The Chris Moeller Archives

The monkees are back

This spring, I've been reading a terrific book called "Summer for the Gods." Written by Edward J. Larson, it won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1997. It documents concisely and fairly the John Scopes Trial of 1925 and the clash between evolutionists and creationists during that heated summer in Dayton, Tennessee, when Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution in a public school in violation of state law.

This spring, the issue of marginalizing evolution has also reared it's ugly head on the national news pages, this time in the outpost of Topeka, KS, where the State Board of Education is busy conducting sham hearings designed to get the theory of "intelligent design" included in state science textbooks.
Adherents of intelligent design, if you're not familiar, believe that the complexity of the natural world could not have occurred by chance. Some intelligent entity, they contend, must have created the complexity. It's a step away from creationism and the strictest biblical literalism, but is grounded in the same junk science, and designed, likewise, to sneak Biblical teaching into America's science curriculum.
In Topeka, three conservative board members, a majority, have been conducting hearings on both "theories," claiming that debate is the healthiest course of action here. It isn't. Like the circus in Tennessee eight decades ago, the hearings are designed to attract attention to faith-based psychological and economic ventures. The healthy debate has already taken place in the scientific community during the two centuries since Darwin. And guess what, a verdict is in. The facts support natural selection, and they continue to provide the key building blocks of biology, physics, geology, chemistry, anthropology, and astronomy.

For three days in Topeka last week, witnesses called by intelligent design advocates attacked evolutionary theory that natural processes can develop from non-living chemicals, that all life has a common source, and that man and ape had a common ancestor. Evolutionists have been invited to testify on Thursday, but the attorney for the evolutionary theory is refusing to call scientists. State and national science groups are boycotting the hearings, viewing them as rigged against evolution. Kansas scientists watching the hearings argue that nearly all of the science presented during the testimony has been incorrect, and been provided by scholars on the fringe of the scientific world. The political ambitions of the board members have often surfaced as well, such as when board member Connie Morris told an ID witness, "I wish I had you in my office to answer all the e-mails I got from all over the country."

I applaud attorney Pedro Irigonegaray's decision to deny the Board the scientific justification it seeks. The results of this hearing are already a foregone conclusion, and will have to be met by court appeal. But I also cherish the different approach taken by the great Clarence Darrow in the Tennessee court in 1925. Darrow succeeded in putting the power of local majorities on trial. In a criminal court setting, he could keep the court's focus on the scientific validity of the creationists' religious beliefs; and by putting his public adversary, William Jennings Bryan, on the stand, he could prevent the populist orator from having a soapbox for his political agenda.
"Do you believe Joshua made the Earth stood still?" he asked Bryan at one point. Then, "Have you ever pondered what would have happened to the earth if it had stood still?"
Bryan expressed his faith, "No; the God I believe in could have taken care of that, Mr. Darrow."
"Don't you know it would have been converted into a molten mass of matter?" Darrow followed.
Eventually, the prosecutor objected, "What's the purpose of this examination?"
Darrow answered heroically.
"We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and that is all."
They don't make 'em like Darrow anymore.

The late anthropologist, noted baseball writer, and Lisa Simpson confidante, Stephen Jay Gould, wrote eloquently in 1989 about the need by some to simplify our origins. "Too few people are comfortable with evolutionary modes of explanation in any form," he wrote. "I do not know why we tend to think so fuzzily in this area, but one reason must reside in our social and psychic attraction to creation myths, identify heroes and sacred places, while evolutionary stories provide no palpable, particular thing as a symbol for reverence, worship, or patriotism."

Isn't it more thrilling, though, to embrace what Gould called the "grandeur in the sweep of continuity?" What I know for sure is that it's incumbent upon intellectual people to constantly remind the bigots and the ignoramuses that the truth and the desire for truth- fact and comfort- are not the same thing.

posted by CM @ 10:34 PM