in a cheap tuxedo."

Intelligent design functions at "a purely scientific level," Dembski says, referencing his books Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities and No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence. "You're looking for scientific detectability of intelligence in the natural world."

This search for a designer goes deeper than science -- and involves the way humans view the world, he says.

"The elite in our culture are materialistic and atheistic," Dembski says. "Intelligent design challenges their materialistic science and materialistic evolutionary theory. If you look at discipline after discipline, it's been evolutionized -- medicine, business, religion, literature. ... If we are right, all these superstructures built on evolution need to be questioned."

Dembski encounters people from many religious persuasions who're looking for something they see as more meaningful than mere survival of the fittest.

"Increasingly, people with any sense of religious sensibilities believe there's an underlying purpose to the world," Dembski, an evangelical Protestant, says. "Intelligent design is the only view opposed to the reductionist materialism that prevails in the academy and in the scientific view the elites of the culture. Most of the unwashed masses, and I count myself among them, believe there's a sense of purpose. We're giving a voice to those people, saying: 'The science backs you up.'"

Like those ancient critics of heliocentrism, Dembski references common sense to prove a design inference.

For example: You're driving through South Dakota, Dembski says, and you come upon a rock formation with the faces of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.

"Are you going to think to yourself, 'Did wind and erosion do that?' No. But that's what the Darwinists are saying, that natural forces brought about this complexity. Obviously Mount Rushmore is the result of intelligence."

The idea that life is so complex that it must be the work of an intelligent designer harkens back to 18th century Christian philosopher William Paley, who came up with the watch metaphor for intelligent design. A watch, Paley argued, was so intricate, "so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day" that it could not result from chance.

"The watch must have had a maker," Paley wrote in Natural Theology.

The problem with Paley's argument was as evident to Darwin in the 19th century as it is to scientists today, who point to the evidence of the fossil record and its evidence of transitions from simple organisms to much more complex organisms.

"You have to look at it as a historical process, and at what you see in the fossil record," says David Zeh, associate professor of biology at the University of Nevada, Reno. "There's good evidence of transitions from simple organisms to much more complex organisms."

About 3.8 billion years ago, the first fossil evidence of single-celled bacteria appears. It took at least another billion years for evidence of eukaryotes (organisms that have cells with a nucleus) to appear in the fossil record.

Time is the key.

"Natural selection is not a chance process," Zeh says. "This idea of intelligent design is really just the same argument as Paley's watch -- it's 'common sense that complexity doesn't just happen.' The answer is it's not just produced by chance. It's chance and the organizing force of natural selection, and it takes a lot of time."

Zeh calls intelligent design "an absurd idea," given that many organisms seem less than intelligently designed.

"There are many aspects of organismal biology that are not optimal," Zeh says. For example, only 2 to 4 percent of the human genome is useful in coding for proteins. At least 50 percent of the genome either serves no useful purpose for humans at all or it "creates problems," Zeh says.

Modern evolutionary biology has many important practical applications in fields ranging from drug design to conservation biology, Zeh says. Yet the political climate for evolutionary research is increasingly threatening. Some scientists seeking grants avoid referring to the E-word, though their evolution-based research is the cutting edge in fields like directed molecular evolution -- which shows some promise for developing cancer treatment -- and in developing genetic algorithms for use with problem-solving computer programs.

"In a lot of cases, this kind of work is going on, and people have to be cautious about invoking evolution," Zeh says. "So it's not realized that the theoretical underpinning of these fields is evolutionary biology."

Zeh thinks that evolution should be taught in grade-school science classes.

"It's the organizing principle of biology and should be taught like American history," Zeh says. "It's fundamental to understanding all sorts of things -- not just biology but human nature."

Lipman, president of the American Humanist Association and an active member in the Las Vegas Interfaith Council, similarly values a thorough approach to teaching evolution in public schools.

"As far as I'm concerned, evolution is responsible for improving the quality of our lives, in making humans better and better and finding more cures for illnesses," Lipman says. "This is part of the evolving of our human bodies. We're constantly becoming better and better and more able to improve the quality of our lives. It's a wonderful thing. I would much prefer what we are today to what human beings were 5,000 years ago."

And for Christians who feel their beliefs are challenged by evolutionary thought, Margaret Towne, the pastor's wife, offers a hopeful solution, talking of two "books" by which religious believers live.

"There's the book of nature that science reads and the book of scripture that Christians read," she says. "If the author of those two books is the same, then those two books should be synchronous."

Various sects of Christianity have historically balked at scientific discoveries since the days of Galileo.

"The church had trouble when we found that the Earth was not the center of the solar system," she says. But reason and the ability to think critically are among gifts that Towne believes come from God.

"God wants us to love him with all our hearts, all our souls and all our minds," she says. "We need not fear what science brings."

Zeh tells his students that "determining whether or not there's a creator is outside the realm of science." Forcing science to conform to a dogmatic set of ideas about existence, whether religious or otherwise, isn't productive.

"Ideology interferes with science," Zeh says. "The results are disastrous. People should learn these things."

Deidre Pike is a Northern Nevada-based freelance writer and writing lecturer.