A smart battle against intelligent design

Despite a victory in the Dover school board trial, the battle against creationism needs a steady stream of recruits

For the last 100 years, scientists, teachers and parents have been relying mostly on lawyers to keep religion out of public school science classes in this country. So far, the lawyers have been doing a pretty good job.

Illustration: Dan Page

But the burden is shifting to the scientists themselves, say experts involved in recent cases defending public school science curricula from anti-evolution revisions. “The buck stops with university professors,” says Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California.

It is tempting for scientists to insist that creationist perspectives should not be dignified with a response, says Richard Katskee, assistant legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and one of the four principal lawyers in last year’s rout of the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board mandate to teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. But the stakes are too big.

“We’re talking about stuff that is intentionally designed to deceive kids,” says Katskee. “It’s a national phenomenon that will have a real and palpable impact on the future of science, because science education will be undermined. The voices of serious scientists speaking up will make the difference.”

“Scientists have to speak out,” says Whitehead Member Harvey Lodish. “Biology is the study of evolution. It is the history of life going back four billion years. Evolution is not an abstract concept. It is a working tool. It is a powerful set of arguments we use all the time to be able to infer from experiments in yeast, rats and mice what humans are like.”

Two years ago, in his role as president of the 11,000-member American Society of Cell Biology, Lodish petitioned the governor and the state education board in Ohio, his home state, to reject a new 10th-grade model science lesson plan that included components of intelligent design. In February 2006, the Ohio board finally removed the religious-based material from the science curriculum.

The evolution of creationism

The strong and comprehensive court ruling in the Dover case last December marks the end of the most recent resurgence of anti-evolution teaching activity in the United States, wrote George Annas, professor of law and public health at Boston University, in the May 25 New England Journal of Medicine.

But if the past offers any precedents, the same concepts will be repackaged under different names.

Teaching evolution was first outlawed outright in 1925, provoking one of the most famous trials of the 20th century, in which John Thomas Scopes was tried and convicted. In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a similar Arkansas law as unconstitutional for furthering a religious purpose. Next came state laws in Arkansas and Louisiana to balance the teaching of evolution with “creation science,” a spin also ruled unconstitutional in 1982 and 1987, respectively, for the same First Amendment violation.

The third wave was intelligent design (ID), which allows for limited evolution within species, including antibiotic resistance, but is silent about other creationist claims, such as the earth’s age. ID posits that life is too complex to have evolved from common ancestors who crawled grudgingly out of the primordial soup.

“In a way, it is a classical example of evolution at work,” Steven Gey, a leading scholar on religious liberties and free speech at Florida State University, told an audience there in May. “ID is creationism that evolved in response to a series of legal decisions that said creationism is not going to fly under the First Amendment.”

Now that the Dover decision has effectively exposed ID as a rebranded form of creationism, Annas, Gey and others predict a fourth strategy with a seductive campaign to “teach the controversy.” Never mind that the controversy is largely manufactured by proponents of creationism and ID.

“It’s one of the three pillars of creationism: Evolution theory is in crisis, evolution and Christianity are incompatible, and it’s only fair to balance evolution with something,” Scott says. “The fairness argument is incredibly powerful in a country like ours.”

The only major pending case now involves the Cobb County, Georgia, school board. A federal district court had ruled that textbook stickers describing evolution as “a theory, not a fact” violate the First Amendment. On May 25, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals remanded the case back to the district court to sort out problems with the record. That may mean additional court hearings on the evidence and a possible new ruling. “If this goes the wrong way, it will be the first case we’ve ever lost between scientists and the fundamentalist objections to scientific data,” notes Gey.

The new arguments against evolution are increasingly framed in terms of molecular biology, cell biology and information technology—languages that evolutionary biologists do not speak as well, says Kenneth Miller, a cell biologist and biochemist at Brown University and expert witness in the Dover case.

Miller first became involved in the issue when he accepted a student challenge to debate the founder of the Institute for Creation Research on campus 25 years ago. As he researched the opposing position, he became infuriated with the deceptive misrepresentation of scientific evidence. Worse, the Roman Catholic researcher realized, “what they wanted to stick in the science classroom wasn’t God per se, but it was their view of religion, not mine.”

Peaceful coexistence

In his book Finding Darwin’s God, Miller defends his view that belief in God and evolutionary theory can coexist peacefully.

“There are many levels of understanding of the causal ingredients of almost anything that happens in our universe,” says John Haught, a theologian at Georgetown University. “You don’t have to see science as in any way competing with fundamental religious positions.”

Haught urges scientists to keep religion out of the science classroom. “There are prominent science thinkers and writers who have themselves unconsciously folded evolutionary science into a world view that nature is all there is, so there cannot, a priori, be any other explanations,” he said. “The irony is that this sabotages and subverts the whole mission of scientific education.”

The most important role scientists can play is to teach evolution better in classes and communicate the accumulating pieces of evidence and the nature of science more clearly and more often to the general public, say lawyers, scientists and teachers. And if a crisis arises in their backyard, scientists need to speak out.

“You are not trying to convert partisans on the other side,” Miller says. “You are trying to reach out to the great middle ground of American people who, if they fail to support science, ultimately threaten the scientific enterprise. If we in the scientific community don’t provide the information, the American people won’t have the chance to come to the right decision, and it will be our fault.”

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How to jump in

Individual scientists can strengthen the understanding of evolution and science itself, says Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). Here’s what he suggests:

• Teach your science well. Students become the informed citizenry that understand the evidence for evolution and support high-quality science education.


• Inform the public about your research. That helps to explain the evolutionary concepts behind it.


• Do your homework. Uninformed responses to creationism can do more harm than good. For example, presenting the evolution debate as science versus religion may compel people to choose the religious side.


• Write an opinion piece. Your words may stiffen the backbone and strengthen the defense of a teacher who is under pressure to inject religion into her science class.


• Team up with teachers, lawyers, clergy and anyone else who can address what else is at stake, such as quality of education and the separation of church and state.


• Organize outreach activities, such as public lectures or workshops for teachers and other community leaders.