EVIDENCE AGAINST EVOLUTION

The Edwards decision, as mentioned, rejected equal time for creationism and evo- lution but allowed secular, scientific alternatives to evolution legally to be taught. Antievolutionists generated abrupt appearance theory and ID because scientific alter- natives to evolution were not found in the scientific community. Creationists looking for an alternative to the now-unconstitutional creation science had another option suggested to them in the dissent to Edwards written by Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote, “The people of Louisiana, including those who are Christian fundamentalists,

are quite entitled, as a secular matter, to have whatever scientific evidence there may be against evolution presented in their schools, just as Mr. Scopes was entitled to present whatever scientific evidence there was for it” (Scalia, dissenting, Edwards, 482 U.S. 578, 634 (emphasis added)).

A month after the Edwards decision was published, the attorney Wendell Bird, who had argued the creationist side before the Supreme Court in Edwards, analyzed the decision in a joint paper published with ICR staff. The ICR staff seized on teaching evidence against evolution as a potential legal strategy for creationists—as creation science was no longer legal to teach. The article said: “In the meantime, school boards and teachers should be strongly encouraged at least to stress the scientific evidences and arguments against evolution in their classes (not just arguments against some proposed evolutionary mechanism, but against evolution per se), even if they don’t wish to recognize these as evidences and arguments for creation (not necessarily as arguments for a particular date of creation, but for creation per se)” (Bird 1987: 4).

Teaching evidence against evolution (EAE) thus was viewed as a way of teaching creationism on the sly. Given the two models mind-set of young-Earth creationism, this made perfect sense: evidence against evolution is considered evidence for creationism. Creationists believe (probably correctly) that students think in the same dichotomous way: if students learn that evolution is weak or invalid science, they automatically will conclude even without urging from a teacher that special creationism is the true explanation for nature. Given this reasoning, denigrating evolution by teaching the evidence against or a critical analysis of evolution becomes a backdoor way of teaching creationism.

A dissent, however, is not legally binding, and so there is no legal directive to teach EAE, though this is how creationists often present Scalia’s dissent to the public.

After Edwards (1987), there were a number of efforts by creationists to pass leg- islation requiring not equal time for creationism and evolution, but equal time for evolution and the alleged evidence against evolution. A series of bills with similar wording got their start with a 1996 Ohio bill resulting from the grassroots efforts of a retired Wisconsin teacher. John Hansen founded Operation T.E.A.C.H.E.S. (Teach Evolution Accurately, Comprehensively, Honestly, Equitably, Scientifically) and trav- eled around the country between 1995 and 2000 trying to persuade state legislators in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Kentucky, Alaska, Georgia, and New Mexico to sponsor his model bill (Hansen 1997, 1999, 2000). Ohio State Representa- tive Ron Hood formatted Hansen’s idea as legislation (Trevas 1996) and introduced it (without success) in 1996 and 2000. A Georgia legislator also introduced the Hood bill, and when Hansen retired to Arizona, he persuaded an Arizona legislator to in- troduce the bill as well. None of these bills passed. Hansen claimed in his newsletter that legislators in Alaska, New Mexico, and Kentucky also introduced his legislation, but I could find no record of such bills.

The Ohio legislation submitted by Representative Hood (HB 62, submitted in 1996, and HB 679, submitted in 2000) was virtually identical to the Georgia and Arizona bills: “Whenever a theory of the origin of humans or other living things that might commonly be referred to as ‘evolution’ is included in the instructional program provided by any school district or educational service center, both scientific evidence and related arguments supporting or consistent with the theory and scientific evidence

and related arguments problematic for, inconsistent with, or not supporting the theory shall be included.”

A 2001 Arkansas bill (HB 2548) forbade educational agencies to use public funds to purchase textbooks or other instructional materials lacking antievolution arguments from ID and traditional creation science sources: “No state agency, city, county, school district or political subdivision shall use any public funds to provide instruction or purchase books, documents or other written material which it knows or should have known contain descriptions, conclusions, or pictures designed to promote the false evidences set forth in subsection (d) of this section.”

Subsection (d) of the bill listed supposed examples of evolutionary fraud taken from ID proponent Jonathan Wells’s book, Icons of Evolution: Haeckel’s embryos, the Miller-Urey experiment, Archaeopteryx (the ancient bird), and the peppered moth example of natural selection. From traditional creation science (Chick 2000) the bill’s author took such staples as Piltdown man, Nebraska man, and Neanderthal man—all claimed to be fraudulent, though only the first actually was. Elsewhere in the bill were references to other creation science claims such as gaps in the fossil record, falsity of the geological column, and flaws in radiometric dating. Even if one were not familiar with creation science literature, the reference to evidences—a term from Christian apologetics rather than science—would reveal the inspiration for this bill.

In addition to assuming that scientific evidence against evolution exists, such bills—like the equal time bills they supplanted—appeal to the American public’s appreciation of fairness; the third “pillar of creationism.” The American political tradition of local decision making (e.g., by town councils or local school boards) encourages a wide variety of voices to contend for influence and authority. Part of the American political and cultural tradition is for all voices to have an opportunity to be heard, even if later rejected. This is enshrined in the First Amendment’s Free Speech and Assembly clauses and manifests even in journalistic traditions in which the reporter is expected to present both views of a controversy. As will be discussed elsewhere (chapter 11), the fairness approach, though culturally very powerful, is misapplied in the realm of science, which actually is highly discriminating—against those views that fail to accurately explain nature.

Scientific knowledge grows because ideas are considered, weighted against the evidence, and provisionally accepted or rejected depending on how well they fare. In the initial stages of the consideration of a scientific explanation, a variety of positions are likely to be entertained, but as any scientist will be quick to admit, most explanations eventually end up on the cutting room (or perhaps laboratory) floor, or are seriously reworked. Once rejected, however, there must be a compelling reason for discarded explanations to be taken seriously again. Scientific claims for the world and its inhabitants suddenly coming into being, at one time, in their present form, have not been taken seriously since the end of the eighteenth century, and it is unfair to pretend to students that this view is a viable scientific option in the twenty-first century. On reflection, the American cultural tradition of fairness is most appropriately applied in matters of opinion, rather than in matters of fact and logic. The 1897 attempts by an Indiana legislator to pass a law setting the value of pi to 3.0 (Mikkelson 2007) are viewed as comical: we would respond the same way to an effort by an enthusiast of the

Old South to require textbooks to report that General Grant surrendered to General Lee at the end of the Civil War. There are some things that one’s preferences simply cannot change.

Evidence against evolution is emerging as a popular antievolution approach, espe- cially after the failure of ID to survive a constitutional challenge in the federal district court case Kitzmiller v. Dover (see chapter 7). It is attractive to legal specialists among the antievolutionists because it appears to avoid the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by not obviously promoting religion. It remains to be seen whether this strategy will be effective; as discussed in chapter 7, in a small number of cases, judges have alluded to the importance of looking at the historical context of policies pro- moting evidence against evolution and have declared them, in effect, creationism in disguise.

There are many phrases that express the underlying idea of EAE—that evolution is weak science that warrants careful student examination. One approach is to require students to critically analyze evolution—meaning that students should criticize it. An- other phrase used is “strengths and weaknesses of evolution”; yet another is presenting evolution as “theory not fact,” meaning to present evolution as a theory in the popular rather than the scientific sense as a guess or hunch. Frequently these theory-not-fact policies take the form of disclaimers that are to be read to students or pasted into textbooks.

Critically Analyzing Evolution

One EAE variant was promulgated by ID supporters on the Ohio State Board of Education during a controversy over the content of state science education standards in 2002. Lacking enough votes to have ID included in the standards, pro-ID board members arranged for a public hearing in March 2002 that would include ID propo- nents and opponents. Stephen C. Meyer, the director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, testified that as a compromise, the board members who had been pushing to include ID in the curriculum should instead encourage teachers to “teach the controversy” about evolution (Miller 2002:6). He contended that there was a vigorous debate going on within the scientific community over the validity of evolution. Jonathan Wells presented examples from his book Icons of Evolu- tion illustrating the kinds of problems with evolution that students supposedly should be taught. The anti-ID testifiers, biologist Kenneth R. Miller and physicist Lawrence Krauss, strongly discouraged adding ID to the standards, and also rebutted the claim that—at least among scientists—there was a controversy over whether evolution had occurred.

After much wrangling over wording, in October 2002 the board finally approved the standards, including one referring to evolution that read, “Describe how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory.” The wording illustrated how political the issue had become, as both the proevolution and antievolution factions could (and did) claim victory. Supporters of evolution education claimed that the standard required students to critically analyze different ideas within evolutionary theory, emphasizing the word aspects: “‘What we’re essentially saying here is evolution is a very strong theory, and students can learn from it by analyzing

evidence as it is accumulated over time,’ Tom McClain, a board member and co- chairman of the Ohio Board of Education’s academic standards committee, told the Associated Press” (Olsen 2002).

Intelligent design supporter Phillip Johnson, on the other hand, interpreted the standard as requiring students not to critically analyze but to criticize evolutionary theory: “The recent decision of the Ohio Science Standards Committee of the State School Board has been a big breakthrough. [Critics] are calling it a compromise, but it isn’t. It’s our position. It allows teachers to present evidence against the theory of evolution. This evidence includes the facts that the drawings of embryos in the textbooks are fraudulent and that the peppered moth experiment was botched if not an outright hoax” (Staub 2002; emphasis added).

A few years later, in 2006, in the wake of the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision, the Ohio Board of Education dropped the “critically analyze” standard, as well as a model antievolution classroom lesson plan that accompanied it. But criti- cal analysis of evolution has proved popular wording for a basic EAE approach; between 2002 and 2007, the National Center for Science Education recorded sixteen state or local policies promoting this approach in thirteen different states.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Evolution

Another approach creationists use is to propose that when evolution is taught, both “strengths” and “weaknesses” of the subject should be taught; sometimes the language used calls for teaching evidence for and evidence against evolution. In all cases, the content presented is the familiar creation science and ID claims that there are gaps in the fossil record, that natural selection cannot produce big changes like body plan differences, that the overwhelming complexity of even the simplest cell cannot be explained by natural processes but requires special creation, and so on.

State science education standards are often divided into process skills and content sections. Process skills include information students should know about science as a way of knowing—that science includes observation, experimentation, testing, and so on. The content sections outline the concepts and facts students should know within any discipline. Physics content standards, for example, usually include the requirement that students understand concepts of mass and density. Texas state science standards are known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS. They include in each discipline (physics, chemistry, biology, and other fields) a process skill that states the following:

(3) Scientific processes. The student uses critical thinking and scientific problem solving to make informed decisions. The student is expected to (A) analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information.

Because process skill 3A accompanies the TEKS for each field of science, one might infer that the intent of the writers was that students should learn to be critical

thinkers, a worthy pedagogical goal. A teacher could choose any of a number of scientific explanations to assist students in learning these skills. However, in 2002– 2003, when biology textbooks were being considered for adoption, creationists on the state board of education lobbied to require the textbooks submitted by the publishers to include strengths and weaknesses of evolution—but no other scientific theory. Publishers were loath to rewrite their books to include a lot of bad science, but fortunately after much wrangling, the majority of the board voted to adopt the books largely as they were (Stutz 2003). Calling for strengths and weaknesses of evolution was again a contentious issue when the TEKS came up for revision in 2008 (Scharrer 2008).

During the 2003 hearings, creationists urged textbook publishers to include ex- amples of alleged strengths and weaknesses of evolution from the Discovery Institute Fellow Jonathan Wells’s book Icons of Evolution (Wells 2000). Wells himself spoke at the hearings about the various failings of the textbooks submitted for adoption. Without specifically mentioning intelligent design, Icons instead vigorously attacks evolution—the idea of common ancestry, as well as natural selection as a mechanism of evolution. Identifying commonly used textbook illustrations of evolution or of nat- ural selection as “icons,” Wells lambastes (among other examples) the Miller-Urey “sparking” experiments, which produced organic molecules from inorganic molecules; the concept of homology; the nineteenth-century embryologist Ernst Haeckel’s draw- ings of vertebrate embryos; the peppered moth natural selection experiments; and the idea of humans evolving from apes. Ostensibly a critique of high school and college textbooks, the book uses the presentation of the alleged icons in textbooks as an ex- cuse to attack the validity of evolution by natural selection itself. The book has been widely panned by scientists (Coyne 2002; Padian and Gishlick 2002; Scott 2001b), but it forms a template for the EAE approach. (A rebuttal to the claim of the supposed fraudulence of the peppered moth natural selection experiments is presented in the readings in chapter 11.)

A new book from the Discovery Institute, Explore Evolution, repeats many of these claims and is apparently intended for use as a textbook promoting the “critical analysis of evolution” or “strengths and weaknesses of evolution” approaches (Meyer, Minnich, Moneymaker, Nelson, and Seelke 2007).

Explore Evolution’s chapters are organized into “Arguments For” and “Arguments Against” sections. Unfortunately, the “Arguments For” are strawman presentations of evolutionary biology, from which students will learn little about standard science. The “Arguments Against” are familiar creationist claims. About half of the book is devoted to challenging the common ancestry of living things, arguing instead for the barely disguised alternative of special creation to explain similarities and differences ordinarily explained by evolution. Because the goal is to have Explore Evolution used in the public schools, obvious creationist language is avoided. As is typical in ID publications, natural selection comes in for special attack as being inadequate to explain the diversity of living things. Again typical of ID publications, evolution is presented as an active scientific controversy, despite statements from a wide range of scientific associations that, on the contrary, evolution is considered mainstream science (Sager 2008).

“Just a Theory” Disclaimers

Another EAE approach is to denigrate evolution by requiring that it be distin- guished from all other scientific explanations as a theory, by which they mean a guess or a hunch. Often such efforts are coupled with requirements that disclaimers (“evo- lution is just a theory”) be included in textbooks or be read to students. As discussed in chapter 1, scientific theories are far from guesses: there are many explanations in science, and the best ones are elevated to theories. When school boards or state leg- islatures attempt to single out evolution as just a theory, it is clear that they are not using this term in its scientific sense. But such disclaimers and policies have the net effect of drawing attention to evolution as a particularly controversial subject, which makes it less likely that evolution will be taught.

Efforts to require disclaimers for evolution began in Texas, when in 1974 the state board of education required that all biology textbooks bought in the state treat evolution as a theory and not factually verifiable. “Furthermore, each text- book must carry a statement on an introductory page that any material on evo- lution included in the book is clearly presented as theory rather than verified” (Mattox, Green, Richards, and Gilpin 1984: 1). Although in 1984 the Texas at- torney general opined that the Texas disclaimer was illegal (see chapter 10), other states and communities have regularly proposed and passed such evolution-only disclaimers.

The vast majority of theory, not fact, policies and disclaimers do not pass, but the publicity given to them contributes to the general perception that evolution is somehow less valid than other scientific subjects. A disclaimer that was passed by the board of education in Tangipahoa, Louisiana, in 1994 singled out evolution for special treatment. Teachers were directed to read the disclaimer to students before discussing evolution or assigning readings. The disclaimer read in part:

It is hereby recognized by the Tangipahoa Parish Board of Education, that the lesson to be presented, regarding the origin of life and matter, is known as the Scientific Theory of Evolution and should be presented to inform students of the scientific concept and not intended to influence or dissuade the Biblical version of Creation or any other concept. It is further recognized by the Board of Education that it is the basic right and privilege of each student to form his/her own opinion or maintain beliefs taught by parents on this very important matter of the origin of life and matter. Students are urged to exercise critical thinking and gather all information possible and closely examine each alternative