'Creationism: Still Crazy After All These Years' - Eugenie Scott, AAI 2009

good morning I am very pleased to be here I want to talk mostly about indeed creationism still crazy all the after all these years talk about some of the things that are going on today but just as a quick schematic of what I'm going to talk about in terms of the history of this movement creation science begat intelligent design begat after a very important legal decision Edwards versus AG Willard two strains of anti evolutionism one strain was to promote the idea of teaching the evidence against evolution the second strain was to promote the idea of teaching evolution and alternative theories to evolution now I'm a scientist there a lot of scientists here just for the fun of it how many scientists are here okay afterwards could you please bring up the list of evidence against evolution for me that's the reaction you get when you talk to scientists what evidence against evolution the big idea of biological evolution that living things shared common ancestors we're not arguing about that we argue about the details we don't argue about common ancestry about descent with modification when you ask scientists what about the alternative theories you get the same sort of laughter or confused look we don't know any alternative scientific theories to common ancestry to the eye there's lots of debate about the process of evolution the pattern that evolution is taken but there aren't any alternative theories and there isn't a list of evidence against if you go to the people who promote these ideas and you say what are the alternative theories to evolution surprisingly enough they seem to go back to what has traditionally been called intelligent design and creation science similarly when you ask about the evidence against evolution well remarkably enough we seem to be led back to those same arguments all over again now I'm only going to very very quickly go over creation science and intelligent design because most of you know a little bit about that anyway if you don't there's going to be a very good book sold after this talk where you can learn a great deal more about these topics creation science is very largely the product of henry morris and his followers who built this movement from the 1960s on which is still going very strong I spoke about creation science when I was last invited to the AI meetings and no.7 and so you can you don't have to buy my book you can also hear about this on the very excellent videotapes that the RDF prepares from these meetings but the thing I want you to keep in mind for our purposes today creation science as well as intelligent design are based upon a specific Christian doctrine called special creationism which is an idea not just about God creating but how God create it's the most important component of special creationism is that God creates everything in its present form and that's true of galaxies that's true of the planetary system that's true of plants and animals on earth today human beings Barnacles a barnacle a an ape as an ape a pine tree as a pine tree and they were all created as separately created kinds with limited genetic variability so you can have evolution within the kind but you can't have evolution from one kind to another and the most common form of special creationism is that this creation event took place at one time over six 24-hour days now I say it's usually because there are other forms of special creationism something called progressive creationism for example which basically is what most of the intelligent design people are embracing which takes the idea that God does specially create things but he creates them sequentially through time so from the intelligent design perspective God specially created the motor of the bacterial flagellum that was a special creation now maybe other parts of the bacterium might be able to involve evolved but that's just evolution within the bacterial kind right bacteria don't evolve into dress right that's the general idea the most important thing about special creationism is the creation of things in their present form and that is a theme that we'll see running through all the kinds of creationism now the creation science movement continues to excel oh go back again continues to be a very large and very successful movement by no means has these creation science movement declined at all over the last 15 or 20 years since the ascendancy of intelligent design there are probably with the advent of the internet more sources of creation science now than there were 15 or 20 years ago these are the folks who brought you flood chief the idea that all sedimentary deposits all over the planet were the result of noah's flood and for example Grand Canyon was cut catastrophic aliy when a huge amount of water burst through you can see the lake there in the Colorado Plateau a huge amount of water burst through and cut Grand Canyon catastrophic ly much as glacial lake Missoula created the channel scablands up in Montana there there are examples of catastrophic geology certainly this is not one of them if you want to know more about Grand Canyon of course you can go with NCSE to on a raft trip down Grand Canyon we do that every summer I will tell you the creationist side of the story and my colleague Alan Gish llyich who is a PhD geologist will tell you the evolution side and of course you can make up your own mind so see the canyon with Scott and Gish sort of if you read the creation science literature you will find that they promote what they call the to model approach there's only two possibilities either evolution or special creation so therefore if you disprove evolution creationism wins by default remember this diagram you're going to see it again because this is a basic thread that runs through the creationist movement past and present and doubtless future now I mentioned when I started this talk that a very important legal decision Edwards versus Aguilar sort of changed the landscape a bit now let me go back to them the Edwards decision and a dissent by Justice Scalia pretty much shaped the current situation that we have in the creation and evolution controversy today justice brennan wrote that it was legal to teach scientific alternatives to evolution one of which was proposed abrupt appearance theory which for euphemisms as just one of my very favorites all time for for creationism I think it's actually going to come back I think maybe abrupt appearance theory has a future in the post intelligent design world and of course intelligent design theory was specifically named as it were in order to be a scientific alternative to evolution of course creation science was the original scientific alternative to evolution Justice Scalia had a dissent in which he mentioned that it was perfectly reasonable for teachers to teach the evidence against evolution and I'll come back to that in more detail but very briefly what do we mean by intelligent design all intelligent design is a fairly broad movement with a very narrow scientific base some have compared it to a theocratic movement their goal quite honestly is to replace the materialism in American society with a quote proper Christian theism and they do this by attacking the material basis of science the fact that we do science by explaining nature through reference to natural causes rather than through reference to supernatural causes that methodological naturalism is a very normal way that science has been done for over a hundred years perhaps even longer by attacking the material base of science they believe that they can attack the material oriented materialistic philosophically materialistic orientation of the society now how do you attack science well cell division is certainly a very materialistic explanation the theories involved in how cells divide is natural causes but nobody is going to get excited if you stand on the corner and say scientists are lying to you about cell division instead they attack evolution because evolution within science is the most sensitive shall we say topic and it is one that many we'll have reservations about anyway so attacking science excuse me attacking evolution is a way of attacking the materialist basis of science which is a way of attacking the materialist orientation of American society that in a nutshell is intelligent design they do this by claiming that there is evidence against evolution where we hear that before the scientific claims of intelligent design are pretty thin one claim is something called irreducible complexity which is promoted by Michael Behe in his book Darwin's black box the other is the idea of the design inference from William dem skeeze book of the same title in many other publications complex specified information or specified complexity if you will both of these are pretty much the same idea at heart these two scientific ideas in terms of their definition refer to the fact that there is terrific complexity in nature and that this complexity is unexplainable through natural causes either because of its complexity and Bea's terminology or because of its improbability in dem skis probability or in dem skis of pilots schematically you can look at intelligent design is followed stuff like stuff phenomena on the planet that exhibits specified complexity or irreducible complexity could either be explained by chance or by natural causes like natural selection clearly it is absurd to assume that chance could produce something like the vertebrate eye clearly they say it is absurd to assume that something like natural selection could produce irreducible complexity since the heart of your reducible complexity is the idea that all components of a complex system have to be there at one time therefore they couldn't be put together incremental e which is what natural selection requires therefore say the intelligent design proponents intelligent design is the explanation this phenomena now it happens to be the case that scientists disagree that natural selection is incapable of explaining these things I mean the intelligent design promoters are just simply wrong when it comes to understanding natural sense most scientists also disagree profoundly that intelligent design is a scientific idea whatsoever we all agree chance does not produce complexity if you are unsure about that please be assured that evolution is not a chance phenomenon natural selection which is the major engine event of evolution is adaptive differential reproduction there are chance elements involved in the production of the genetic variability upon which natural selection operates but natural selection is not a chance process a major misunderstanding about evolution so basically what the intelligent design people are saying is that chance and scientific processes chance and evolution can't explain something therefore intelligent design explains it where have we heard this before this is very much like the creation science to model approach in which disproving evolution proves oopsie intelligent design now getting back to Scalia's dissents I want to talk now about the current evidence against evolution school of anti evolutionism because I think this is a great interest and people need to know about it Scalia wrote in his dissent that it was perfectly legal to teach the evidence against evolution this was seized upon immediately literally the month after the Edwards decision came down by the Institute for Creation Research Wendell Byrd wrote that school boards and teachers should be strongly encouraged to at least stress the scientific evidences and arguments against evolution classes not just the arguments against some supposed evolutionary mechanism but against evolution per se against the idea of common ancestry even if they don't wish to recognize these as evidences and arguments for creation evidence against evolution proves creationism that is the way these people think and that if you understand that you understand why they are proposing the kinds of laws and regulations that they propose these days now in this quote from the ICR impacts newsletter wendell bird is talking about school boards and teachers something happened in the late 80s and 90s that gave a new window to anti evolutionism and that was the establishment in the united states of science education standards this was actually a product of the bush one administration in 1989 the National Governors Association had a meeting at which the first President Bush was present and President Clinton was a governor and the decision was made that the United States needed to have some more continuity from place to place about education so standards and mathematics and history and science were proposed and these would be of course because we have local control here in the United States of Education the national standards in these various disciplines would of course be merely advisory but it did stimulate a great deal of thinking throughout the 90s the national science education standards the kind of yellow document there was prepared by the National Academy of Sciences through a great deal of consultation with master teachers and scientists all over the country a very long process of critique and consensus for about four years so that everybody was pretty much on the same page and then the national science education standards even if they weren't required to be adopted by the states tended to be cloned by the state simply because all of the state education officials were involved in this it was a very smart way of doing it much larger than the history standards that really ran into a buzzsaw so most of the state science standards require the teaching of evolution most of them use the e word but even if the word evolution is not there the concept of common ancestry and of course natural selection and adaptation and so forth are in the science education standards now if you're a creationist you're seeing evolution coming into your into your science education standards you're going to want to do something about it and over the years this is just a small selection from 2000 to 2005 the National Center for Science education I ran into lots of cases where either alternative theories to evolution or evidence against evolution was being proposed in science education standards around the country in virtually every case here where you see a yes by the state the it was proposed but it was actually not passed it wasn't passed because civic minded citizens like yourselves scientists and teachers and civil libertarians went to those school board meetings and testified and argued against the inclusion of non-scientific ideas in the science frameworks I want to use as an example the state of Texas Texas has had a long history of trying to discredit evolution back in the 70s there was actually a disclaimer pasted into science textbooks in Texas that declared evolution was a theory not a fact etc now most science education standards have two parts this is worth knowing because it gives you a little bit of a roadmap here one part of the science education standards in Texas or anyplace else are called the process skills or the science as a way of knowing there's sort of general statements about how do you you know what's an experiment and what's a theory and and how do you do science the second component of science education standards are the content standards in physics you teach optics and you teach the concept of mass in a biology you teach you teach cells and you teach evolution so that two different sections of the standards are a bit different and they refer to different things the standards of each state are devised by a committee of teachers and scientists that's appointed for that purpose and the Texas standards are called the Texas educational knowledge and skills Tek s or teks the teks were developed in 1998 and they have two major parts in the process skills is a standard called 3a the student is expected to quote analyze review and critique scientific explanations including hypotheses and theories as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information now that's kind of a funny way of stating a critical thinking standard but itself it's not too weird and it occurs by the way throughout all of the teks here are the here's process skill 3 for chemistry and biology and you can see that basically it's the same thing I'm not sure I can read that analyze review and critique scientific explanations including hypotheses and theories as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information true of chemistry of physics of environmental science across the board and the other statements and the process skills are the same site evaluate the impact of research on scientific thought society in the environment describe the connection between biology and future careers between chemistry and future careers you get the idea generally speaking these process skills apply across the board to all the sciences now the thing about the teks is that they are a very strong statement from the state of Texas as to what textbooks have to include in order to be bought by the state to be used by the teachers Texas buys a whole lotta textbooks it's a really big state it adopts from K through 12 California is a bigger state but California only adopts k-8 so it doesn't have the cloud as Texas does too bad anyway Texas adopts buys a whole lot of textbooks so pretty much what Texas wants is what you're going to get in textbooks and in 2003 there was a 2003 and for when high school biology texts were being considered for adoption there was a huge fight and the fight considered whether the biology textbook publishers would be required to include the weaknesses of evolution in their books whether they would have to take these books back and rewrite them to include the weaknesses of evolution now if you remember earlier in my talk we scientists don't have a list of the weaknesses of evolution right so what we're talking about is a lot of really bad science at best and closeted creationism in all probability I really like that now the good news is that even though creationist members of the board fought very very hard cooler heads prevailed and the textbook publishers were not made to include the weaknesses of evolution now here comes 2008 and 2009 and the teks are going to be revised mindful of the attack on evolution the committees change the wording to try to get rid of the strengths and weaknesses language now remember this is a whole bunch of committees this is physics and chemistry and biology and Earth and space science a new study environmental science to marine biologists all these committees every single one of them agreed on new wording for 3/8 here's what it was analyze and evaluate scientific explanations using empirical evidence logical reasoning and experimental and observational testing well yeah that's what we do that's really a critical thinking standard strengths and weaknesses doesn't really make a whole lot of sense this is really what scientists do it didn't quite last that way dr. Mac Leroy who is the chairman of the board of education in Texas and a young earth creationist and a major he's been on the board forever he also led the fight in 2003 to try to get the biology textbooks written mr. Mac Leroy and his colleagues tried to amend the stuffings out of 3a they couldn't just throw out the the word of the new wording well of course not every single committee was out of that every single committee had the exact same wording if he had thrown out 3a across the board he would have run into some real political problems so he amended the bejesus out of basically supportive or not supportive sufficiency or insufficiency arguments for or against what is not fully understood a healthy source of alternatives for strengths and weaknesses it did not help that the new scientist published an article on horizontal gene transfer with the very splashy cover Darwin was wrong chopping down the Tree of Life I was quite startled to be sitting there in the board meeting and hearing one of the creationist school board members say here's this new article from the knot creationist publication New Scientist this is mainstream science and it is an article talking about how evolution is a theory in crisis why can't we teach the students the weaknesses of evolution like this what it is don't get me started on the new scientism okay so what happened after several contentious meetings the board finally came up with what we call son of strengths and weaknesses which and by the way excuse me I propose that you can you can predict the amount of political pressure involved in one of these statements based upon the number of prepositional phrases and conjunctions right in all fields of science analyze evaluate and critique scientific explanations by using empirical evidence logical reasoning and experimental and observational testing stop there just to stop that's good fun no including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations so as to encourage critical thinking by the student count the prepositional phrases like I say okay now we predict that a couple years from now when high school biology textbooks come up for revision all sides of scientific evidence will be used much as strengths and weaknesses was back in 2003 to try to pressure the textbook publishers into putting a lot of crap into the books we'll see what happens the other thing I want to tell you about which is related is what are referred to as academic freedom laws which are cropping up all over the country if you go to NCSC comm or our old domain NCSE web org we really still are adored but we finally got the we finally got NCSE calm as a domain name yes anyway cyber squatters terrible people academic freedom legislation is cropping up all over the place No I have a hypothesis that one cause of these this kind of legislation which I'll describe in a moment has to do with a number of cases in the 1900s excuse me 1990s and 2000's involving teachers top-down approaches where you have an equal time for creation science laws which were very popular in the late 70s or district-wide laws like dover Pennsylvania's which require teachers to do something haven't worked for them very well if you can get individual teachers to bring this stuff into the classroom you might have a better shot at however there were these three cases back in the 1990s and 2000's where individual teachers did exactly freelance and quite this the same fashion and they were smacked down for it by the courts courts deciding that you can't just freelance the teaching of whatever it is you want to teach a case that is not as well-known as it should be is a Minnesota State Court case Rodney Levesque versus independent school district in Faribault Minnesota in his complaint Levesque holds the view that the teaching of evolution in high school should be accompanied by a critical examination of the scientific arguments and evidence both for and against the theory now when this was taken to court the Minnesota state court ruled against him plaintiff asserts a free speech right to teach the criticisms of evolution in the biology classroom plaintiffs position is wrong that's a useful thing to know here's why the court also wrote that academic freedom is not a license for uncontrolled expression at variance with established curricular content plaintiffs classroom at the high school is a non-public forum and the district has the right to limit the speech in that classroom to the teaching of the designated curriculum in other words if you sign the contract in the district you have agreed to teach that districts curriculum a k-12 teacher has virtually no academic freedom okay so what if the district is prevented from stopping a teacher from teaching alternative theories or evidence against evolution or what if a district tells a teacher that he can't teach the evidence against evolution not that you have to teach the evidence against evolution I think this is part of the rationale for these academic freedom acts that we have been encountering lately let me tell you a little bit more about the nitty-gritty of these guys the academic freedom act movement started in Alabama with the law in nineteen in 2004 which was intended to encourage the teaching of creationism without using the term the sponsor of this bill said quote this bill will level the playing field because it allows a teacher to bring forward the biblical creation story of humankind representative Jim Carnes was quoted as saying quote evolution is one fairy creation as an alternative theory now the bills got out of committee but they didn't get through the house before the legislature adjourned but the legislators in Alabama are nothing if not determined and in subsequent years there have been more bills proposed in this original bill and most of its successors the claim was made the teachers need the protection of their academic freedom teachers need protection to teach alternative theories of origins the purpose of this I believe was to prevent a district from doing as the district and Levesque and Webster and Pelosi did and tell the teacher not to teach the alternative theories this is basically a get-out-of-jail-free card for a creationist teacher that's really what what we're talking about the other thing was this bill was was was permissive in the sense that it didn't require a teacher to teach alternative theories it just said that you can teach alternative theories if you wanted the other thing that this bill did was it would protect students if the student subscribes to a position on origins but this is very scary for teachers I mean you can kind of imagine as the caption says here maybe it's not a wrong answer maybe it's just a different answer teachers basically don't want the teachers don't want laws and regulations that allow the students to say well I'm protected I can write anything I want in this test or I can write your answer but then I can go on and on and on about creationism etc etc the most serious of the academic freedom X is Louisiana's which did pass in March 2008 Louisiana State Senator Ben Nevers introduced SB 561 the Louisiana academic freedom act this was modeled on a 2006 policy that had been used in worship Washita County which had been promoted by the Louisiana Family Forum which is a religious right group the Washita parish policy again was one of these strengths and weakness's kind of policies but it permitted teachers to help students understand analyze critique and review in an objective manner the strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories what was interesting about the Washita County policy is that it added besides evolution and origin of life it tucked on global warming and human cloning which are usually not topics taught in high school biology actually origin of life is hardly ever taught in high school biology but these are all topics that are of great interest to the Religious Right the neveress 2008 bill was proposed and had it passed it would have been bad indeed it would protect teachers who wanted to teach the strengths and weaknesses it was couched in terms of critical thinking everybody's in favor of critical thinking right and it also protected teachers if they wanted to bring in supplemental materials to the regular textbook which was something that the Discovery Institute found very attractive and obviously pushed because they happen to have published a book explore evolution explode evolution is where they come which presents the weaknesses of evolution we have an analysis of this on our website and so you can find out what's wrong with it in great detail that's what we do well as it happens the original nevers bill didn't passed and the bill that did pass was renamed the Louisiana Science Education Act probably they didn't want it to sound like an Alabama bill but it is still problematic they a lot of the really bad things of the original Act were taken out although those still are the intent of the Act the way the bill finally read is that the teacher should foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills logical analysis and open an objective discussion of scientific theories who wouldn't right including evolution the origins of life global warning a human Chloe you know the the fact that these these scientific explanations are singled out sort of puts a big flashing neon light on them of course also in the bill that was passed the teachers were given authority to bring in supplemental materials with very little oversight guess who wants that there was a procedure that was vaguely referred to in the law as to how a parent could bring a complaint so like if you're in Louisiana and somebody bring your teacher starts teaching from this book you can complain about it but the process that you have to go through is so labyrinthian and the deck stacked against you because the committee that's appointed includes the publisher and includes it's not a very good system this is for the true creation and evolution geeks in this audience this is the this is the phylogeny of academic freedom acts this is this was drawn up by my colleague Anton mates a wonderful young man who's just gone off to graduate school in Washington and I'm sure he'll be a fine scientist but he actually did this marvelous marvelous phylogeny reading all of the bills and making a timeline and figuring out what was influenced by what so I just have to go over this with you because it's so much fun geek out you guys the left-hand side of this phylogeny originated with the original alabama bill and this deals with the rights of students and teachers it involves the legal protection of teachers and the idea of alternative theories now the alabama bill was critiqued by the discovery institute which of course is the intelligent design think-tank up in washington as a boy in seattle washington and later versions of the bill dropped a reference to alternative theories and replaced it with the full range of scientific views now that is a phrase from the santorum amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act and you can think you can sort of hear why this is better linguistics alternative views might make somebody think of creationism there's nobody here but as but as scientists and teachers right we certainly don't want to reiation ism to be taught wink-wink nudge-nudge full range of scientific views doesn't sound as much like we're proposing creationism but of course the full range of scientific views includes the alternative theories right so this is this is a way of trying to duck some of the legal challenges that will doubtless be applied to these to these laws at some point the tree on the right represents another strain of act freedom axe this time arising from the Washington Parish critical analysis strengths and weaknesses it also is a permissive policy but it tacks on these other religious rights enthusiasms like global warming origin of life cloning and so forth a little bit later on the provision was added that administrators cannot censor materials which of course was something encouraged by the intelligent design promoters because they have this nice handy-dandy book they could sell a lot of copies for and they also put in the obligatory oh but this is not to promote religion and bundling evolution with other religious right enthusiasms such as global warming is part of the parcel now we have here a little horizontal gene transfer between these two as you can perhaps imagine these these don't occur in a vacuum and we are likely to see more evolution of this type in the future stay tuned because there will be a new legislative season beginning in January and we'll we'll be adding to this tree I'm sure the summary have the evidence against evolution or academic freedom act approach includes the fact that they assiduously try sari assiduously try to avoid any overt mention of religion whatsoever you noticed in the bills that I was quoting to you there was no effort whatsoever to mention God mentioned creationism they're getting better and better at whitewashing the over religiosity out of their position the stress is on academic freedom on free speech rather than on free exercise the other First Amendment clause and everybody's in favor of academic freedom right who isn't raise your hand if you're against academic freedom it's not going to happen they also are protective bills which is very clever they they will protect a teacher who wants to teach alternatives or evidence against evolution something like that again they get out of jail free card and perhaps the most interesting thing about these bills is that they are permissive rather than directive rather than like the Dover policy where the teachers were told in Dover Pennsylvania you will teach a B and C this says you can teach a B and C the reason why that's clever has to do with the legal system we could go to the judge in Dover and say we want an injunction because this policy requiring the teaching of this bad stuff is going to cause harm and you know the you have a chance of getting one if you go to a judge with one of these permissive policies it's harder to get an injunction it's harder to challenge the bill on its face okay a facial challenge is much more difficult the judge is much more likely to say something like well you know nobody's really done it yet now let's just see what happened let's see how it plays out what the lawyers call an as-applied challenge that's a lot harder if you can make a facial challenge like we did in in Dover you can find your plaintiffs the plaintiffs have have a much easier time of establishing the standing to sue with them as-applied challenge you've actually got to go out there and find the teacher who's stepping over the line you've got to find that teacher and then find somebody in that classroom where would be taking the class the next year who has standing who is willing it's the the barriers I just raised much much higher it's a very clever way of trying to duck some of the legal problems that they have had in the past finally they avoid singling out evolution by embedding evolution with other topics like global warming and so forth because in an earlier case Epperson versus Arkansas the Supreme Court said hey you know when you single out of like that you are hip so facto prima facia and whatever other latin phrases you want to whip out you are just saying we're being religious because it's you know why just single out evolution from all the things we'll evolution is the one sub subject in the curriculum that causes problems for people's religion so they embed evolution with global warming and some of these other enthusiasms as a way of trying to work around a person so the legal strategy is getting much much clever most of you have who have read in the event si se stuff know that we obsess about something called the pillars of creationism and the reason I keep bringing this up is because it's a really easy thing to remember if you can remember these three arguments virtually every claim that a creationist makes or letter to the editor or any other kind of communication book whatever it could be fit into one of the three of these and if you can recognize these you can place any of the argument into it and then you automatically know the answer to the argument once you understand the argument the responses to the pillars the first pillar of course is that evolution is a theory in crisis scientists are giving up on evolution it is no longer considered a valid hello all of a sudden here we go it is no longer considered a valid argument the second pillar of creationism is that evolution and religion are incompatible that's something that is exercised with great enthusiasm and the fairness argument that it's only fair if you teach evolution that you balance it with something will either balance it with creationism or balance it with creation science balance it with intelligent design balance it with the evidence against evolution you're seeing a pattern here right what we're seeing today is the 1st and 3rd the academic freedom acts are claims about the validity of evolution but also very very strong claims to promote the fairness piller if you look at the proposed academic freedom act which you can find on the web the the way of marketing this is extremely clever let me teach let me think who doesn't want your kids to think right the framing of this argument is very very clever it's framed in terms of critical thinking and academic freedom not framed in terms of promoting somebody's religious idea the Discovery Institute has the academic freedom petition which you can quickly go down to their website and sign up for and there again we're talking about the academic freedom of teachers to teach the strengths and weaknesses teachers will be protected from being fired harassed intimidated etc also part of the frame that the intelligent design people are very enthusiastically promoting that they are the underdogs and being discriminated against by big science I guess that's us the big science and teachers are and students also will be protected in these bills so that's where we are and as I say come January there's going to be more of this we fully expect to have new and improved versions of academic freedom X stressing these kinds of critical thinking and academic freedom not religiously sounding ideas whatsoever if you want to know more about this you can go to NCS e-comm if you go to this little button over here you can sign up for a Friday electronic newsletter that will depress you and give you the give you the news for what goes on during the week if you go to the news button up here you'll be taken to this page where you can sort for whatever state you're interested in or you can sort for a year of interest and you'll pull up all of the news that we have about what's going on in that state in terms of the creation and evolution controversy and of course it's a membership organization so you're welcome to join I will not discourage you from doing so my colleagues are Glenn branch who writes that wonderful Friday a newsletter that many of you get and I know from the feedback we get that is just an extraordinarily helpful thing for many people louise mead is our education outreach director robert lund is our communications director peter houses our faith outreach director and our three wonderful flare-ups wranglers the guys who spend most of their time giving advice to teachers and school board members and lawyers and everybody else josh rose now Steve Newton and Eric Mikkel it's a really great bunch of people to work with and I'm extremely pleased that I have such a talented staff and of course like all right minded organizations we are naturally on Facebook and there we go well I must say it's a very good feeling to have Jeanne Scott and her gang on one side in this battle in a few minutes I have to go and catch a plane but I'd like to initiate the quick question session if people want to ask questions to Jeanne I well I know it's not but it's not my fault so those people loose in Texas and is a system that doesn't have kids trying to make sure that everyone else does it for education what is the ordinary citizen going to obviously other than just never never got your message to me the importance of voting too many people I mean you may not have kids if you have one vote and you know something down Mac Weber is wonderful its all's good to remind people you know the creationist each I've one vote just like senators there are various ways certainly join the Texas citizens for science there is another wonderful organization that we partnered with in addition to TCS and that's the come on thank you Texas freedom network wonderful people they really do greatly also if you'd like to become really hands on I don't know what your background is if you're a scientist if you're whatever if you can volunteer at your local school they always need extra people they need people for tutoring they need extra people to check out books in the library I mean there's get to know your local teachers teachers are fabulous people I think we'll take we'll have to kind of shorten the question period because there is a book signing but then there's also the we we have the closing ceremony like twelve fifteen or thirty 12:30 oh we can do word wishes yes okay that's it time thank you very much for uh companies to tell us how this recently talking to my sister to zero game chees of biology major at University Davis in Monell and you're talking about for it he starts treating how resting it is that she'll be the same degree as people who as my major is still don't fully accept evolution and how the very least accessor history deniers book and my question is do you think that high school and college faculty just armed r-tard to nice and are forceful on to let these people know that for all the times of emergencies that well I don't know how you can force someone to accept a scientific idea I mean you know be more forceful in what sense you don't whack somebody over the head because they don't accept you know this enzyme being involved in sell degree but I take your point and I I really want to underscore it my biggest gripe frankly is with my fellow college professors I'm a recovering college professor myself I don't think college professors are doing a very good job teaching evolution if high school teachers come out of four years of college and some of them are biology majors right they don't understand evolution that's not the fault of the Education Department that's the fault of the arts and science biology department and geology department and Astronomy Department we can do a whole lot better job of teaching evolution to undergraduates after all people who graduate from college go on to become school board members go on to become teachers go on to become captains of industry and voters and we need to have we need to do a much better job teaching the nature of science and teaching what evolution really is you know I was I travel a lot and speak a lot at campuses around the country and usually I'm invited by the science departments they do a talk for them and I'll do a public lecture as well and one of the things I always ask the biology department people is do you require a course in evolution for your biology majors and often times there's a certain amount of squirming going on because they haven't quite gotten around to doing that yet they say well what are you going to catch up to Brigham Young of course what needs to be done at the university level in the biology departments is to bring evolution into every single class not save it for the course in evolution but bring it into every single course every single class at least once a week figure out how are those of you who are scientists figure out how you can bring the idea of common ancestry into biochemistry molecular biology organism ik biology population biology it's easy there too and ecology is next question are you saying that the question had to do with the new science cover the article itself wasn't that bad although you know sometimes scientists don't think very think about how they phrase things and you can phrase things in ways that don't mislead the public there were some phrasings that I would certainly have appreciated a little more thoughtfulness there but basically the article wasn't bad the article was talking about how at the single-celled organism level the level of archaea and protists and stuff like that you have a lot of swapping around of genetic information now more than one person then that article pointed out that once you get to multiple celled organisms once you get to Metazoa oh yeah you get trees it's just a little stuff you know it's just the single stealth stuff which it's really complicated that doesn't that's not an argument against evolution but the goofballs at New Scientist had this big splashy cover Darwin was wrong we'll give me a break Darwin didn't know anything about horizontal gene transfer how could Darwin be wrong the idea of being is that there's no tree of life anymore well that's just nonsense if the bottom of the tree is a banyan that doesn't mean there's not a tree right once you get Metazoa you get trees not a big deal so my beef with New Scientist is that if they want to have a flashy cover that'll get people to buy the magazine I don't have a problem with that but don't do something that is going to deliberately mislead the public about what evolution is now National Geographic had a really great cover a couple years ago was Darwin wrong I imagine a lot of people picked that cover you know picked up that issue of National Geographic to see if Darwin was wrong and you open it up and says no and what I might add was about ninety four point type and so you couldn't miss world forms fossils everything and on you have all these wonderful scars are fair are the best specimens or the type specimens of the species they represent and I'm wondering could the fact that we show the same features of the same Union a dozen scales over over and over again instead of emphasizing the hundreds and thousands of fossils which match your different parts of the of the overall skeleton could that be causing a problem with people not accepting that there are actually thousands of fossils I mean I don't think we're over using any particulars in the big idea that you and I would both support is that we need to inform the public that there are a wonderful transitional series down pro throws book if you haven't taken a look at it out there it even bought it it's good book Don's book has got marvelous stuff about whales about horses you know there's lots of sequences that that show really really good gradual change through time and even more so when you get into vertebrates so III don't think that people are saturated with with the same old examples I think they just don't know in general what the examples are one slide that I use that's very effective I think in in public audiences is a slide that was prepared by an NC sa member whose name now escapes me and I really be embarrassed since this is going to be on the internet and I'm not giving him credit for it but it's a slide showing from the earliest australopithecines well this is pre Ardipithecus but you know the earliest Oscar australopithecines up until modern humans and you know I show this in say okay draw line where is the ape where is the human and of course it's impossible because even even if you only look at skills you can't we have such a variety now that we can't even we can we can't say that there is hard and fast lines between them thank you for your question we'll have one more question please marker protections in these academic academic freedom acts for teachers only uses to bring in all it well because they're permissive you don't have to bring it it but what if a parent or a student in the classroom wants the alternate theories Brian can the teacher be protected from course it depends on the wording of the law in in several manifestations it wouldn't matter because the teacher can make the decision the law is written in terms of the teachers right to do a B or C but the point being even if the laws it reads one way literally it is still the case the teachers find laws like this highly intimidating and I think the net effect of these kinds of laws is just the teachers don't get around to teaching evolution this year just couldn't get to it it's kind of in the back of the book anyway and we had to spend so much time memorizing the enzymes and photosynthesis so we have much more problem in the United States with teachers skipping evolution than we do with the actual Frank teaching of creationism and but that former is a major problem if your concern is with public understanding of science and science literacy thank you so much for inviting me to be part of it you

Channel: Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science

Views: 209,702

Rating: 4.8474441 out of 5

Keywords: Creationism, Intelligent Design, Religion, Science, God, Designer, Evolution, Natural Selection, Charles Darwin, Atheist Alliance International

Id: pItVGYa863k

Length: 56min 3sec (3363 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/aethauia]

So, I wanted to post this on RichardDawkins.net but my username/password isn't working...

How can we introduce the concept of evolution to young children in a developmentally appropriate way, so that the first time they hear about it isn't in middle or high school, at which point any religious training is already embedded, and at which point - just based on age - they are most likely NOT to listen to their teachers?

[u/[deleted]]

Lol Genealogy tree of bills...

[u/migraine516]

That was a great video. And I have 2 of those bottles. They're awesome.

[u/Hookhand]

She's a nice lady. I met her a few years ago.

[u/sassanix]

That water bottle is so distracting.