Evolution's Refusal to Die

By Karl Giberson, PhD

The most interesting strategy employed by anti-evolutionists over the last century and a half has been to report that "Darwinism is Dead" or "Evolution has Collapsed." The exercise is all but meaningless in terms of scientific discussion but it's a marvelous culture war strategy, requiring almost no effort to get a few people claiming, in all seriousness, "They say evolution is dying. Most scientists don't believe it any more." And as long as the claim is made to laypeople who have no idea what the actual scientific community thinks, the strategy is sure to have some influence.

The anti-evolutionary Discovery Institute has just published a report titled "How a Scientific Field Can Collapse: The Case of Psychiatry." Taking aim at everything from its "eccentric pioneers" (Freud and Jung) to its "peer reviewed" -- but often changing -- guidebook, the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," the article reports on recent and credible concerns about psychiatry published by scientists in respectable publications likeNew Scientist.

The real quarry of the article, however, is not psychiatry, but evolution. The article lists many of the problems of psychiatry -- long history of failure, ignoring critics, reliance on a book, etc., etc. -- and then claims that similar maladies afflict evolution -- failing to explain the Cambrian Explosion, exalting Darwin and the Origin of Species, refusing to hear or publish scientific critiques of Darwinism, etc., etc. Psychiatry is collapsing, and evolution is just like psychiatry, so it should be collapsing also.

But we have heard all of this before. In 1968 Henry Morris, who did more to galvanize anti-evolution than anyone, published "The Twilight of Evolution," inaugurating a non-stop chorus of claims that Darwin's theory was all but dead. At around the same time the Harvard educated lawyer Norman Macbeth published "Darwin Retried," claiming evolution had collapsed. Writing in the American Biology Teacher in 1976, Macbeth announced that evolution had "utterly failed." Another lawyer, Philip Johnson, made identical claims in "Darwin on Trial," published in 1991, described on its website as a "standard in American protest literature." "Darwin on Trial" launched the Intelligent Design movement.

The list of books claiming that evolution has come down with a serious illness is long. On my bookcase alone, we have "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," "The Collapse of Evolution," and my favorite, "Evolution Shot Full of Holes."

Immediately after the Origin of Species was published in 1859, Darwin's rival Richard Owen said the book and its speculative theory would be forgotten in 10 years. Eberhard Dennet published "At the Deathbed of Darwinism" in 1904. George MacCready Price, who influenced William Jennings Bryan, claimed in 1924 that Darwinism was now a "doctrine ... merely of historical interest." And then, of course, we have the "Lady Hope" myth that Darwin himself announced his theory to be dead, as he lay on his own deathbed.

In the century and a half since Darwin's theory of evolution was first pronounced dead, it has grown steadily stronger. It is not in "crisis." It is not "collapsing." It is not "shot full of holes." Darwin's theory has grown steadily stronger to the point where virtually all evolutionary biologists -- not a one of whom wrote any of the books listed above -- would be mystified by the claim that evolution was dying, or even feeling poorly. Evolution is no more ill than heliocentricity, atomic theory or quantum mechanics is ill.

Ironically, the reason for the robust health of evolution can be found in the very article attacking evolution I quoted above from the Discovery Institute: Science -- and this includes evolution -- is a self-correcting enterprise. I know little of psychiatry, but I am not shocked to discover that critical voices have emerged and are being heard. This is the norm for science. Seemingly secure science is often modified -- think Newtonian physics -- and entire fields even disappear, like phrenology (studying personality via bumps on the skull). Anyone who understands the scientific community knows it to be full of renegade individualists only too eager to overturn the status quo. This aggressive self-examination is the reason why we now understand the world so well -- why we know the behavior of nature in such excruciating detail that we can build a phone capable of extracting a tiny bit of information from a database on the other side of the planet.

The historical lesson is clear, even if the anti-evolutionists can't see it: Science is open to correction. In the event that evolution does become a "theory in crisis," we will read about that in Scientific American, Nature and Science, not the blogs of the anti-Darwinian culture warriors.

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Why Americans Love Creationism

By Karl Giberson, PhD

I was sobered while watching a recent conversation on HuffPost Live about America's troubled conversation over origins. Nominally about recent attempts in Louisiana to get creationism into the public schools, the wide-ranging conversation shines a remarkable light on the country's century-long battle over creation vs. evolution.

All of the strategies developed by the anti-evolutionary leadership to rally support for their cause are on display. Significantly, however, the individuals in the conversation are not the leaders of the movement promoting their standard arguments, but ordinary conservative Christian leaders who have absorbed the anti-evolutionary message. Their confident claims and responses to challenges testify to the rhetorical power of this message. They are true believers.

The great power of the anti-evolutionary message embraced by so many Americans comes from the following, all of which are on display in the conversation:

1. Appealing to America's democratic impulse: At a time when we constantly hear that lawmakers should heed the voice of the "90 percent of Americans who want more gun control," on what basis do lawmakers ignore the "vast majority of Americans who reject evolution?" Does this constituency have no right to be heard? Must their children be forced to learn ideas in the public schools at odds with their family's values and rejected by most of the voters?
2. Demanding fairness and tolerance: Isn't America all about being fair? And what could be fairer than giving voice to other viewpoints with widespread support? At a time when most Americans are demanding gay marriage in the name of fairness, why are we being so unfair to the creationists, excluding their ideas about origins?
3. Promoting freedom for our students: Must education be coercive on the topic of origins? Why can't teachers present "both sides" and let our "bright high school students" make up their own minds? Will this not encourage critical thinking in our science classes? What is this need to restrict science teaching to just one viewpoint when there are others in play?
4. Appealing to authority: A popular anti-evolutionary website contains the signatures of hundreds of credentialed academics who "Dissent from Darwin." This is a lot of intellectual firepower. Surely such a large crowd of anti-evolutionary scholars can't all be wrong.
5. Deflecting criticism: Much has been made of the failure of the creationists to publish in scientific journals. But their ideas are blocked from those journals by editorial and peer referees whose allegiance is to the scientific status quo. New paradigms, like Intelligent Design, are rejected out of hand.
6. Currying sympathy: Anti-evolutionists in secular universities or other scientific institutions are forced to hide their views from their colleagues. I was once in a gathering that including several such individuals and they insisted that nobody take any pictures, lest they be identified. If they "come out" they run the risk of losing their jobs, run off by intolerant peers who object to their ideas without considering them. Ben Stein exposed this abuse of Intelligent Design scholars in the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

This rhetorical strategy contains great synergistic power; polls show that Americans are not coming around to accept evolution, even as its scientific credibility has grown to point of certainty. The conservative Christians in the video above have heard and embraced all of these arguments. In their view, they have a strong case and every right to press it.

Dismantling these arguments takes more time than assembling them. And the process often sounds like little more than special pleading and self-serving prejudice. Science, of course, is not a democratic process -- and it shouldn't be -- but explaining why is a bit tricky to an audience that values democracy so highly. High school students are not capable of adjudicating the validity of anti-evolutionary arguments -- they have enough challenges simply learning the material and taking time to put fringe ideas in their heads is not reasonable. Restricting education to well-established knowledge is certainly not intolerance, but you can't tell that to someone who rejects well-established knowledge.

The "Dissent from Darwin" list disintegrates when you look at it closely: The signers are largely non-biologists or even non-scientists. Many are retired academics, trained long ago before evolution became so established. Virtually none are experts in the sense of being evolutionary biologists active in the field. Ben Stein's movie is riddled with falsehoods that have been exposed. (No creationists have even submitted papers to scientific journals, much less had them rejected. The few cases of people losing their jobs turn out to far more complicated than simply anti-creationist prejudice.) And on it goes.

Science education in America is in trouble.

The Evolution of Anti-Evolutionism

By Karl Giberson, Ph.D

Anti-evolution bills continue to circulate in school districts across the country. The concerns that motivate the bills are now about a century old, first making headlines in the famous trial of John Scopes, on trial for disobeying a Tennessee law known as the Butler Act passed in 1925. The law read:

That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals, and all other public schools the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.

Scopes was declared guilty in this celebrated trial but anti-evolution lost in the court of public opinion. Laws similar to the Butler Act were quietly ignored in other states. In 1968 the Supreme Court struck down a similar law, still on the books in Arkansas. Mississippi's supreme court struck down their version of the law two years later.

Anti-evolution reappeared in a new form in a 1982 trial in Arkansas with a more modest demand for a "balanced treatment of creation science and evolution science." If creationism could not be legally mandated as the only thing taught about origins, surely it was reasonable to demand that it have a place alongside evolution. In a much examined decision, Judge Overton declared that creationism was religion and had no place in America's science classrooms.

Overton's decision effectively guaranteed that creationism -- at least any version resembling the biblical story, which the Arkansas version did -- would never have a place in science classrooms funded by American taxpayers. The decision forced the anti-evolution movement to adopt a new strategy, known as Intelligent Design or ID.

The supporters of ID, who are strongly anti-evolution and overwhelmingly Christian, promote the idea that a creative "intelligence" is responsible for the appearance and development of life on earth. Because they don't identify this intelligence as God -- the only actual alternative they have ever offered is that it could be "space aliens" -- ID must be regarded as non-religious.

ID went on trial in Dover, PA in 2005 after a local school board mandated a curriculum requiring the teaching of ID, and promoting an ID textbook Of Pandas and People as the appropriate anti-evolutionary resource. The trial was a disaster for ID. The textbook was shown to have been a creationist text that had replaced "creationism" with "intelligent design." The judge handed down an aggressive ruling that ID was really creationism, and thus religious.

Anti-evolution was defeated in Dover, just as it had been in Arkansas, Mississippi and, for practical purposes, in Dayton, Tenn. But it was not killed and, as the saying goes, "what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger." And sure enough, a Gallup poll taken last year showed a significant increase -- from 40 percent to 46 percent -- in the popularity of creationism (46 percent endorsed the choice "God created humans in present form").

Anti-evolution bills continue to circulate with no sign of diminishing. Each time they reappear, their demands are more modest, evolving in response to their last failure. From outlawing evolution in Tennessee, to "equal time" for creationism in Arkansas, to "ID" in Pennsylvania, the argument has now become "teach the controversy." The same people, using the same strategies, spurred on by the same motivations, now call for America's public schools to present the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution, often described as "teaching the controversy." Anti-evolutionists charge that academic freedom demands they be heard. After all, should not teachers be permitted, encouraged or perhaps even required to present both sides of any scientific controversy?

Anti-evolutionary leadership comes from the well-funded and sophisticated Discovery Institute in Seattle, Wash., which enthusiastically reported that "eleven bills addressing academic freedom in science education" were soon to be voted on to possibly become law. (Some failed recently.) In particular, Montana's HB 183 was applauded because it would "free K-12 public school science teachers from fear of administrative reprisal to teach objectively both sides of scientific controversies..."

This new strategy is compelling and one can hear the rhetorical packaging: "All those who oppose academic freedom for America's public schools raise their hand." No hands? I thought so. One right-wing ID pundit is arguing that "Teaching the controversy is a good liberal cause."

The call to "teach the controversy," despite its noble sound and appeal to American intuitions about fairness, is built on a lie and an abysmal confusion about science pedagogy.

The "controversies" don't exist and, if they did, they would be poor choices to hand over to high school students to adjudicate. Imagine, for example, asking high school students to decide whether the laws relevant to radioactive decay have been constant since the earth first appeared. How would they even think about this? Take the age of the earth as an example of one such "controversy" on which the Discovery Institute has been careful not to take sides. The age of the earth was a matter of some controversy for well over a century -- but that century ended a hundred years ago! Used to dating the earth at about 10,000 years using the Bible, geologists determined that it was much older more than two centuries ago. At first the numbers were varied and uncertain; different dating methods yielded different results. There was no consensus in 1850 -- a real controversy existed.

But when scientists don't agree, they work energetically to find out what is wrong. Research is done to gather more data; papers are published highlighting the disagreements and asking tough questions. More data is gathered. Conferences are held to address the problem. Very bright young people eagerly go into this field because it is obviously in need of fresh thinking. More data is gathered. Young whippersnappers brashly challenge their elders. Fogeys with their heels dug in gradually become marginalized. More data is gathered. Slowly the discrepancies begin to disappear under a mountain of fresh data until the reasons for the differences vanish and a consensus emerges.

Students who go on to study science and join the scientific community will one day work on actual scientific controversies -- and there are many. But they are not the ones that the anti-evolutionists want to see in America's public schools. We do our students no favor by pretending that religiously motivated objections to well-established ideas constitute genuine scientific controversies.