Here is a long article on the Kansas issue, with a good summary of the ID
movement's position on it.
Two things I found particularly interesting is the author's comparison of
Johnson with William Jennings Bryan, which I personally think is very apt:
"The first step toward understanding the events in Kansas is to disregard all
that we've learned about the Scopes trial from Inherit the Wind. Clarence
Darrow did not slay William Jennings Bryan, or if he did, the spirit of the
old warhorse has risen again, largely in the body of Berkeley law professor
Phillip Johnson. The Kansas episode reflects the convergence of Johnson's
new anti-evolution crusade and old-style biblical creationism."
The other thing that I found interesting is the number of books Johnson has
sold since 1991:
"Johnson's books have sold more than a quarter-million copies, and it is no
wonder that his kind of arguments showed up among conservative Christians
who voiced their opinions during the science standards hearing in Kansas."
Johnson's and other IDers' ideas have penetrated *very* deeply, not just in
the USA but around the world. It is not generally realised but Darwin on
Trial has been translated into a number of languages, including French,
Russian and Chinese. If it was tracked by the secular press it would
probably be on the best-sellers list. That's why the TEs and NEs quibbles
about Johnson's alleged scientific inaccuracy are just blowing in the wind!
If one reads Ashton's book, "In Six Days" which is comprised of 50 young-
Earth creationist scientists who are supposed to be explaining why they
believe in six-literal days in Genesis, but in fact seems to be more about ID,
complete with quotes from Behe and Johnson! Considering that Behe
believes in common descent and Johnson in an old-Earth, this is truly
remarkable, and indicates that the old Creation-Evolution deadlocked
battle-lines are shifting, if they haven't already shifted.
It will be interesting how the large numbers of relatively uncommitted
theistic evolutionists in churches and synagogues react. Now that there is an
alternative to Genesis literalism on the one hand, and baptised naturalistic
evolution on the other, I would expect large numbers of such uncommitted TEs
to realign themselves with the ID movement. If this happens, the hardcore
TE/ECs will find themselves increasingly isolated and irrelevant.
Steve
=======================================================================
http://www.thenation.com/issue/991004/1004larson.shtml
The Nation
October 4, 1999
Inherit an Ill Wind by EDWARD LARSON and LARRY WITHAM
E-mail this story to a friend.
Way down in Georgia last month, REM lead singer Michael Stipe paused
in the middle of a solo during a rock concert because he had Kansas on his
mind. "What's with Kansas and creationism?" he asked, looking puzzled.
He had heard, he explained, that Kansas officials had brought in "a
Hollywood ad man" to put the best spin on their actions. "We have
medieval sodomy laws here in Georgia," he added, "but we don't advertise
it."
The sold-out crowd cheered, and America's great debate over Darwinism
found its place once again in the popular culture. Even rockers in Atlanta
were asking how Kansas could strip evolution from its science-education
standards seventy-five years after the Scopes trial had supposedly ended
such silliness. It did seem as medieval as Georgia's sodomy law--but even
that was struck down by the state Supreme Court last year. The question
merits an answer because the episode is not a home-grown Kansas
anomaly. It arose from forces that are national in origin and scope.
Creation Science & Intelligent Design
The first step toward understanding the events in Kansas is to disregard all
that we've learned about the Scopes trial from Inherit the Wind. Clarence
Darrow did not slay William Jennings Bryan, or if he did, the spirit of the
old warhorse has risen again, largely in the body of Berkeley law professor
Phillip Johnson. The Kansas episode reflects the convergence of Johnson's
new anti-evolution crusade and old-style biblical creationism.
In 1961 Genesis Flood, by Virginia Tech engineering professor Henry
Morris and conservative Christian theologian John Whitcomb, gave
believers scientific-sounding arguments supporting the biblical account of a
six-day creation within the past 10,000 years. Even Bryan and other early
twentieth-century fundamentalists could not accept such a young earth in
light of modern geology. Yet the book spawned a movement within
American fundamentalism, with Morris as its Moses leading the faithful
into a promised land where science proves religion.
This so-called creation science spread among ultraconservative churches
through the missionary work of Morris's San Diego-based Institute for
Creation Research. The emergence of the religious right carried it into
politics in the seventies. Within two decades after the publication of
Genesis Flood, three states and dozens of local school districts had
mandated "balanced treatment" for young-earth creationism along with
evolution in public-school science courses.
It took nearly a decade before the Supreme Court finally unraveled those
mandates as unconstitutional. Creation science was nothing but religion
dressed up as science, the High Court decreed in 1987, and therefore was
barred by the Constitution's establishment clause from public-school
classrooms along with other forms of religious instruction. By this time,
however, young-earthers, who were deeply concerned about science
education, were entrenched in local and state politics from California to
Maine.
Then along came Johnson--a chaired professor at the University of
California's Boalt Hall Law School and former clerk to Chief Justice Earl
Warren. He is no young-earth creationist, but he is an evangelical Christian
with an uncompromising faith in God. Reading Richard Dawkins's The
Blind Watchmaker in 1987 enraged him. Dawkins uses Darwinian
evolution to deny God and dismiss the supernatural--but Johnson saw the
argument as circular. "I could see that Dawkins achieved his word magic
with the very tools that are familiar to us lawyers," Johnson explained in
the journal Christianity Today. "If you take as a starting point that there's
no creator, then something more or less like Darwinism has to be true."
Johnson then launched his own crusade--not for biblical creationism but
against philosophical naturalism in science. In a series of popular books
beginning with Darwin on Trial in 1991, Johnson argued that science
should not automatically exclude supernatural explanations for natural
phenomena. It was an easy sell in a country where opinion polls find about
10 percent of the people believing that life evolved by natural processes
without divine intervention along the way. Of course God could have
created humans, or at least laws that guided their evolution from the
primordial ooze, most Americans readily concede.
The Berkeley don brought what his allies call "cultural confidence" to the
familiar lament against excluding God from science. A sophisticated law
professor conversant in postmodernist rhetoric (though a realist himself),
Johnson could argue that science makes metaphysical assumptions no less
than religion, and some scientists and philosophers began to concede a bit.
"You had to meet intimidation with counter-intimidation in order to move
the discussion along," says Johnson. "Now, that perhaps was the lawyer's
contribution."
Johnson also reached beyond the academy to latent popular distrust of
science. His latest book, aptly titled An Easy-to-Understand Guide for
Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, captures his tone. "Given that
only a small minority of Americans believe the central finding of biology,"
he asks, "how should our educational system deal with this important
instance of disagreement between the experts and the people? One way
would be to treat the doubts of the people with respect.... The opposite
way is to tell people that all doubts about naturalistic evolution are
inherently absurd.... American educators have chosen the second path."
Johnson's books have sold more than a quarter-million copies, and it is no
wonder that his kind of arguments showed up among conservative
Christians who voiced their opinions during the science standards hearing
in Kansas.
Another "authority" often cited in Kansas was a Lehigh University
biochemistry teacher named Michael Behe, who enlisted in Johnson's
crusade in 1991. That year, Behe wrote a letter to the journal Science
defending Darwin on Trial. Johnson responded by encouraging Behe, a
devout Catholic, to write his own easy-to-understand book presenting
biological phenomena that defied Darwinist explanation. It was the type of
argument popularized more than a century ago by Darwin's archfoe, the
great Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz, updated with examples of complex
organic molecules. Another bestseller was born--Behe's Darwin's Black
Box.
Johnson and Behe do not argue for the young earth of creation science, but
they do propound that intelligent design (rather than random chance) is
apparent in nature. This, they argue, divorced from biblical creationism,
should be a fit subject for public-school education. With this argument,
they have expanded the tent of people willing to challenge the alleged
Darwinist hegemony in the science classroom, and this emboldened the
populist uprising in Kansas.
National Standards & Local Control
Bottom-up revolts against authority can come in reaction to top-down
reforms, and that was evident in Kansas. The state Board of Education
members who rejected evolution were also trying to strike a blow for local
control and against national education standards.
The federal push for standards-based education reform began in 1989,
when the nation's governors met with President Bush to rally around his
call for "measurable national goals" in education. The governors, of course,
emphasized state flexibility under increased federal grants, an idea that
worked for the Bush White House as well. Some federal education experts,
flush with new theories of learning, saw the reform movement in more
centralizing terms. Here was a financial and political vehicle to advance a
national curriculum.
The Bush Administration's "America 2000" was more a tone-setter than
legislation, and the tone was picked up in Kansas. In 1989, led by its then-
progressive Board of Education, Kansas set in motion a program to
establish measurable and unified goals for its public schools. It fit neatly
into a general trend, in which states began to displace local school boards
in financing and setting standards for public education.
The centralizing move, along with the rise of new theories of education like
outcome-based grading and process-based science, provoked a
conservative reaction in many states. In Kansas it was led by Kansas
Education Watch, or KEWNET, which criticized experts for usurping the
role of parents and local schools. This new grassroots activism began
affecting decisions of the elected state Board of Education, especially after
1996, when four social conservatives friendly to KEWNET won seats. The
board was then split 5 to 5 on issues of local and state control.
This was not a partisan division in solidly GOP Kansas, but intraparty
warfare pitting Bob Dole-type Main Street Republicans against the party's
right-wing activists. No one has been more critical of the board than the
state's stalwart GOP Governor, Bill Graves, who has advocated abolishing
that elected body ever since the right-wing resurgence. Board member Val
DeFever, a moderate Republican who voted with the minority on the
science standards, calls the conservatives "stealth candidates" who sneaked
into power. Others said they were forthright campaigners who promised an
independent board, but most voters probably did not fully appreciate what
that might mean before the fireworks in August.
Either way, as one Kansas teacher said, the 1996 election "blew the
education establishment out of the water. They'd never seen a board like
this." Lawrence Lerner, an emeritus science professor, reviews state
science standards and how they are adopted. "State boards at least tend to
have people with professional qualifications" and are usually appointed, he
says. "Kansas is a peculiar situation."
In the nation's capital, meanwhile, under the banner of "Goals 2000," the
new Clinton Administration had accelerated the national education reform
movement. The Educate America Act, passed by the Democratic Congress
in 1994, put teeth behind the call for state education standards. Under the
new law, standards written by states had to be reviewed in Washington to
insure quality and uniformity in English, history, math and science. That
backfired, however, when a federally funded set of history standards came
out that conservative critics denounced as replacing "the Founding Fathers"
with multicultural heroes. The new Republican Congress responded by
deleting federal control of the content of state education standards in 1996.
The states have great flexibility now, although they still tend to follow
national trends. Yet, from Washington's point of view the Kansas outcome
is well within the state's authority. "We don't review standards for
substance, only process," notes Melinda Kitchell Malico, a spokeswoman
for the US Department of Education. "We won't be reviewing the Kansas
standards."
Goals 2000, Kansas Style
Like other states, Kansas began with the model science standards drafted
by the National Research Council, a public-policy arm of the prestigious
National Academy of Sciences. Various national science and teacher
groups had asked the NAS to develop model national science standards.
Nearly every state then used them in drafting their Goals 2000 state science
standards, notes Rodger Bybee, who helped draft the NAS document.
"They are called national standards, but it is not a mandate," he says, "It is
not a law. Their use is voluntary. The states see the comprehensiveness of
the standards, and then use portions of them."
The standards cover physical, life and earth science, and it is in the latter
two areas that the concept of evolution falls. Further, "Evolution and
Equilibrium" is presented as one of five "unifying concepts and processes in
science." The other four pillars--from systems and evidence to
measurement and form--appear devoid of ideological content.
Bybee, now director of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study in
Colorado, said he visited eight or ten states to give presentations on the
NAS document. "It's by invitation," he said. "It's usually to the committee
reviewing the standards." He made such a visit to Kansas in early August
of 1998, a month after the state commissioner of education, a gubernatorial
appointee, had formed a committee of Kansas scientists and science
educators to write the state's new science standards.
"I spent a morning with them," Bybee recalls. The topic of evolution
invariably came up, a concern of some Board of Education members but
not of the science writing committee. "The committee anticipated there
would be some conflict," Bybee said after the board vote in August. "But I
don't think they understood it would end up this way."
In working through similar processes over the past few years, controversy
has erupted over evolution in thirteen other states besides Kansas. Only
three of them, however--Alabama, Illinois and Nebraska--ended up diluting
the teaching of evolution. Alabama, for example, required a disclaimer in
biology and geology texts stating that evolution "is theory, not fact."
Illinois put evolution in its "controversial issues" category. That allows
each local school district to decide how to approach it. Nebraska did not
go that far, but after an assistant attorney general argued that teaching
evolution might violate the religious freedom of some students, the state
school board added cautious caveats. Kansas might have ended up merely
in this group were its elected Board of Education not half composed of
assertive social conservatives.
"I really believe the good things that come out of schools happen in
classrooms and locally," said Scott Hill, one of the conservative board
members. "It was a huge issue for us." That sort of thinking led the board
last year to demand a role in actually drafting the science standards. That
startled the state education establishment, but it conceded five slots on the
twenty-seven-member writing committee to the conservative board
members. Evolution was not a major issue in anyone's thinking yet.
In the early nineties, amid a backlash in local schools against process-based
science education, the board had voted to make process-style assessment
tests optional. Going into the 1998 science standards, conservatives' main
concern had been to roll back the focus on process. A board appointee to
the writing committee explains, "One of the charges was to make these
standards more content-oriented, or fact-oriented. Forget the process. Get
us back to what content these kids have to know when they get out of
school." It was only after board members saw the emphasis given to
evolution by the NAS model that they began adding opposition to
Darwinism to their concern that science should study "facts."
Evolution Takes Center Stage
The leader of the anti-evolution wing of the board is Steve Abrams, a
Baptist lay leader and veterinarian who has been active on the religious-
right wing of state GOP politics. He stresses fact-based science, but there is
no denying his belief in young-earth creationism. "In the scientific field, we
should be studying science: facts that can be documented, observed and
measured," Abrams told the news media. "Evolution is not good science,
and, as such, we don't believe it should be presented."
In all, the science writing committee had nine meetings from mid-1998 to
June 1999, with the first public comments solicited in December and
January for version 2 of the standards. Kansas teachers' groups, which
were already supportive, tended to write in with accolades, while
conservatives were the ones showing up at the otherwise poorly attended
public comment sessions. By this time, however, it became clear that the
committee's intent was basically to follow the NAS model. Revised
versions 3 and 4 did just that. "We were not going to remove the theory of
evolution from the document," said John Staver, co-chairman of the
writing committee and professor of science education at Kansas State
University.
Abrams led a threesome on the board that Staver viewed as the only
probable negative votes to the writing committee's version 4. Then, at a
May board meeting, Abrams suddenly announced that an ad hoc
"subcommittee" had produced an alternative set of standards called Trial
4a, which had the fingerprints of young-earth creationism all over it.
The rift became openly political. The education commission sent a mediator
to urge peace, but public hearings in May and June became vociferous
showdowns between science educators and religious parents. Nearly every
science and education organization in the state sent petitions to the board
and letters to newspaper editors.
With the board vote still uncertain, the science committee offered a
compromise fifth draft, which deleted all reference to the age of life on the
earth and substituted "patterns of cumulative change" for "evolution" as a
unifying concept of science. Responding to widespread ridicule of his
creationist Trial 4a draft, Abrams also went back to the drawing board by
taking the committee's fifth draft and excising the offending content, such
as macro-evolution and the Big Bang. "What we did was delete language,"
board member Hill explained; yet the final product contained evidence of
its creationist path by recommending study projects on recent dinosaurs
and abrupt geological events. It was broad enough to attract support from
Kansans worried about issues of evolutionary naturalism raised by Johnson
and Behe.
In the days leading to the vote, various "alerts" went out among leaders on
the science writing committee warning that the Abrams proposal was
"speaking to powerful emotional needs" found in the religious public.
Staver argued that most religions accept evolution; he noted that the
Roman Catholic Church did, and he even quoted the Pope. The Kansas
Catholic Conference disagreed, however. Taking a leaf from Behe's book,
state Catholic education officer Mary Kay Culp said, "A major concern
here is teaching evolution as a fact protected from any valid scientific
criticism." She complained that the NAS standards seemed to put "science
as a way of knowing" above religion, which it associated with superstition
and myth.
Tensions rose to fever pitch as the matter moved toward a final vote by the
Board of Education in early August. Local, state and national science
educators lobbied board members, especially wavering moderates. Local
religious conservatives lobbied their board members. An NPR Weekend
Edition on the pending showdown featured a string of moderate state
Republican office-holders, including Governor Graves, denouncing the
anti-evolution effort, but more telling was an interview with a local student.
"No one was there that's still alive today that actually witnessed creation or
evolution," he commented. "It's just what a person believes. I mean, we
have no right to say what exactly is true." That's fact-based education with
a postmodernist twist, and a scientist's worst nightmare.
Conservative Victory & National Response
The final 6-to-4 conservative victory came as no surprise. One swing
moderate, a devout Mennonite, had let on that he would follow his
conservative constituency in voting for the anti-evolution standards.
Apparently in Kansas, teaching nothing about origins is a political
compromise between young-earth creationism (three votes) and evolution
(four votes). The decision on August 11 generated headline news stories
across the country, and soon even rock singers were talking about it
onstage.
Johnson and Behe tried to sound conciliatory. "In context," Johnson wrote
in the Wall Street Journal, "the Kansas action was a protest against
enshrining a particular world view as a scientific fact and against making
'evolution' an exception to the usual American tradition that the people
have a right to disagree with the experts." Behe added in the New York
Times, "Teach Darwin's elegant theory. But also discuss where it has real
problems." Speaking in Topeka only a week after the vote, however,
Johnson saluted the bravery of the conservatives on the state Board of
Education, saying that the controversy has led to an "unrestricted debate
about the scientific and philosophical issues."
Many media commentators and scientists denounced the Kansas board's
action. "The Kansas skirmish marks the latest episode of a long struggle by
religious fundamentalists and their allies to restrict or eliminate the teaching
of evolution in public schools," current president of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science Stephen Jay Gould responded.
"The major argument advanced by the school board--that large-scale
evolution must be dubious because the process has not been directly
observed--smacks of absurdity and only reveals ignorance about the nature
of science." According to Gould and the NAS, creation science is bad
science, and intelligent design is not science at all. Gould has planned a
speaking trip to Kansas for October, when he surely will have more to say
about the Kansas Board of Education. Four conservatives on that body
stand for re-election next year, in what promises to be a hotly contested
fight.
Politicians can spot a tide from miles away, however. When asked about
the Kansas action, campaign spokespersons for all the leading GOP
presidential candidates said that such decisions should be left to states and
localities, with a Bush spokeswoman adding that her candidate "believes
both [evolution and creationism] ought to be taught." Democratic front-
runner Al Gore apparently agreed, because his spokesman immediately
commented that the Vice President "favors the teaching of evolution in the
public schools" but cautiously added that "localities should be free to teach
creationism as well." REM's Michael Stipe has good reason to be puzzled
about more than just Kansas and creationism.
E-mail this story to a friend.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edward Larson is the author of Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial
and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (Harvard),
which won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1998. Larry Witham is an author
and journalist in Washington, DC.
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"It is perhaps clear to the reader that the genetic system is, in principle,
isomorphic with communication systems designed by communications
engineers. As a matter of fact, genetical systems have historical priority
since organisms have been using the principles of information theory and
coding theory for at least 3.8 x 10^9 years!" (Yockey H.P., "Information
Theory and Molecular Biology", Cambridge University Press: Cambridge
UK, 1992, p7)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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