Interview with Steve Jones: the threat of creationism Understand article

By Dean Madden from the National Centre for Biotechnology Education, University of Reading, UK.

When Darwin was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, UK, his future career was strongly influenced by several scientists, notably geologist Adam Sedgwick and John Henslow, the botanist who suggested that Darwin should accompany Captain FitzRoy on the HMS Beagle. As was required of Cambridge dons at that time, the two scientists were ordained church ministers. They were also deeply committed Christians. Yet even they, some 30 years before Origin of Species was published, doubted the literal truth of the Bible. In England, general acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution was rapid, and the Anglican church soon came to terms with it. Elsewhere in Europe and America, religious opposition was muted: typically the debate was not whether natural processes or the Christians’ God had created living things, but whether the creation was a result of a supernatural influence working through nature or the result of natural processes (‘what happened?’ not ‘whodunnit?’).

The Catholic hierarchy has generally been conservative, but the overwhelming weight of evidence was such that in 1996, Pope John Paul II issued a letter in which he said that the work of scientists worldwide: “… leads us to recognise in the theory of evolution more than a hypothesis” (unlike many modern creationists, John Paul understood the difference between a mere hypothesis and a scientific theory). Today, mainstream Christians are not usually biblical literalists, and leaders in both the Catholic and Anglican churches have recently reaffirmed their opposition to the teaching of creationism in science lessons (Thavis, 2006; Bates, 2006).

In August 2006, an analysis of people’s acceptance of evolution was published by the journal Science (Miller, 2006). Thirty-two European nations plus the USA and Japan were compared in the report. The study showed that Icelanders, Danes, Swedes, French, Japanese and Britons were among those most likely to accept that humans evolved “… from earlier species of animals”. Individuals with a strong belief in a personal God and who prayed frequently were significantly less likely to accept the concept of evolution. In the USA and Turkey, where strong religious beliefs are common and evolution education has been politicised, people were least likely to accept evolution.

Throughout the western world, particularly in Europe, secular modernity has long been seen as a consequence of urbanisation, increased wealth and better education. Sociologists have speculated that, as the religious become increasingly conscious of their unusual identity in a secular society, they may become more entrenched in their views. Such entrenchment may also be true of those of no faith, living in predominantly religious societies. This may account for the increasingly polarised debate over the teaching of evolution that has been noted by several observers, including Steve Jones.

The emergence of much modern opposition to the teaching of evolution worldwide can be traced back to the pioneering days of the USA, when settlers from different religious backgrounds, unable to rely upon an established church hierarchy, found it necessary to develop their own ‘do it yourself’ churches. This, coupled with a highly decentralised education system, largely run by elected amateurs in 17 000 school districts, has led to several instances where school boards have tried to prevent the teaching of evolution or to promote the teaching of religion. These have often been challenged in the courts.

The most famous remains the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ of 1925, which was held in Dayton, Tennessee, USA. By the mid-1920s, six of the Southern states had already passed anti-evolution laws. The Scopes trial was a publicity stunt concocted by local businessmen to boost Dayton’s flagging economy: the trial would be the first in the USA to be broadcast live on the radio. When he was approached by several businessmen, twenty-four-year-old John Scopes agreed to their request to stand trial. Everyone knew that Scopes was likely to be convicted of teaching evolution, although in reality he may only have used a book that included evolution, and may not have taught the subject. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which backed Scopes’ defence, planned to appeal to the US Supreme Court in the hope of obtaining a judgement which clarified the rights of the individual over those of the government.

Although Scopes was convicted, the ruling was soon overturned on a technicality, robbing the ACLU of its chance to take the case further. The ban on evolution education remained, and the amount of evolution taught in US schools declined over the next 35 years, so that evolution was absent from almost all US school biology textbooks in the early 1960s. The Sputnik scare of 1957 prompted a re-think of US science education, and evolution returned to the textbooks, notably the new high-school texts produced by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study. When the Tennessee law and others like it were eventually declared unconstitutional in the 1960s, the anti-evolutionists were forced to adopt a different strategy. This approach was necessitated by the USA’s separation of church and state, which does not permit the teaching of religion as religion in publicly funded schools. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, ‘creation science’ was their preferred mechanism.

‘Creation science’ attempted to suggest that scientific evidence supported biblical events, and demanded that equal time be given to creationism and evolution in the classroom. Most of the highly selective interpretations of evidence were obvious nonsense. For instance, it was suggested that humans initially escaped the biblical flood by climbing to the tops of mountains. Dinosaurs, however, were less successful and trilobites even less so – this accounted for the relative positions of fossils in rock strata. Several court judgements, notably in Arkansas and Louisiana, ruled out the ‘equal time’ argument. Creationism was deemed a religious idea by the US Supreme Court, not a scientific one, and therefore it could not be taught in US schools.

Recently, the plain creationism of Scopes’s time and ‘creation science’ of the late 20th century have been replaced by ‘intelligent design’ (ID), a strategy promoted by the US Discovery Institute, which aims to “… replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God”.

The ID movement generally avoids any reference to a God however, and presents its ideas as rational alternatives to accepted scientific understanding, which should therefore be entitled to equal treatment in (US) science classrooms. Consequently, ‘Teach the controversy’ became the new slogan of the anti-evolutionists.

Perhaps because of its appeal to fairness and its superficially scientific approach, unlike that of similar efforts in the past, the ID movement’s influence has been felt far beyond its native USA. Well-organised, often generously funded and sometimes politically endorsed campaigns have influenced school education not only in countries such as Poland and Turkey, where religion and politics are closely associated, but also in more secular societies including France, Germany and Italy. Early in 2004, for example, Italy witnessed the removal of the theory of evolution from the middle-school curriculum, ostensibly because students ‘were confused by it’. Almost two years later, after a ‘Darwin Commission’ had reported, a weakened account of evolution was re-introduced, omitting any reference to human origins.

This and similar events, such as the Dover School Board trial in the USA, led the Interacademy Panel on International Issues, a global network of the world’s science adcademies, to issue a statement on the teaching of evolution in June 2006^w2. “Theories about the origin and evolution of life on Earth…”, it said, were being “…confused with theories not testable by science”. It noted that all forms of life on Earth continue to evolve, a fact which “…palaeontology and the modern biological and biochemical sciences are describing and independently confirming with increasing precision. Commonalities in the structure of the genetic code of all organisms living today, including humans, clearly indicate their common primordial origin”. Similarly, the Council of Europe has issued a strongly worded statement in support of teaching evolution^w3.

What will the next challenge from the creationists be? In Louisiana, USA, groups hostile to evolution have adopted a subtle new tactic, which appears to encourage a cherished feature of science. They have proposed and passed a law which requires ‘academic freedom’ to promote “… critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied, including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning”. Critics fear that this law and others will allow creationism in by the back door.