A NEW WIND TO INHERIT

Snave's Note: Thanks to friend Joe for the cartoon above and the article below. I tend to agree with just about all of the article.

by Evan Cornog
Newark Star-Ledger
08-21-05

Science is unruly. Rather than respecting the wishes of despots or popular majorities, it stubbornly adheres to a "scientific method" and widely agreed-upon standards of truth. Independent intellectual inquiry has always been a risky business, as Socrates and Galileo and so many others have learned the hard way.

This summer marks the 80th anniversary of the "Monkey Trial," in which a Tennessee schoolteacher named John T. Scopes was prosecuted for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in violation of state law. The trial is perhaps best known through the 1960 movie "Inherit the Wind," which presented a thinly fictionalized account of the courtroom confrontation between Clarence Darrow, the crusading Chicago lawyer who took Scopes' side, and William Jennings Bryan, the veteran tribune of Midwestern discontent who used his rhetorical skills to support the state of Tennessee.

In the 1920s, the national press portrayed Tennessee officials as ignorant hicks (some of the reporters at the trial actually applauded remarks by lawyers for Scopes, and H. L. Mencken took particular delight in going after Bryan, whom he described as a kind of "fundamentalist Pope").

Today, four score years after Scopes' conviction (which was later overturned on a legal technicality), creationism has taken a new, more sophisticated form as "intelligent design" (or ID) theory, and it has been getting much kinder treatment in the press.

Advocates of ID are careful to avoid the mistakes of earlier creationists -- they keep mentions of God to a minimum, and no longer try to advocate (as Bryan did at the Monkey Trial) a literal reading of the Book of Genesis as the explanation for the presence and diversity of life on earth. The emphasis is on "gaps" in the theory of evolution, and ID advocates urge schools to "teach the controversy" rather than demanding, as Tennessee tried to do, that schools avoid teaching evolution entirely.

This position has recently won support from President Bush (the "education president"), who declared to a group of reporters from Texas, "Both sides ought to be properly taught" in order that "people can understand what the debate is about."

The president's position is, then, that of the advocates of ID. And in a nation where more than half the people, according to a recent Gallup poll, think creationism/intelligent design ought to be taught in the schools, it would seem a politically savvy move.

But the real savvy belongs to the leaders of the ID movement, who have managed to create the appearance of a "debate" where, at least as far as science is concerned, there is none.
They have done this in a way that takes advantage of both ordinary people's sense of fair play (after all, where's the harm in hearing both sides?) and the conventions of American journalism, where the desire to represent "both sides" has of late frequently deteriorated into a reflexive balancing act in which reporters and editors, fearful of controversy, avoid anything that looks like editorializing.

As a result, Holocaust deniers are given equal time with legitimate historians, the allegations of the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" are "balanced" against a far more extensive and long-standing record of Sen. John Kerry's heroism in Vietnam, and ID advocates are given a prominent place (such as the op-ed page of last Monday's USA Today) to present their views in opposition to the opinion of pretty much the entire global scientific establishment.

So when Time magazine does a cover story on the controversy, as it did earlier this month, it feels compelled to include a "face-off" between Darwinians and anti-Darwinians on the origin of the eyeball.

After Bush's surprising victory in last November's election, many New York media types decided they had to take the religious views of red-state Americans more seriously, and in many cases that is a good thing. But it is also important to call ignorance ignorance, and to distinguish between things that ought to be taught in science classes (such as evolutionary theory, which is one of the pillars of modern science, and has been supported by more than a century of testing) and those things that ought to be considered in social studies classes (such as creationism and ID).

In an essay for the British magazine New Scientist, Lawrence Krauss, director of the Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics at Case Western Reserve University, lamented: "Science only functions with the presumption of honesty. It flounders when confronted by those who knowingly and willingly distort the truth." Krauss goes on to point out the avowedly religious goals of various ID advocates, and says that science courses routinely "teach the controversy" in areas where genuine scientific debate exists.

Journalists, though, function in a more political realm, and sometimes are slow to report as reality points of view on which scientific opinion is reasonably settled (such as global warming, which is overwhelmingly seen as a fact by environmental scientists, whatever the cavils of the Bush administration and others).

But by surrendering its own faculties of critical judgment, journalism can do a grave disservice to the country. Science education is struggling as it is, and long gone are the bold days when the nation responded to the Soviet Union's launch of the first Sputnik spacecraft in 1957 with a renewed commitment to teaching science in our schools.

The United States is not alone in its newfound infatuation with creationist ideas. Evolution has come under attack abroad, in such nations as Serbia and Pakistan. Are those the nations we want to accept as our peers in the pursuit of knowledge? Our nation is alert, as never before, to the dangers posed by Islamic fundamentalism; but we seem to be growing less alert to the dangers posed by our own, indigenous fundamentalism.

Our journalists need to recover a bit of that self-confident tone that allowed their predecessors in 1925 to ridicule the ignorant lawmakers of Tennessee. Ignorance is ignorance, and intelligent design is creationism dressed up for the talk-show circuit.