OPEN LETTER TO THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF BIOLOGY TEACHERS
AND THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR SCIENCE EDUCATION
As an instructor of geology at a State University, and an Evangelical
Christian, I would like to state my opposition to Dr. Massimo Pigliucci's
open letter to the NABT, NCSE, and AAAS (attached below) about the change
in wording made by the National Association of Biology Teachers in their
ãStatement on Teaching Evolutionä (http://www.natcenscied.org/nabtart.htm).
While I am a geologist by training, and not a biologist, I do teach
concepts
of biological evolution at an undergraduate level. I am currently (spring
semester 1998) teaching a course in historical geology -- a survey of Earth
history from the formation of the Earth 4,600 million years ago to the present
including a survey of the history of life as preserved in the fossil record
(http://www.kutztown.edu/~schimmri/gel102/gel102.html). I teach evolutionary
theory as ãthe best naturalistic explanation we have to understand the
observed
diversity of life through time on our planet.ä As a Christian, however, I do
leave open the possibility of Divine intervention in the natural world (the
resurrection of Christ being a prime example) although such beliefs are not
discussed in the secular geology classroom.
I have several very strong objections to Dr. Pigliucciâs comments. First,
his apparent characterization of opponents to the original wording of the NABT
statement as ãreligious fundamentalistsä and the ãChristian rightä reveals his
prejudices and his ignorance of the diversity of Christians who were
opposed to
the wording of the original statement. In some sense, all Christians are
creationists. The Apostle's Creed, recited in all Roman Catholic and a great
many Protestant churches, begins "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, the
Creator of Heaven and Earth." To Christian and Jewish believers, God is
viewed
as the Creator. This must not, however, be confused with young-earth
creationism,
a belief held by a minority of Protestant Christians in a literal
interpretation
of Genesis 1-11, that I, along with many other Christians, would reject.
I would like to list a few other disagreements with Dr. Pigliucciâs
letter...
- Dr. Pigliucci's statement that "the scientific community at largeä has
ãa peremptory duty to defend rationalism" is nonsense. Rationalism is a
philosophical belief that is not shared by all scientists and is
certainly
not shared by many Christians and Jews who do not believe that
methodological
naturalism and science reveals all there is to know about the world.
Using
the word ãperemptoryä in the above statement, a word my Websterâs
Dictionary
defines as ãauthoritative, forbidding debate, final, absoluteä, clearly
demonstrates Dr. Pigliucciâs bias and is antithetical to the spirit of
intellectual inquiry he professes to espouse.
- Dr. Pigliucciâs comment that "As a scientific community we should not
allow even the smallest crevice to appear in the edifice of evolutionary
biology that has been erected over the past 100 years" is an astounding
statement from a self-professed proponent of "open inquiry". Perhaps
Dr.
Pugliucci should examine his own dogmatic beliefs before criticizing
those
held by some Christians.
- Dr. Pigliucci stated that ãThe NABT leaves open the possibility that
evolution is in fact supervised in a personal manner. This is a
prospect
that every evolutionary biologist would vigorously and positively deny.ä
The phrase ãevery evolutionary biologistä is demonstrably false. I can
provide the names of evolutionary biologists who are Christian or Jewish
and who would disagree with this statement.
- Dr. Pigliucciâs comment that ãIf something is unpredictable it is hardly
supervisedä seems naive and presumptuous to me. Unpredictability may
only be apparent unpredictability because of our incomplete knowledge of
the entire system involved.
Dr. Pigliucci complains that the job of teaching evolution should be left
to "scientists and educators, not to lawyers, theologians, and politicians."
As an educator, I would agree, but perhaps Dr. Pigliucci should expect an
outcry
from philosophers and theologians when science strays into those fields by
making
philosophical and theological statements (evolution is impersonal and
unguided)
and labeling those statements as science. Dr. Pigliucci is confusing the
science
of evolution with his own atheistic philosophy of life (I refer to his
online essay
ãGod as a Falsifiable Hypothesisä at http://fp.bio.utk.edu/sands/god.htm).
In this
sense, he is far more similar to the young-earth creationist movement (which
believes the same thing about evolutionary theory) than he is to many of us
who are
both science educators and Christians.
In closing, I would like to strongly encourage the National Association of
Biology Teachers to maintain the present wording of their ãStatement on
Teaching
Evolutionä (http://www.nabt.org/Evolution.html). I would also like to
recommend
that the NABT and the NCSE seek input from scientists of all faiths before
formulating such statements in the future. It appears to many of us who are
Christians working in science that the NABT statement was originally
written by
people who were indifferent to the diversity of opinion among scientists
regarding
the philosophical and theological implications of their definition of
evolution.
While many Christians, including myself, oppose the inclusion of young-earth
creationism into public schools, we also view organizations like the NCSE
as being
overly sympathetic to an atheistic philosophy of science that we would
strongly
reject. Young-earth creationism should be evaluated on its scientific
merits, or
lack thereof, and not by oneâs belief in the philosophy of Rationalism as Dr.
Pigliucci suggests.
Steven H. Schimmrich
Ph.D. Candidate in Structural Geology (May 1998)
Department of Geology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Moderator - Science & Christianity mailing list
http://home.earthlink.net/~schimmrich/scichr/scichr.html
Instructor of Geology
Department of Physical Sciences
Kutztown University
Kutztown, Pennsylvania 19530
schimmri@kutztown.edu
610-683-4437
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Subject: IMPORTANT: open letter about the definition of EVOLUTION
Dear friends,
What follow is an open letter to the NABT, NCSE, and AAAS, about their
recent changes in the "layperson" definition of evolution. These changes
were implemented as a result of direct pressures from creationists.
Please, read the letter and, if you agree with most of it, send me an
email with your full name and affiliation. The letter will be sent to
the three organizations and posted on the "Darwin Day" web page at the
University of Tennessee (http://fp.bio.utk.edu).
Thanks for your time and consideration,
- Massimo Pigliucci
Open letter to the National Association of Biology Teachers, to the
National Center for Science Education, and to the American Association
for the Advancement of the Sciences
Object: recent changes in the wording of the NABT's definition of the
word "evolution"
To whom may be concerned,
It has recently come to our attention that the NABT, with the support of
the NCSE, has changed its statement defining what evolution is. This
change apparently was the result of pressures from the Christian
Fundamentalist movement. We strongly urge your two organizations to
reconsider such a change, and to defend scientific principles in the
face of public or partisan pressure of any kind. The following is a
brief analysis of the original statement, of the recent changes, and of
the stated motivations for such changes.
Our feeling is that it was an unfortunate decision, which can
potentially mislead the American public and which yields undue authority
to the already overwhelming political and religious pressure over
science that has been mounting in this country in recent years. The NABT
and the NCSE, as well as the scientific community at large, have an
inalienable right and a peremptory duty to defend rationalism and open
inquiry. The proposed change of the statement simply betrays such high
ideals at their core.
The significance of the change is far greater than just the two dropping
two controversial words, since it represents the first wedge of a
movement intended to surreptitiously introduce religious teachings into
our public schools. As a scientific community we should not allow even
the smallest crevice to appear in the edifice of evolutionary
biology that has been erected over the past 100 years.
The original NABT statement.
The original NABT definition of evolution was crafted in 1995 as a
"Statement on the Teaching of Evolution". The first item on the list of
"tenets of science, evolution and biology education" read:
The diversity of life on Earth is the outcome of evolution: an
unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal
descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection,
chance, historical contingencies and changing environments
While the customary modern definition of evolution in graduate level
textbooks is more akin to "changes in allelic frequencies in a
population" (D. Hartl & A. Clark, 1989 - Principles of population
genetics, Sinauer), the above quoted statement very accurately portrays
the broader meaning that evolutionary biologists attach to the term. In
fact, changes in allelic frequencies are a consequence, not the essence,
of evolution. Furthermore, since the NABT was looking for a definition
that could be understood by the general public and applied by biology
teachers nationwide, references to specific subject matters such as
population genetics are inappropriate.
The modification and how it came about.
The 1995 NABT statement apparently offended some religious
fundamentalists, chiefly among them Berkeley lawyer Phillip Johnson
(author of "Darwin on Trial" and other misleading literature on
evolution). Apparently, Johnson and others have claimed that the
statement implies that evolutionary theory is an ideological statement,
since the words "unsupervised" and "impersonal" automatically exclude
any divine intervention. This was explicitly suggested by a letter to
the NABT by what the NCSE qualifies as "distinguished scholars" Alvin
Plantinga, John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame
University, and Huston Smith, Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion at
Syracuse University. Notice that while these esteemed colleagues may
very well be "distinguished", they certainly are not biologists.
Smith's and Platinga's concern was that the NABT wording "...gives aid
and comfort to extremists in the religious right for whom it provides a
legitimate target. And, because of its logical vulnerability, it lowers
Americans' respect for scientists and their place in our culture. If the
words 'impersonal' and 'unsupervised' were dropped from your opening
sentence it would help defuse tensions which, as things stand, are
causing unnecessary problems in our collective life."
As a consequence of this upheaval, the NABT agreed to reconsider the
wording of the controversial statement, and did so at its 1997 meeting.
The Board voted to retain the original statement, on the sound reasoning
that Smith's and Platinga's assertion that the wording "contradicts the
beliefs of the majority of the American people" is irrelevant.
Scientific definitions, according to the Board, are independent of
public opinion. But things did not end there.
NABT President-Elect Richard Storey reconvened the Board at the end of
the meeting, a few days later. The outcome of the new discussion was
that:
1) The extant wording which included "unsupervised" and "impersonal"
apparently was miscommunicating both the nature of science and NABT's
intent;
2) The deletion of those two words would not affect the statement's
accurate characterization of evolution, and affirmation of evolution's
importance in science education.
Eugenie Scott's comment on the NCSE web page
(http://www.natcenscied.org/) was that the new NABT statement
(http://www.NABT.org/positions.html) was the result of "a statesmanlike
decision that better fulfilled [the NABT] goal by reducing a potential
source of conflict in the classroom."
Why it was a bad move.
Apparently, the feeling at the NABT meeting was that the organization
and the American public (actually, the Christian Right) had a
miscommunication problem. The NABT did not want its statements to
include theological positions - rightly so. This politically correct
attitude, however, does not serve science very well. We do not disagree
that science, and evolutionary biology in particular, cannot prove or
disprove the existence of some kind of god. On the other hand, the
reason the American public perceives a direct conflict is because indeed
evolution denies many attributes of the various forms of Christian god.
In this, fundamentalists and the American public at large are smarter
than most scientists give them credit for. It is time for the scientific
community and for educators to simply face this fact and move on,
regardless of the consequences and predictable social outcry.
In fact, Scott's statement that the NABT move was an example of
"statesmanlike decision" is particularly illuminating of the fear of
scientists and educators to face political and religious pressures. It
is the same "statesmanship" that prompted the National Science
Foundation to actively delete any appearance of the word evolution in
the layman abstracts of research proposals in evolutionary biology
funded by the Federal Government. And we thought that the Inquisition
and witch-hunting were over!
As to the two points deliberated by the final NABT Board meeting, let us
analyze them in some more detail. The words "unsupervised" and
"impersonal" were taken as miscommunicating the nature of science. Not
really. Science is based on a fundamental assumption: that the world can
be explained by recurring only to natural, mechanistic forces. Johnson
is quite right in affirming that this is a philosophical position. He is
wrong when he suggests that it is an unreasonable and unproven one. In
fact, every single experiment conducted by any laboratory in any place
on Earth represents a daily test of that assumption. The day in which
scientists will be unable to explain natural phenomena without recurring
to divine intervention, we will have a major paradigm shift - of
cataclysmic proportions.
The second point of the Board's deliberation is that dropping the
contentious words does not affect the accuracy of the portrayal of
evolution to the American public. Really? The NABT leaves open the
possibility that evolution is in fact supervised in a personal manner.
This is a prospect that every evolutionary biologist would vigorously
and positively deny. All we know so far about the evolutionary process
tells us that there is no supervision except for the action of natural
selection (which, by definition, is not teleonomic). Furthermore, a
personal involvement would imply some "person" who would take care of
directing the evolutionary process one way or the other. The fossil
record, as well as the importance of random events such as catastrophes,
mass extinctions, and genetic drift, assure us that such a personal
involvement has not happened. Unless, of course, the person in question
is supervising evolution in a way to perfectly mimic an unsupervised,
impersonal process. A possibility, the latter, repeatedly invalidated on
philosophical grounds ever since David Hume and well before Darwin...
Furthermore, the wording following the indicted terms, "unpredictable"
and "natural" seems to us to convey the same feeling to which Johnson
was objecting to. If something is unpredictable it hardly is supervised,
and if it is natural, it hardly is divine.
In conclusion, we reiterate that evolution indeed is, to the best of our
knowledge, an impersonal and unsupervised process. Scientists are always
open to revise their positions if new compelling evidence surfaces, so
that Mr. Johnson can be reassured that the incriminated words will be
dropped if demonstrated to be inconsistent with reality. Until then,
please leave the job to scientists and educators, not to lawyers,
theologians, and politicians.
Signed,
Dr. Massimo Pigliucci, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolution,
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Society for the Study of Evolution
"Dobzhansky" Awardee
Melissa Brenneman, Librarian and Computer Sciences teacher, Roane State
Community College, Harriman, TN
Dr. Mitchell Cruzan, Assistant Professor of Ecology, University of
Tennessee, Knoxville
Carl Ledendecker, Knoxville-TN Montessori Teacher
--******************************************************************Massimo Pigliucci, phone 423-974-6221 fax 0978Dept. of Botany, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-1100Lab page http://fp.bio.utk.edu/pglScience & Society http://fp.bio.utk.edu/sandsDarwin Day http://fp.bio.utk.edu/darwinRationalists of East Tennessee http://www.korrnet.org/reality******************************************************************
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-- Steven H. Schimmrich Assistant Professor of GeologyPhysical Sciences Department schimmri@kutztown.edu (office) Kutztown University schimmrich@earthlink.net (home) 217 Grim Science Building 610-683-4437, 610-683-1352 (fax) Kutztown, Pennsylvania 19530 http://www.kutztown.edu/~schimmri/