Yesterday, I posted the first half of my summary on my talk, “Thou Shall Not Inhibit Academic Freedom: The Evolution of Anti-Evolutionism.” I had started to discuss Louisiana’s SB 733“Science Education Act” and looked at its language. This post will finish the summary with some reflections.
I concluded yesterday with these questions:
Why these four things - "evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning" - and not four others. The bill says "but not limited to" but it still points at these four. Why?
What supplemental materials are available and what are their contents?
Do the Discovery Institute or the Louisiana Family Forum have supplemental materials available? How do they help "students understand, analyze, critique, and objectively review scientific theories?"
The first question is fairly simple to answer. Evolution et al present problems for people who interpret the Bible literally. If we evolved from a common ancestor, separate special creation becomes untenable or at least more difficult to accept. Many Christians accommodate evolution into their views, believing in souls and the afterlife and regarding evolution as the means by which God brought life and humanity to Earth. But for fundamentalists, this is not possible. Global warming compromises our special place because human manipulation of the environment seems to imply that the Holy Spirit isn’t watching out for us. (In my presentation I didn’t get this in depth about it.)
I compressed the second and third questions into one by looking at the Louisiana Family Forum’s mission and links and then at Discovery Institute fellows’ recent supplemental textbook Explore Evolution which takes a “teach the controversy” approach, all shielded under a banner of “academic freedom.”
Before we take on the supplemental materials, we need to understand what “teach the controversy” means. Stephen Meyer (director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture) wrote in the Cincinnati Enquirer that this tactic:
1. Does not require that science teachers teach ID to students - “at least not yet.” (You have to love the veiled threat there.)
2. Teachers should “teach the scientific controversy about Darwinian evolution.”
3. State boards should permit, but not require, teachers to tell students about the arguments of scientists, like Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe.
Judge Jones took a moment in his Kitzmiller decision to call the “teach the controversy” tactic disingenuous. Why did he say this? Because the tactic alleges that there is actually a “scientific controversy about Darwinian evolution.” There is no scientific controversy here as I will show below. The controversy is political and social, springing from particular sectarian misgivings. Lastly, we should not teach students about Behe’s critiques because their impact in science has been nothing but an annoyance batted away repeatedly in both popular and peer-reviewed publications. Behe’s “irreducible complexity” argument has accomplished nothing. To teach it to students as actual science would be to lie to them about its status.
But people, including Sarah Palin, George Bush, and Sen. Ben Nevers (SB 733’s sponsor) all want this manufactured controversy to be taught in schools. Palin recently said, "Teach both (creationism and evolution). You know, don't be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.” Ben Nevers has said, “This bill does not allow the teaching of any religious belief, or religious theory, so if it's not science...then certainly it couldn't be brought into our classrooms in Louisiana.”
I agree! If it isn’t science. Don’t teach it.
But how might this be taught in Louisiana? First, let’s look at the Louisiana Family Forum. Their mission states that they promote “Biblical principles: foundational values derived from transcendent scriptural truth.” If you continue searching around the site, you will find nothing about science. They have not consistently fought for comprehensive science education or championed good geology teaching. Nothing. But we do find a link to Answers in Genesis - Creation, Evolution, and Christian Apologetics: “Answers in Genesis is an apologetics (i.e., Christianity-defending) ministry, dedicated to enabling Christians to defend their faith and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively.” Where’s the science? There is a lot of religion here and a lot of religious assaults on science that have never come from within the scientific community itself. If we are to take the Louisiana Family Forum as an educational resource on the bill they fought to promote, then we must assume that they in fact want to teach creationism and are using the cover of “teach the controversy,” “critique” and “review” to accomplish their goals. So far this looks disingenuous at best.
If we move onto the Discovery Institute we find that some of their fellows have written a supplemental textbook called Explore Evolution. The authors are Stephen C. Meyer, Paul A. Nelson, Jonathan Moneymaker, Scott Minnich, and Ralph Seelke. Meyer is the head of the DI’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture and Paul Nelson is an avowed Young Earth Creationist. The book supposedly compares what it calls Neo-Darwinian models with other competing explanations in what it calls an “inquiry-based approach.” What are these competing models?
In large part, I modeled my exploration of Explore Evolution on Josh Timmer’s critique as the basis for my presentation (go to Ars Technica) and contrasted the “Tree of Life” with the “Orchard of Life.” If you’re confused about the “orchard” you should be.
First, what is the tree of life? It is the visual representation of our “common descent with diversification.” In the picture included here, you can see our ancestor at the top left and then the proliferation and diversification of life. The y-axis represents genetic and phenotypic diversification. The x-axis represents time. So we go from the ancestor through prokaryotes, eukaryotes, and archaea up through things like volvox, algae, and fungi to angiosperms, insects, fish, dinosaurs, birds, and the mammals. There we humans are up there in the right corner above orangutans with whom we share a common ancestor several million years ago. How cool to be able to envision our relatedness to every other organism on the planet!
Now, we can talk about controversies on the tree of life. How closely related are we to Neanderthals? That’s a great question in science. The question is not “Are we related to Neanderthals?” Biologists, paleontologists, and anthropologists have skirmishes over portions of the tree of life. None of them argue that they are on it.
But that’s not what Explore Evolution would have us believe. They want to foist a particular notion, the “Orchard of Life” on high school students. No one in biology talks about the orchard of life unless they are talking about orchards. I looked knowingly at one of the biologists in the room when I started talking about this and said, “All of the biologists in the room are probably wondering what the ‘orchard of life’ is because they’ve never heard of it.” I got a knowing grin back. Why?
Because this orchard is the same old special and separate creation model that creationists have used for years. Look at the graphic below. What do each of the starting points mean and what is the evidence for them? They could be canines, arthropods, mollusks, etc.? I have no idea.
But if you know anything about Biblical literalists then you know that this “model” is propping up the notion that God made each of the “kinds” in Genesis. This is propped up with a cottage “theory” (used in the colloquial sense here) with its own pseudo-cladograms described as “orchards” by the creationist sub-group called Baraminology (baramin is a neologism that puts two Hebrew words together - "bara" (created) and "min" (kind)). By the way, that graphic comes from Answers in Genesis. They use the term orchard.
There is no evidence for this model at all. None. Go look through peer-reviewed journals. I did. I looked through PubMed which will search millions of science articles published in the last approximately 150 years. Here’s what I found:
“tree of life” – 3563
"evolutionary biology" – 6234
“evolutionary development" 7406
“evolution” - 226,476
“creationism” – 89
"intelligent design" – 86
“orchard of life” – 85
The articles on creationism are entirely disparaging. Many of the intelligent design entries are from engineering journals where you hope people are intelligently designing bridges and what not so that we have good infrastructure; the remainder disparage intelligent design as anti-science and such. The orchard of life? Plenty about orchards. Nothing that would support a creationist conclusion. Nothing.
Meyer et al say that they are providing an educative tool that explores evolution. This is utter nonsense. It is what Justice Brennan would have called a “sham” based on his ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard. This “model” is the same old same old. It’s just been given a new name - “teach the controversy.” But it’s just a way for fundamentalists to sneak particular Christian notions into classrooms by using the authority of science to undermine science. It’s a Trojan horse.
Josh Timmer says it best:
“These are not scientific controversies; they're not part of a coherent scientific case that can be made against evolution. They're actually opinions that have barely registered within the wider scientific community…
“This is pretty typical of all the scientific material in the book. Even when it has its facts right, they're embedded in interpretations that none of the actual scientists cited are likely to recognize. The mere presence of actual science does nothing to outweigh the general morass of errors, distortions, and faulty logic that comprise the bulk of the book. The book as a whole acts like a funhouse mirror, distorting and removing the context from the bits of science that do appear.”
If I got a review like that, I might cry.
But maybe academic freedom should cover this anyway? Not according to anything that holds some sort of professional or legal precedent. There is no constitutional right to academic freedom. And the right so far understood inheres in universities as institutions, not in individual faculty. It does not apply to high school teachers, especially in fields like biology that are so driven by research expertise. Research expertise calls things like the “orchard of life,” “irreducible complexity,” and “specified complexity” a bunch of nonsense. It doesn’t matter if they are overtly religious or not – they are not part of science. But they are enmeshed in particular religious assertions so they are unconstitutional and not protected by free speech either. Should we be free to “teach the controversy” about the Holocaust? What causes AIDS? Of course not. Evolution, though ethically different from those issues, is at least as well supported in the historical and scientific sense. It is the overwhelmingly supported grounding theory in biology. As Theodosius Dobzhansky noted, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
SB 733 undermines science education. Period. And you know what, the bill’s sponsor said as much when he said that “scientific data related to creationism should be discussed when dealing with Darwin's theory.” Enough said. This is religion.
Why does it matter? Science and evidence matter. The fact that we are related to the mushroom and the cat and our brothers and mothers carries ethical imperatives. We are responsible to and for them. Nature matters. Truth matters. Civility matters. The Constitution matters. Bills like this stir up sectarian fights. Just look at Dover, Pa. where neighbors turned on each other for their belief or lack thereof (read The Devil in Dover by Laurie Lebo for a taste of its ugliness).
So let’s get rid of things like this. Let’s let science be what science is.
I answered a number of questions afterwards, the most interesting of which came from a woman who serves on a small local school board in Pennsylvania. She said that the topic of creationism has come up but that no one has acted on it. In part it is the science standards in the state. A grad student working with Michael Berkman (PSU Dept. of Political Science who studies school boards and evolution education) came and told us about varying state standards. People wanted to know about Bible education. One student wanted to know how to approach teaching evolution in a potentially hostile environment. I pointed him to Brian Alters.
Anyway, it was a good talk. It was well-attended (80-100 I think). A few people have already suggested I do another one and I might well. That one will probably be on global warming denialism in American education. We’ll see.
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