DEFENDING EVOLUTION, AS STRANGE AS IT MAY SEEM1

Abstract

The wake-up call has been sounded many times, and yet scientists and science educators keep trying to ignore it: turning the other cheek, asleep in their ivory towers. Creationists have made steady advances since the 1960s, despite having been repeatedly and soundly defeated in the courtrooms (the last time they won a legal battle was at the Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925). The advances are being made at the level that is farthest from the everyday concern of most evolutionary biologists: the grassroots level of junior and high school students, their parents and—astoundingly—their teachers. As unbelievable as it may seem, poll after poll not only confirms that only about 10% of Americans believe that evolution occurs and is entirely a natural phenomenon, but that about a third of high school biology teachers rejects the theory of evolution. Worse, about 56% of science teachers nationwide disagree with or are undecided about the statement ‘‘evolution is scientific fact.’’ Even among the biology teachers who would actually like to teach evolution in their classrooms, my first-hand experience is that they simply don’t know it. They are themselves the product of an educational system that focuses on how to teach instead of what to teach, with the result that they are full of innovative pedagogical ideas that they have no way of implementing because they don’t know well enough the subject matter they are supposed to teach. In the public arena, creationism is evolving rapidly. Although many Americans are still enchanted with dinosaurs such as John Morris and Duane Gish (Arthur 1994) of the oxymoronically named Institute for Creation Research, a brand new wave of intelligent design ‘‘theorists’’ has been making inroads—with the media, politicians, and even one academic press (Cambridge)—mostly because of the large influx of money from the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and the Templeton Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Religion (Holden 1999). There is nothing scientific about scientific creationism, with its medieval claims of a universal flood that killed the dinosaurs 4,000 years ago, that the earth was created in six days a couple of thousand years earlier than that, and that there were once only two ancestral erect humans walking on this planet: Adam and Eve. Yet the degree of scientific illiteracy among the U.S. public is so great that half the pop-