v1.2.2 / chapter 27 of 28 / 01 aug 08 / greg goebel / public domain
* The battle over Darwin continues into the 21st century and in fact seems to be growing in intensity. While Intelligent Design concepts took a major legal defeat in a 2005 trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, efforts to undermine the teaching of evolutionary science continue on a global basis.
* While Intelligent Design is on the leading edge of the war against Darwin, observation of the continued progress of the conflict strongly suggests that the work of the Discovery Institute is really nothing but icing on the cake of traditional creationism, having done little more than add to the toybox of traditional creationist Darwin-bashing "dumbing down" arguments as part of yet another legal ploy to penetrate public education: "teach the controversy". The idea is that the schools should discuss the objections to Darwinism and describe the alternatives.
On the face of it, that doesn't seem like an unreasonable notion. Although there's no fundamental scientific controversy over Darwinism, the only real disputes being over details, it is socially controversial, always has been. It would certainly be useful to discuss alternative theories such as Lamarckism to show why they're broken. Many scientists didn't have a problem with teaching the controversy in principle. From their point of view, the result of a fair contest between Darwinism and Design would be, on the basis of the evidence available, about as predictable as one between Godzilla and Bambi.
They were then startled to find out that in practice "teach the controversy" had nothing to with a fair contest, it was instead a Trojan horse, a way by which Darwin-bashers got a foot in the door to implement a balanced presentation of Darwinism and Design -- or as the scientists saw it, rigging the contest so that Godzilla and Bambi end up on equal terms. The slogan used by the DI, "critical analysis of evolution", turned out to mean a package of exaggerations, cherry-picked evidence, citations out of context, declarations of the defeat of Darwinism, "Darth Vader was a Darwinist" smear tactics, and general muddying of the waters that was unmistakeably reminiscent of ICR propaganda.
It shouldn't have been a surprise, since nobody was likely to lobby for examination of their views in the schools if those views were going to be exposed to the full force of criticism. In fact, the whole exercise was suspicious on the face of it: if ID was actually a "scientific revolution" as its backers claimed, then the proper forum for the debate was in the formal science arena. It's hard to think of any ground-breaking new scientific theory -- relativity, quantum physics, plate tectonics -- that was established by sneaking it into public school textbooks before it won acceptance in the scientific community, and harder to think of why any legitimate scientist would attempt to do so. As has been commented, peer review doesn't count if it's performed by 14-year-olds.
* The underlying basis of the "teach the controversy" pitch was an appeal to fairness that went over well with the public. People are sympathetic to calls for "academic freedom" and for children to be taught "all sides of the issue". The problem, from the point of view of the science community, is that in the case of Design this was equivalent to saying that fairness demands that, say, astronomy courses teach that the Moon isn't actually made of rock -- it's made of green cheese.
After all, the supposedly "comprehensive" information we have about the composition and interior of the Moon was established by remote sensing from the Earth and lunar orbiting spacecraft, with this knowledge based on a suspicious degree of inference from instruments known by the people who designed them to suffer from many sources of errors. There have only been a smattering of landings on the Moon itself, the majority of them by robots whose design was based on biased scientific preconceptions of what the Moon was supposed to be like -- and there have been absolutely no landings on the far side of the Moon, rendering it a complete mystery. Given the extraordinary "gaps" in our knowledge of the Moon, wouldn't it be proper to "teach the controversy" between the "rockheads" and the "cheesites" in order to promote "academic freedom"?
On a more personal level, is it fairness or foolishness, open-minded or mindless, to give the same credence to a mysterious email claiming to be from the son or widow of a deceased dictator and offering to a complete stranger a "real deal" concerning the handling of a vast fortune the tyrant left behind -- as we do to an email from our local bank offering a 5% interest certificate of deposit? Are we impressed by the emphatic claims of our mysterious correspondent that the "real deal" being offered is of course absolutely on the level and needs to be given the most serious consideration?
John Derbyshire (born 1945), a British-born conservative American columnist, wrote an essay in 2005 that lit into the US president when he expressed some sympathy with the idea of teaching ID as an alternative scientific concept:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Why stop with [Intelligent Design]? Why not teach the little ones astrology? Lysenkoism? Orgonomy? Dianetics? Reflexology? Dowsing and radiesthesia? Forteanism? Velikovskianism? Lawsonomy? Secrets of the Great Pyramid? ESP and psychokinesis? Atlantis and Lemuria? The hollow-earth theory? Does the president have any idea, does he have any idea, how many varieties of pseudoscientific flapdoodle there are in the world? If you are going to teach one, why not teach the rest? Shouldn't all sides be "properly taught"? To give our kids, you know, a rounded picture? Has the president scrutinized Velikovsky's theories? Can he refute them? Can you? And every bunkum theory -- every one of those species of twaddle that I listed -- has, or at some point had, as many adherents as Intelligent Design.
END QUOTE
Derbyshire added later that had no real problem with people believing in ID or promoting it as much as they pleased, but he drew the line at attempts to introduce trash science into public education using public funding:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Not only do I not object to pseudoscience, I don't even object if people want to teach it to kids. Heck, it's a free country. What I object to, and what a great many other citizens -- including many conservatives -- object to, is creationists trying to get pseudoscience taught on the taxpayer's dollar.
... I favor educational diversity. Go set up your own schools and teach Intelligent Design, or the hollow earth theory, or homeopathic medicine. Heaven knows, you have enough money. Or get behind the home-schooling movement, where you might make real progress in promoting your cult ... Good luck to you! Just keep your hands off my wallet.
The science taught in public schools should be consensus science, the science most working scientists believe in. What's the alternative? To teach everything that has a following somewhere? ... If creationism can be taught, why not astrology? Why not phrenology? Why not 19th-century race science?
END QUOTE
Derbyshire concluded these remarks with a scathing blast against ID:
BEGIN QUOTE:
... I actually think Intelligent Design has been a disaster for creationism. You have tied yourselves in knots with the effort to promote creationism while never mentioning those lawsuit-losing essentials of creationism. I can't pretend to wish you well, but if I did, I think I would say: For goodness' sake dump all this gibberish about "complexity" -- specified, irreducible, or whatever -- and get back to basic Bible creationism. It has far more appeal, and you will speak more plainly, with more authority.
... As to [the proclamations of ID supporters] that "Darwinism" will be overthrown any day now, and that working biologists, botanists, zoologists, geneticists, paleontologists, paleoanthropologists, neuroscientists, and medical researchers all around the world will all simultaneously smack themselves on their foreheads and shout out in unison: "Of course! How blind we have been! Those folk at the Discovery Institute have been right all along!" -- well, I have been hearing that for close to twenty years. Is there the faintest sign that any such thing is about to happen? ... Of the thousands of research departments in the above-mentioned disciplines around the world, has even one swung into the creationist camp, or shown any sign whatever of doing so? Names please.
END QUOTE
Elsewhere, Derbyshire described ID as an exercise in "shifty, low cunning", corrupted by the "willful act of deception" in pretending to be scientific when its religious agenda was so indifferently hidden. He denounced the Discovery Institute for "swilling in money" and doing nothing constructive with it, while mainstream researchers scrambled for meager grants to fight AIDS, develop alternative energy sources, or in general actually accomplish something useful.
When his critics complained about his use of the term "flapdoodle" to describe ID, he suggested they could take their pick from a list of alternates: "balderdash, baloney, blather, bunkum, bushwa, claptrap, gobbledygook, hocus-pocus, hogwash, hokum, hooey, humbug, mumbo-jumbo, piffle, rigmarole, tripe, twaddle." In the end, he described the whole dispute as "worse than the bloody Middle East."
* All the fussing aside, Derbyshire's insistence that public science education "teach the consensus" was hard to make any credible argument against. "Academic freedom" is a meaningful concept when applied to university researchers; it is much less meaningful when applied to secondary school teachers, who are required to follow curricula set up by consensus of the members of state educational boards. Trying to teach "everything that has a following somewhere" would create chaos, and if students are to get the facts, it doesn't make any sense to establish them through a public referendum. The science and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920:1992) once had an argument with a fellow sci-fi author who suggested that there must be something to magic because so many people had believed in it for so long. Asimov shot back: "People used to think the Earth was flat. Do you want to put it up to a vote?"
If citizens want their children to acquire a useful education in the sciences, they have no alternative but to ask the recognized community of professionals to provide it. Where else would the citizens get it? From the construction industry? Major league sports? Make it up themselves? Professionals with credentials are not a perfect source of information, but would it be preferable to choose a quack with a degree from a diploma mill in the Bahamas? The only useful way for the critics to challenge the information provided by the professionals is to fund and perform credible research to show why the evidence is wrong, then submit it to peer review and address the criticisms that follow. Public-relations grandstanding is just not going to do the job.
* The first major political issue involving Discovery Institute staff took place in 2001, when Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum attached language, partly written by Philip Johnson, to encourage "teaching the controversy" to a child education bill. This effort was a fizzle -- the language was cut in committee and didn't make it through to the final bill. The next year, 2002, a bill to "teach the controversy" was brought before the Ohio state legislature, but despite personal lobbying by Johnson and Dembski, the bill didn't pass.
However, the Discovery Institute was also pursuing a tactic of lobbying state education boards directly as a means of furthering the organization's agenda. The boards set state educational agendas, and lobbying the boards attracted much less attention than lobbying state legislatures. Some members of the Ohio state education board were sympathetic to the lobbying and decided to include "teach the controversy" in the educational curriculum.
Matters came to a head in an attempt in 2004 by the school board of Dover, a rural town in the state of Pennsylvania near Harrisburg, to require that biology teachers tell their classes that Darwinism was "just a theory" and a dodgy theory at that, and recommend OF PANDAS AND PEOPLE to provide an alternate view. The exercise was essentially textbook stickers all over again: WARNING! HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH!
While its backers believed they were promoting academic freedom in a very modest and prudent way, that wasn't how the affected Dover high school teachers saw things. From their point of view, it was as if they were teaching classes on medicine, and had been required to read a statement that not only called the credibility of their lessons into doubt but then recommended snake oil as an alternative. The teachers refused to read the statement. School administration officials read the statement instead.
A monster uproar that made international news followed. One of the school board members who had backed the exercise recalled later he was astounded at the violence of the reaction, saying: "It was like we'd shot someone's dog." Given the long history of legal feuding over Darwin, with the textbook stickers controversy still in progress at the time, it shouldn't have been such a surprise. Eleven parents, backed up by the ACLU and other organizations, promptly filed a suit against the school board, claiming it was an attempt to impose a religious doctrine on public education. The defense was backed by the Thomas More Law Center, a public legal organization that works on conservative causes. The case was named KITZMILLER VERSUS DOVER AREA SCHOOL DISTRICT, Tammy Kitzmiller being one of the parents pressing the case.
Testimony in the case involved figures such as Michael Behe and Ken Miller. At one point, Miller went to the witness stand wearing a tie clip made of a stripped-down mousetrap to satirize Behe's IC pitch. OF PANDAS & PEOPLE was put under close scrutiny, with the court issuing a subpoena to obtain early drafts of the document. It turned out that the initial drafts used explicitly creationist terminology, which were changed with a search-replace in the wake of court decisions against creation science during the 1980s. In a 1987 draft, the search-replace had gone wrong, producing the phrase "cdesign proponentsist"; the critics of ID involved in the trial suggested that they had found a "missing link" between creation science and ID.
Late in 2005, US District Court Judge John E. Jones III declared the efforts of the Dover school board a violation of the Establishment Clause, releasing a 139-page decision. Judge Jones ruled that the defendants had a clearly religious agenda, pointing out that Design "violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation." He elaborated:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Both defendants and many of the leading proponents of Intelligent Design make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a Supreme Being and to religion in general. To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis, grounded in religion, into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.
END QUOTE
There was still no way to serve spamloaf to the courts and convince the judges it was steak. Judge Jones -- whose had solid conservative credentials, having been appointed to the district court by the Bush II Administration, with his nomination sponsored by Senator Santorum -- edged into the scathing in his dismissal, calling the efforts of the Darwin-bashers in Dover an exercise in "breathtaking inanity" and saying in that the whole thing was an "utter waste of monetary and personal resources." The judge did not conceal his irritation with the attempts of the defendants in the Dover case to tapdance around their real intent, coming close to charging them with perjury, describing their claims that they were not motivated by religious ideology as "flagrant and insulting falsehoods".
Since Judge Jones' conservative background had initially suggested he might well be sympathetic to the defense, the blunt verdict came as something of a shock to those who had been expecting a different result. The Darwin-bashers, instead of suspecting that their arguments lacked credibility, attacked the judge's impartiality and loudly denounced him. He later had to receive Federal protection when threats were made against him and his family -- much to his astonishment, the judge later commenting that he would have expected threats over a trial against drug dealers, but not over an Establishment Clause case.
* There had been some eagerness among Discovery Institute personnel to give Intelligent Design its day in court. In May 2005, Dembski had described on his blog a "vise strategy" in which evolutionary scientists would be forced to testify under oath in a courtroom, with proper cross-examination likely to "squeeze the truth out of Darwinists" and not allow them to get away with their "long history of evading critical scrutiny."
Dembski's strategy did not take into consideration the fact that under such circumstances, ID was also going to get its turn in the vise, and the game of "don't ask don't tell" was likely to crack very quickly under the pressure. In his decision, Judge Jones cited admissions by Behe that the plausibility of ID was, unlike any other widely accepted scientific theory, dependent on the belief in the existence of God, and that the expanded definition of science advocated by ID advocates would qualify astrology as a science. The judge also pointed out that Behe's belief that irreducible complexity implied Intelligent Design was neither supported by logic nor by research.
The Discovery Institutes's critics were quick to point out that Dembski, although he had been lined up as an expert witness, didn't show. In fact, the Discovery Institute generally distanced themselves from the trial, seeing it as a poor vehicle for pushing their agenda, fearing it would undercut their efforts. They protested that the verdict had unfairly discredited the whole concept of Intelligent Design. Fairly or unfairly, that's precisely what it did.
In the wake of the Dover decision, the governor of the state of Ohio asked the board of education to review the "teach the controversy" language that had crept into the state's educational curriculum, and a few weeks later the board removed the language. During the Dover trial, the Kansas state board of education -- which in 1999 had notoriously attempted to flatly eliminate evolutionary teaching from the school curriculum, only to backtrack the next year in the face of loud protests -- had introduced "teach the controversy" language written up with assistance from the Discovery Institute into the curriculum. By early 2007, the language had been withdrawn in the face of further protests.
* Once again, however, for whatever satisfaction scientists felt over the stinging legal defeat handed out by Dover to the Darwin-bashers, the struggle continues. By 2008, new court cases were emerging, and given a US Supreme Court lineup tilted more towards conservatives, the Darwin-bashers were feeling more confident that they might be able to finally carry the day.
Darwin-bashers like to proclaim that their movement is growing in strength politically, and for once they are unarguably right. The Discovery Institute continues to be well funded and continues to refine tactics. In 2007, the DI backed publication of a textbook for high-schoolers to complement the college-targeted DESIGN OF LIFE; the high-school text was given the title of EXPLORE EVOLUTION, clearly in an attempt to obscure the fact that it was a compilation of traditional anti-Darwin arguments. The exercise suggested to observers of the DI that the organization is altering tactics, deemphasizing formal Intelligent Design rhetoric in favor of disguising the message as mainstream science. The DI is also now backed up by a campus organization, the "Intelligent Design & Evolution Awareness (IDEA)" Center, with chapters at dozen of educational institutions in the US and abroad.
Conservative religious groups inclined to Darwin-bashing, such as Pentacostalists, have been growing in global influence at the expense of more traditional religions that don't have a real problem with the idea -- and the various anti-Darwin factions have been willing to bury their differences to form a "big tent" and unite their efforts at opposition. High-school science teachers in some conservative districts of rural America report that the school administrations tell them to not even mention the "e" (evolution) word lest it cause an uproar, with geology classes giving the age of the Earth only as "very, very old."
Reactionary Islam is also jumping on the Darwin-basher bandwagon. In 2006, hundreds of schools and other institutions in Europe were startled to receive a book titled THE ATLAS OF CREATION, written by Turkish Darwin-basher Adnan Oktar. The book featured a lavish spread of beautiful illustrations, backing up materials similar to those found in ICR literature. It is said that in some countries not used to controversy over Darwinism, the reaction was public shock and outrage.
In the UK, teachers reported that the number of students raising protests against classes involving evolutionary science had increased dramatically, mostly due to the larger number of Muslim students. In 2007, a display of prehuman remains in Kenya was loudly denounced by local Darwin-bashers, and security precautions were taken due to worries that the exhibit might be vandalized. In the same year, a Russian family tried to sue the authorities for only teaching Darwinism in biology classes; the suit was unsuccessful, but the family was backed by the Russian Orthodox Church. At least the days when Darwin-bashing could be regarded as a uniquely American sport are over.
