Posted on 02/17/2006 10:36:42 AM PST by SirLinksalot
Designed to create controversy
Courts, school boards and public opinion have made evolution a hot topic
By Bruce Lieberman UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER February 16, 2006
UC San Diego biologist Ajit Varki doesn't want to debate evolution. Doing that, he said, would make people think there's something to debate.
For him, rejecting evolution is like trying to understand chemistry without the Periodic Table of the Elements or arguing that Earth is flat.
“Everybody can have their own view of faith and origins and so on,” Varki said. “But when it comes to science, you've got to deal with facts.”
Although researchers such as Varki embrace evolution, polls show that nearly half of the American public rejects it, prefering to believe God created humans at some point in the past 10,000 years. So the national debate about the teaching of evolution carries on. In recent months, a convergence of school-board disagreements, court cases and public pronouncements by conservative legislators have again made evolution a hot topic in the American cultural landscape.
As controversies about evolution have erupted at public schools in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kansas, California and elsewhere, President Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and other political leaders have argued that evolution should be balanced with other views.
Acknowledging the high-profile discord, the American Association for the Advancement of Science will hold several panel discussions on evolution at its annual meeting, which began today in St. Louis. The association is the world's largest general scientific group.
The conference's focus on evolution follows the association's declaration in December that evolution-related discoveries in 2005 were the science world's “Breakthrough of the Year.”
Also in December, a federal judge ruled that it was unconstitutional for a school district in Dover, Pa., to present intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in high school biology classes.
Supporters of intelligent design argue that complexities seen in nature cannot be explained by evolution, which refers to a natural process of genetic changes that leads to new species over time. They insist that an intelligent designer brings about the phenomena, though their studies make no conclusions about the identity of this designer.
More than 150 years after Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, millions of Americans believe there's scant evidence for it. That alarms biologists such as Varki, who wonder how Americans can so readily disregard more than a century of scientific advancements.
“I know that a lot of scientists are very frustrated about it,” Varki said. “On the other hand, I think for us individually to go out and try to deal with it is hopeless.”
Resurgent interest
Many issues divide Americans, but evolution doesn't have to be one of them, some scientists and historians said.
Lost in today's polarizing debates about evolution is a recognition that many scientists are religious people and many religious people respect the value of science, said Naomi Oreskes, a historian at the University of California San Diego.
“The bigger issue here is what is and isn't science,” Kohn said. “There's no scientist who's going to prove or disprove the existence of God. It's just a different realm.”
The evolution debate has huge implications. At stake are decisions on how public schools should teach children about the origin of humans, religion's place in public life and whether Americans believe in the ability of science to describe the natural world.
Why does the question of how humans came to be still generate conflict in America, and why has it received greater attention in the past year? The answer has a lot to do with the nation's religious heritage, Americans' suspicion of authority and appeal for a sense of fairness, their unfamiliarity with science, and election politics, historians and social scientists said.
The Dover court decision was a mere “bump in the road” for people who aim to discredit evolution, said scholars who have studied the controversy. Proponents of intelligent design agree.
“We're getting more calls, more e-mails . . . (and) a lot more requests from students, especially college-age students who are looking at going into the sciences,” said Robert L. Crowther, a spokesman with the Discovery Institute, a Seattle group that promotes intelligent design.
“Rather than be the nail in the coffin,” Crowther said, “this decision and the whole trial itself has really ignited the issue.”
Roots of tension
The United States is a predominantly religious country with tens of millions of people who believe deeply that God created human beings. But it also has a Constitution that calls for the separation of church and state.
“American society has always had a kind of uneasy compromise between a deep religious conviction on the part of the American people, and also a constitutional commitment to the nonestablishment of religion,” Oreskes said. “I think those things have always lived in tension.”
The evolution controversy also continues to be fueled by Americans' predisposition to question authority, Oreskes said. U.S. scientists displayed this trait in the late 19th century when they broke from European ideas of how science should be conducted.
“We had this wonderful anti-authoritarian attitude that made it possible for us to make new innovations and be more open-minded,” Oreskes said. “Well, guess what? That comes home to roost, because it's not scientists in America who are anti-authoritarian, it's Americans in general.”
Today, the science establishment is perceived by many as just another object of authority that's worthy of suspicion, she said.
While scientists have refused to speak with believers of intelligent design and creation science, politicians have long courted them, said Jon D. Miller, a professor at Northwestern University Medical School who studies the public's understanding of science. Miller is the organizer of “Science Under Attack,” a Saturday session at the conference in St. Louis.
In his view, the struggle over teaching evolution in schools has been fueled largely by religious conservatives hoping to secure office in Republican-dominated states.
“There's a very pragmatic reason why these (debates) reappear, and it's not at all accidental that they appear right before major primary elections,” Miller said. “These issues become in right-wing politics a very powerful tool, because it's a way of mobilizing a base. . . . It's a litmus test, and besides, it's kind of a throwaway issue. It doesn't really make any economic difference to anybody.”
The tactic is hardly new in American politics, Miller said. For years, he noted, Democrats in the South exploited the politics of race to win elections.
By advocating that all sides of the human-origin issue be given equal time, Bush, Frist and other legislators appeal to Americans' sense of fairness and justice, social scientists said.
“It's a wonderful cultural trait, and I think having town meetings and participatory democracy – that's just wonderful, and it's completely irrelevant to science,” said Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland. The nonprofit group works to preserve the teaching of evolution in public schools.
Scientific knowledge is not built on a sea of opinions, researchers said, but on an accumulation of evidence that supports or overturns ideas about how the world functions.
“People learned in second grade that science is observational, science is experimental, science is repeatable,” Scott said. “They learn this set of characteristics someplace in junior high or high school, but they kind of miss the big picture.”
Raising defenses Nicholas Spitzer, a neuroscientist at UCSD, draws a sharp distinction between science and intelligent design. “The thing that science does is it allows an experimental approach,” he said. “The thing that intelligent design does is to take experiment off the table.”
Proponents of intelligent design have said all they want is a fair hearing. Yet no organizer of the science conference in St. Louis contacted the Discovery Institute – the group that espouses intelligent design – to see if it wanted to participate in the discussions about evolution, Crowther said.
That's disappointing for Josh Norton, a UCSD senior and head of an intelligent-design club on campus.
“They're not objectively interacting with the argument,” said Norton, a math and philosophy major. “We don't have anyone going to (the conference) to talk about intelligent design, and that bothers me.”
Norton has had difficulty getting professors at his university to talk about the subject. He said one of them dismissed his request by saying, “there's nothing intelligent in intelligent design.”
Norton added: “That's the most frustrating of all. I may have a false belief . . . but I wish someone would at least show me why.”
At UCSD, which is known for its strength in science and engineering, faculty members are realizing they need to pay more attention to the controversy.
The university now requires students who major in biology to complete a course in biological evolution, Kohn said. The policy became effective with freshmen who enrolled last fall. Professors had discussed the change for years, he said, but the Sixth College poll made it more urgent.
“Our own faculty has gotten sensitized to the issue that there's a bunch of people that just don't get it,” Kohn said.
He doesn't expect much progress in resolving the evolution debate anytime soon.
“I think there is a deep-seated desire to believe that humans are special, and that the Earth is our dominion rather than we're just another endpoint among all the other endpoints of evolution,” Kohn said.
Archive?
Almost 50% of people have IQ's below 100!
I am skeptical of Evolution too, but I am still what would be considered an "Evolutionist" here on FreeRepublic.
Amazing they get into college at all, isn't it?
He doesn't expect much progress in resolving the evolution debate anytime soon.
“I think there is a deep-seated desire to believe that humans are special, and that the Earth is our dominion rather than we're just another endpoint among all the other endpoints of evolution,” Kohn said.
Nice to see they are so open minded at UCSD.
90% are under 120
so what
Why don't they conduct polls about scientists who believe in myths like overpopulation?
Some of these evolutionists are poor logicians. If the universe is ateleological, there are no endpoints. The man's statement is self-contradictory.
See, the reason they call it the theory of evolution is because it isn't a fact, sparky. If it was fact, it wouldn't be a theory. Did Varki skip that day of science class?
Well, except that we can demonstrate the existence of elements and the rotundity of the planet. Can't do that with macroevolution.
Don't ask scientists to think philosophically. That isn't going to happen.
Everybody's smart, just on different subjects - Will Rogers.
You obviously have your weaknesses.
Another day, another load.
bump
Mine is 129-132 and I'm skeptical also. Probably my scores were wrong.
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