What Will the Creationists Do Next?

this program is a presentation of uctv for educational and non-commercial use only [Music] let me introduce Jeanne and then she can actually tell you a little bit more about her organization though I'm sure you don't need to know about it because mostly you probably do and any of us who care about science education are forever indebted to Jeanne and her group Eugenie Scott is the executive director of the National Center for Science education a nonprofit organization that supports the teaching of evolution in the public schools she is a former University professor she is internationally known as an authority on the creation/evolution controversy of the United States and we've had the pleasure of working with NCSE on our understanding evolution website and continue to interact with them any chance we get Eugenie Scott [Applause] this is the world's lowest booting laptop so everybody be patient for a moment but this will give me an opportunity while the world's slowest booting laptop is getting to where we need it to be to just fill in a couple of blanks Kevin and I didn't coordinate our talks today and I thought he might bring up a couple of issues that he didn't bring up and so my talk will actually make more sense if I as I say fill in a blank or two that he didn't talk about which is not a criticism of him if we notice how well I'm doing filling up the air here well the world's slowest booting a laptop laptop does its thing in the beginning a phrase that we tend to use a lot at the National Center for Science education there was the effort to of course ban the teaching of evolution which culminated in 1925 with the trial of John Scopes for the crime of teaching evolution in the state of Kentucky Tennessee is a very welcome sight you never really know when you connect your laptop to a new system whether it's actually gonna work and it's working so this is a good thing the effort to ban evolution of course succeeded very well people tend to look at the Scopes trial as a great victory for modernism as a great victory for science over fundamentalism and so forth that's because they're reading HL Mencken and they're not really looking at what happened in schools around the United States because what happened is Scopes lost and evolution basically disappeared from the high school curriculum and didn't come back into the high school curriculum until after Sputnik and there's a long history of that as well in the arguably in the mid to late 1960s which actually was beyond my high school career so I didn't get any evolution when I was going to high school I had to wait until I got to college the return of evolution to the high school textbook and therefore to the high school curriculum stimulated the growth of a new form of anti evolutionism called creation science now creation science was the idea that you could take a special creation point of view that God created everything and essentially its present form and in the most common form of special creationism this creation event took place about 10,000 years ago relatively recently but you could support that with scientific theory and data and that was creation science and the argument was being made in the 70s and 80s that if you're going to teach evolution in the public schools you at least should teach creation science to balance it out get a lot of talk about balance and fairness in this controversy and there's a reason for that I'll address that again a little bit later on but creation science was an effort to try to temper what they what supporters considered the negative effects of teaching children evolution in the public schools now creation science was a quite popular movement in the especially the late 70s and early 80s and in over 22 or 23 states around the country legislation was actually introduced to require that if evolution were taught you had to teach creation science along with it these laws were fortunately the vast majority of them died in committee not of their own accord might do it's because scientists and teachers went down to the state houses and testified before the education committees and argued against the introduction of these laws which would certainly have very negatively impact my staff is cringing because I just almost use impact as a transitive verb and I'm sorry I will never do it again I don't know what yeah it must be the headache and you know I'm sorry had a negative effect upon the teaching of science in the United States now indeed as this New York Times headline suggests there have been a number of attacks on evolution and the more recent attacks since creation science have really been quite crafty as this recent headline in Texas shows creationists have adopted new strategies and that is actually what I'm going to be talking about today in order to understand the present-day strategies though we have to go don't try to read that okay this is the problem with giving a talk with an audience like you because you're all used to reading you're all you know intellectual people and you see a prop like that and immediately are trying to read it you will go blind don't even try okay this is just a prop just look at the headlines and listen to me instead this is this is a problem that I have with intellectual audiences usually I can get by with this much better to understand the crafty attacks and the new strategies we have to have a little bit of history and this is sort of where my filling the air well the world slow the slowest laptop got to this point commences again remember those equal time laws for teaching creation science and evolution two of them actually passed in Arkansas and Louisiana and the Louisiana law actually got all the way to the Supreme Court where the Supreme Court decided that such laws violated the Constitution and were not legal to teach and so the laws requiring equal time for creation science were struck down however the current situation that we have had its Genesis if you will in that Supreme Court decision which was called Edwards versus Aguilar in the Edwards decision justice Brennan wrote that teachers are free to teach any and all theories about the origins of humankind any and all scientific theories is what I want you to think about because that of course implies that there actually are alternative scientific theories of course creation science was presented as exactly that there was evolution one scientific theory and then there's creation science which is an alternative scientific theory according to proponents there Scalia descended from the Edwards decision and Justice Scalia wrote that the people of Louisiana should have the entitlement to have scientific evidence against evolution talk so if we look at the consequences of the actual decision and the dissents for the evolution as it were of anti evolutionism there are two major points from Brennan they got the notion that there are indeed scientific alternatives to evolution that could legitimately be taught and of course the most popular one is intelligent design quote theory which Kevin described briefly in his presentation but then from the Scalia dissent they got the idea that there existed evidence against evolution and that it was perfectly legal to teach it now creationists were very quick to seize upon particularly this evidence against evolution argument and that's what that's what I'm going to concentrate on my in my talk today Kevin took care of intelligent design I want to talk about the evidence against evolution approach because that has had a very interesting evolution in and of itself creationists were very quick to seize upon the evidence against evolution approach and literally the next month after the Edwards decision was handed down which was in July of 87 in the August 1987 Institute for Creation Research publication acts and facts the following paragraph appeared school boards and teachers should be strongly encouraged to at least stress the scientific evidences and arguments against evolution in their classes not just arguments against some proposed mechanism but getbut against evolution per se even if they don't want to recognize these as evidences and arguments for creation let's see what's going on here evidence against evolution is evidence for creation this was a very natural conclusion for creationists to come to because it reflects very clearly their basic view which they've referred to as the to model approach in the to model approach you have only two possibilities on the one side you have evolution on the other side you have creation science or intelligent design some form of special creation therefore if you can just eliminate evolution creationism wins by default so you don't have to come up with the peer-reviewed articles about creation about intelligent designer irreducible complexity or anything like that you don't have to come up with the science to support the idea of special creation you just have to eliminate evolution and because there's only two possibilities there for creationism wins now of course there's a there's a logic here that well actually the logic is not bad because if you only have two choices if a if not a then B works but the problem is the premises and that is that over there on the special creation and intelligent design side of the ledger you've got more than just those two alternatives one of which was mentioned by Kevin and his talk that's the istic evolution the idea that God creates through the process of evolution is not proved by eliminating evolution it doesn't anymore than creation science has proved or intelligent design is proved or any other kind of religious so you have a really muddled kind of argument here but it's one that the creationist hold very very strongly and I think if you understand this as one judge referred to it a contrived dualism you'll understand what's going on in the creationist movement today because the evidence against evolution approach is really an effort to try to sneak creationism in through the back door disproving evolution leaves creationism as the default position so you don't actually have to argue that Noah's Flood created Grand Canyon like they did in creation science you just have to prevent students from accepting evolution and then they naturally will accept that God created things especially because they're probably correct students also tend to think in the same kind of dichotomous fashion as creationists do so let's just look at this schematically first of all creation science gave rise to intelligent design an intelligent design gave rise to after the Edwards versus Agra large Supreme Court decision what we could refer to as the post Edwards arguments and there they take two forms one of them is to argue that there the approach should be to present the evidence against evolution the other approach is to present alternative scientific theories now of course as we know alternative scientific theories means intelligent design and creation science so it's a nice little feedback loop there it makes things very interesting but I'd like also like to present to you that partly because of that two model approach or the contrived dualism if you will the evidence against evolution has the same effect the evidence against evolution approach to teaching science to anti evolutionism if you will really does have the the same net effect of promoting intelligent design and creation science let's talk a little bit more about the evidence against evolution approach there are a lot of euphemisms for this and as we at the National Center for Science education monitor the creationism and evolution controversy around the country we see the same phrases cropping up over and over one very common one is to argue that students should critically analyze the evidence of the evidence for evolution now let me do a little translating here because critically analyzing is not critically analyzing it's not what you think it is critically analyzing is criticizing if you actually look at the lesson plans if you actually look at the arguments that the proponents of these ideas present for classroom use they're not talking about a critical analysis of looking at different components of the argument and what's the logical relationship etc they want you to criticize evolution another phrase that we hear a lot is to present the evidence for and the evidence against evolution this was particularly popular and a series of bills that came up in the mid-1990s in Ohio and proposed in New Mexico and several other states as well none of which fortunately passed strengths and weaknesses of evolution is a phrase that we're hearing a lot right now because this is a component of the Texas science education standards which I'll talk about in a little bit more detail later presenting evolution is Theory not fact is another phrase that we run into a lot in the Selman versus Cobb County Georgia textbook disclaimer textbook sticker case that some of you might recall from a few years ago this was the heart of that difficulty of presenting evolutionists theory not fact now of course as all of you people who are well-versed in science in this audience know very well of course evolution is the theory because theories are so much more important than facts because theories explain facts theories Trump facts facts are a dime a dozen theories are those abstract inferential explanations that tell us how the world works and there they are devised after a great deal of work and testing of hypotheses and and inferring relationships and doing all the really hard brain work that goes into science that's not what these mean when you hear evolution being referred to as theory not fact and some of these anti evolution proposals what they're talking about is present evolution as a theory in the sense of a guess or a hunch or something that you really don't have to pay very much attention to it's just a theory I've often told students when I do workshops for teachers I have stolen liberally from Judy scotch Moore as she has a wonderful little exercise that she and encourages the teachers to do for the students to help teach them what the meaning of Theory actually is in science as opposed to the street definition that there that the students probably come into the class thinking about and she she presents the ideas and the details don't matter but his cell theory just a theory is atomic theory just a theory all right you know of course you get to evolution is it just a theory well no no more than any of these other theories so it's when you hear evolution being argued in some of these policies as well we should be teaching evolution it's Theory not fact it actually is a creationist approach finally our second to the finally teach the full range of views about origins I'll come back to that because that comes right out of an amendment to No Child Left Behind which has been giving us a lot of problems and finally from the Discovery Institute the idea that one should teach the controversy which is a very clever bit of wording implying that in fact there is a controversy within science over whether evolution took place now obviously there would not be a need for the National Center for Science education were there not a controversy in society about evolution I mean I would like us to go out of business next week if we could because if there was no need for us that would be just fine for all of us however that's not what teach the controversy means they mean pretend to students that scientists are debating whether or not evolution took place and that simply is a falsehood that students should not be a should not be inflicted with we have had lots of legislation in the last couple of years about anti evolutionism in some fashion or another either promoting the evidence against evolution ideas or promoting the the idea that some form of creationism or intelligent design should be presented there's a lot of different kinds of laws and in 2008 we had quite a few and it's only February of oh nine but already we're on on the way to having a bumper crop of these laws I'm afraid I'll show you a little bit later on how you can find out more about these laws to understand a major component of the current evidence against evolution approach I want to take you back to 2001 and the No Child Left Behind education bill with which many of you as teachers are quite familiar yes indeedy No Child Left untested as the teachers comments senator Santorum them senator in Pennsylvania presented an amendment to the Senate's version of the bill now the first paragraph of the Santorum amendment said it is the sense of the Senate that good science education should prepare students to distinguish the data or testable theories of science from philosophical or religious claims that are made in the name of science well I think that's a fine idea I am all for that may his drive increase the second paragraph unfortunately read where biological evolutionist talks the curriculum should help students to understand why the subject generates so much continuing controversy and should prepare the students to be informed participants in public discussions regarding the subject now why is this not such a good idea this is not such a good idea because evolution is singled out from all scientific ideas as the only example of a controversial issue the Santorum amendment paragraph 2 was not really a critical thinking encouragement as it was marketed to the press and scientists and teachers almost 100 organizations of scientists and teachers submitted a letter to the conference committee when the House and the Senate bill had to be brought together to argue that this amendment should be dropped that it was bad science it was not good policy and not something that we wanted to see in the in the bill certainly not well through the good offices frankly of scientists and teacher organizations and lobbying the conference committee version of the bill did not include the Santorum amendment as part of the bill but politics being what it was there was a reference wording related to the Santorum amendment tucked way way deep down inside in the conference committee report now that seems like a bunch of legalese but it's actually important because the conference committee report is not part of the bill it is not law it is used should the law ever be challenged in the future to represent the views of Congress sort of explanatory material to help the judge or the jury decide what was the what were the views of Congress and passing the bill in its components but it is not part of the law it does not there's nothing in No Child Left Behind that mentions evolution that mentions any specific topic science or other ones so the idea that the Santorum amendment a material that does appear in No Child Left Behind somehow is significant for science education is really an overstatement to say to say at least when the conference committee report came out all that remained of the two paragraphs of the Santorum amendment was what you see in red student students should distinguish the data and testable theories of science from religious or philosophical claims that are made in the name of science which is actually the good part and the notice that the rest of it is a little different from Santorum second paragraph where topics are taught that may generate controversy parentheses such as biological evolution now that may seem like a small victory but it is a huge victory because instead of this statement referring you know putting big flashing neon lights around the copic of evolution it's a controversial issue stop a paragraph of policy which is not so bad the phrase the full range of scientific views however is something that we have encountered in ncsc regularly since 2002 and it happens to be the case that philip johnson law professor here at the university of california has taken credit for basically writing the Santorum amendment and when explained what when asked what are your goals he said he had hoped to accomplish to make it very difficult for public schools authorities to justify firing or disciplining a teacher who informed students of the weaknesses of the Darwinian Theory rather than teaching it in the authoritarian dogmatic matter the Darwinian have been able to enforce up until now you know it's sort of like those those dogmatic spherical earthers but nonetheless we are the you know Darwinian dogmatist it's has a literation there i guess that is attractive to anti-evolutionists so i wanna find this quote very useful in understanding what's going on in the anti-evolution movement today because it picks up both of those points the weaknesses of evolution is in there as if teaching students the weaknesses of evolution is going to improve their critical thinking and secondarily the idea of protecting teachers against their districts or their the state or in an illegal setting from being disciplined or being forbidden to teach creationism basically the reason why that protective component came up and is of such concern to the creationist is that during the 1990s and early 2000s there were a number of cases one here in California in Southern California pilosa versus San Juan Capistrano another one up in Illinois Webster versus New Lenox where teachers were told by their school districts no don't teach creationism no don't teach the evidence against evolution and the teachers sued their districts for their freedom of speech of academic freedom etc to teach what they wanted to teach in all of all three cases of this sort taking place in the 90s and early 2000 in all three cases the courts came back and said nope you don't have academic freedom as a k-12 teacher a k12 teacher signs a contract with the district that means the k-12 teacher agrees to teach the curriculum of that district if you don't like that districts curriculum find another district I mean you know it's different at the university level and people should not confuse this so these but the idea of the Santorum amendment in Johnson's own words was to try to protect teachers from suffering the slings and arrows of John Pelosi and gray Webster and Rodney Levesque so if we go back to our little flow chart here where we have the evidence against evolution approach we can sort of see a branching in two ways one branching goes into sort of protecting teachers their academic freedom if you will and the AFA there in this little chart refers to academic freedom Act which is something I'll talk about in more detail so one branch of this evidence against evolution strategy is to protect teachers so that they can teach these creationist ideas basically a get out of jail free card for creationist teachers what we're talking about the second branch is the idea of critical thinking that if we bring in the weaknesses of evolution or the evidence against evolution and teach it along with evolution that this will inspire the students to really exercise their critical thinking skills and we all want our students to be critical thinkers right raise your hand if you want your children to be critical thinkers yes indeedy we all want the okay so clearly this is the way to do it right teach them creationism teach them evolution and they can be critical thinkers that way some of us would think that that's perhaps not a very good idea now a very the first examples well actually not the very first but the first very consistent examples that we had of this academic freedom act or protective approach were a series of bills that began in 2004 in Alabama and these were actually called academic freedom X and these bills beginning with the 2004 bill protects teachers if they present the alternative theories of origin well what by the way are the alternative theories it's intelligent design its creation science etc so this is the get out of jail free card for creationist teachers of course and also these bills in Alabama protected students gave student free speech rights now this is the sort of thing that any teacher is going to say oh yeah can you imagine the term papers that would come in from students when I was teaching college I actually made the mistake of allowing I only did this two years I was a slow learner not a one trial learner but certainly a to trial learning I allowed my students to write papers on creation science and I got the worst papers I had ever received they were nothing but authoritarian quotes famous scientist X says this therefore it must be true therefore evolution didn't play take place famous famous scientist Y says this therefore it must be true because these famous scientists therefore evolution didn't take place they were just awful and of course the academic freedom Act in Alabama and its various descendants would protect students from handing in bad research papers would protect students from handing and wrong answers on an exam it's the sort of thing that teachers just don't really want to see and of course what this would result in his teachers just skipping evolution right because it's such a pain in the patoot they have to deal with this the I'm sorry mrs. Brown we just had to spend too much time on photosynthesis this year we're just not going to get to those chapters after all and that's the easiest way to do it which is not a good thing over the last few years we've had a lot of these academic Freedom Act types of legislation these protective acts and they have there there's too many my colleague Anton mates has done a wonderful phylogeny of these bills and and how one big at the other and the there's actually even some inter specific genetic exchangers as elements get passed around from one to the other and and there'll be a much more detailed discussion of this in the reports of the NCSC if the for those of you were interested but as you can see in 2009 we're starting to get the more of these academic freedom laws let me just give you a very quick summary of the academic freedom act version of the evidence against evolution they never mentioned religion they never mentioned creationism they in some some cases some of the policies even specifically state this should not be construed as as calling for the introduction of creationist ideas oh no nobody here but a scientist and of course the reasons for that is because creation science and then intelligent design have both gotten flattened in the courts because they are examples of religious advocacy and the First Amendment says that the classroom has to be religiously neutral so you know to avoid the Establishment Clause and the continuation of their legal failures they avoid religion assiduously they stress academic freedom they stress free speech interestingly enough there's a free speech clause in the First Amendment in addition to the Establishment Clause they tend to be protective bills teacher licensed teachers may teach this and there's another component of that as well and that these are permissive bills unlike the Dober policy that said that that basically had to do with instructing teachers to present intelligent design although eventually through the months that got watered down and watered down until it was just reading a policy but you know it started out teaching telogen design these policies don't say thou shalt they say thou me if you can do this now that is a very clever approach from a legal standpoint because if you have a policy that says teachers have to do this you can challenge that policy on its face you can make what lawyers call a facial challenge and I'm not a lawyer either and I don't play one on television either but you know we both hang around with lawyers a lot we talk about facial challenges are a whole lot easier than having to wait until some teacher takes up this suggestion this permissive approach and actually crosses the line in a classroom that's called an as apply Challenge you've got to find that teacher number one which is not always easy I mean I don't know how many of you have children but not too often do they come home and say guess what we learned in school today mom that just doesn't happen so not it most of the time you don't know what goes on when this teacher closes the classroom door you got to find the teacher you gotta find a plaintiff you have to find someone who has standing within that class or is going to be in the class next year you have to have someone who's willing to bring suit as well as having standing it's just a lot more difficult to do an as-applied challenge than it is to do a facial challenge and we believe that they deliberately chose these permissive wording in the bills as opposed to a directive bill wording in order to avoid these kinds of problems and another thing that we're finding with these academic freedom acts is that they are embedding evolution with a series of other controversial issues like stem cells or global warming as a way of avoiding an earlier legal challenge from one of the first anti creationism cases so to speak the a person case that strongly warned against singling out evolution from all other scientific theories now let me talk a little bit about Texas because Texas has very much been in the news in Texas represents sort of that other branch of the evidence against evolution approach Texas represents the the the critical thinking approach like all states are owned included Texas has science education standards and in Texas they are called the Texas educational knowledge and skills or the teks now like all standards the teks are composed of two components one is the content you have to teach solutions in chemistry or you have to teach optics in physics you have to teach sedimentation in earth science the content the other portion of the teks has to do with what they call process skills or science as a way of knowing habits of mind how to do an experiment stuff like that so it's in the process skills that we find the problem with petites process skill 3a for many many years has read as follows the student is expected to analyze review and critique scientific explanations including hypotheses and theories as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information well okay that sounds like a critical thinking standard doesn't sound strengths and weaknesses is kind of funny wording because you know we kind of tend not to really think about strengths and weaknesses of theories so much as use and you know explanatory power whatever but anyway it on its face that doesn't seem like a terribly objectionable standard and in fact the teks 3a does occur in for example the chemistry standards which is presented here and if you try to read this you will go blank but don't worry about it and also in the biology standards and teks 3a is you know is identical in both and there's a lot of kind of reused concepts and ideas in all of the teks the teks for chemistry or for physics or earth science or biology or environmental science they're all kind of more or less similar they all have statements about evaluate the impact of research on the STS science technology describe connections between physics and chemistry and then on the bottom and describe the connections between biology and future careers so there's a lot of commonality on this okay so one would think that if you have a statement calling for the analysis and evaluation of scientific theories and it occurs in physics and chemistry and earth science and environmental science and everything across the board that teachers would be able to choose an appropriate theory or hypothesis to is to develop a critical thinking activity around wouldn't you one would think wouldn't one but that's not how it works in Texas because in Texas the only scientific theory to which 3a was applied was guess which one in 2003 in Texas Texas was adopting its high school biology text and in on the school board was a was a strong faction that a minority faction of creationists who wanted to apply the strengths and weakness's wording of three a to evolution and why did the textbook publishers who had submitted books for adoption to go back and rewrite the books and put in the weaknesses of evolution because the textbooks only had strengths and when you ask well what are the weaknesses of evolution because the scientists we don't really have a list you know you're not going to go over to Kevin and say Kevin give me the list of weaknesses of evolution right the weaknesses of evolution come right out of the creationist literature it's things like Hegel's embryos or things like the peppered moth or the common standard laundry list that were used to looking at in which have been long since refuted in the 2003 textbook adoptions fortunately the cooler heads prevailed on the school board and the board voted to accept all of the textbooks with very tiny tweaks and did not require the textbook publishers to put in the weaknesses of evolution now what is going on now in Texas you might have heard some of this it has made the national news and it's been picked up by wire services and so forth the for a year beginning in January 2008 new writing committees were appointed for each of the subject areas in in the teks and the committee's have been working for a year and they submitted last fall various drafts of the rewritten teks and all all eight of the writing committees submitted the exact same wording for teks 3a the old is on top the new is on the bottom the new 3a reads analyze and evaluate scientific explanations using empirical evidence logical reasoning and experimental and observational testing I see some nods around the room you must be teachers and now that is a real critical thinking standard that is you know that is a useful thing for teachers and they can construct a workable classroom exercise around this and this occurred this wording replacing the old strengths and weakness's language occurs in physics and chemistry and biology and earth science and all of the all of the subject areas the first reading of the teks was last month in January and by a wealth creationists now have a majority on the board and in fact the leader of the 2003 creationist faction has just been reappointed by the governor as the chair of the board so things were very tense last month in Austin when I and my colleagues were there working with their Texas citizens for science and Texas freedom network our other allies in the state and we watched with white knuckles as the creationist faction tried to remove the new three a language and go back to the old three a language you know that the politics are incredible in Texas I mean we think we think Sacramento is kind of a curious place you ain't see in Austin the effort to go back to the old three a wording failed on a tie vote seven to seven so because there was you know they had in order to get the old wording in they had to have eight to seven and one of the guys was out on a walk nobody knew where he was he was gone but we didn't know that he was really upset because the chairman had appointed somebody else to a committee and so he was sort of having a little mad and he was a I mean has nothing if you think this has to do with science it doesn't that this has nothing to do with science this has to do with internal politics and all kinds of crazy stuff okay so 3a the new wording was saved the old strengths and weaknesses wording was not reinserted and that was a huge huge victory for science education in Texas that said the creationists were prepared with a very long list of amendments to make to the to the teks to water down the presentation of evolution I was interesting because there is a brand new earth and space science tEEX based basically bringing geology back and planetary science back and there was a lot of evolution in there I mean the guy who wrote it as an NCSE member good man and there's a lot of evolution in the ESS teks they went through those with a with a fine-tooth comb and any teak having to do with radio and radio isotopic dating with any sort of change through time paleontology those had to be tweaked tweaking fatigues to water down the coverage of evolution make it more tentative instead of saying describe you know the paleontological record recessions you know discuss whether the paleontological revit know it's stuff like that well unfortunately our allies on the board didn't really understand what was going on and in most cases these weakening amendments were passed there will be another school board meeting in March tune in for future attractions so to speak we will find we will see whether it's possible to get rid of those weakening amendments and actually have some science education standards and Texas that are with something the National Center for Science education x' website has a lot of information on this and other aspects of the creationism and evolution controversy if you go to the news button up there on top you will be taken to this page and I call your attention to a couple of sorting possibilities you can sort for a state California or Texas or wherever you can sort for this year last year or whatever it it's very easy to get around in this in this website so I would encourage you to take a look the address is NCSE web org and i we'll call your attention to one more item here and the far upper right-hand corner it says join often times when I talk and when I describe NCSC people say I didn't know it was a membership organization no you know thank you so much for inviting me to be part of your you the question the question was what if the creationist won well I would say I mean clearly people can live live long and happy lives without ever knowing anything about Charles Darwin without ever knowing anything about a common ancestry of living things without ever knowing anything about natural selection and other mechanisms of change certainly most of the planet goes most of the human beings on the planet do just fine without very much knowledge about evolution that's also true of Mozart I'm going to make an argument that is not practical I'm going to make an argument and there are practical arguments and Kevin can make them but it certainly is the case that if you understand that evolution has occurred if you understand that every living creature planter animal single-cell multi-celled on this planet has had a an incredible history linking back through relationships ancestral relationships this genealogical relationship through time it gives you a very different perspective I think on who you are what you are or what is your place in nature and this is true whether you are a religious individual or whether you are non-religious individual there is a there is a huge change and awareness I think if people truly understand what evolution means and it is also an absolutely fascinating serious set of scientific ideas and theories and explanations that it would be very sad if people were unable to learn everybody knows an eight-year-old who is crazy about dinosaurs right well you think dinosaurs are cool wait'll you hear everything else that's going on in evolution there are also practical reasons for understanding evolution and of course they are legion physicians really have to know a whole lot more about evolution than they people using antibiotics have to know a whole lot more about evolution than they do people who deal not just in medicine but people who deal with horticulture and agriculture need to know a lot more about evolution than they do there are and this is not just micro evolution okay this is not just the mechanics of evolution not just the idea of natural selection and drift and the other processes that influence change it's also the idea of of common ancestry itself my colleague Josh Rosen oh and I were were during the lunch hour talking about his talk that he's going to be giving at Triple A us next week and one of the examples that he's going to use is a really great one you remember you know tax all the anti-cancer drug it's a wonderful drug you remember how about six or seven years ago there was this great worry that all the use the trees up there in the northwest corner were going to be poached to death because that was the source of tax all well it happens to be you know a tree that does not in vast quantity but if you look at the phylogeny of you trees if you look at the relationship of those you that you tree that is getting scarce or and scarce or is not very numerical and you look at its relatives which is what phylogeny is it's looking at reconstructing that genealogical relationship what are the you know who shared a common ancestor or more recently with others if you look at that whole phylogeny that whole taxonomy of you trees you can find that there are relatives of that scarce you that you can use to make taxon and that is a very practical thing especially if you know anybody would cancer the question was did Bush prepare a signing statement which you recall from the last eight years were ways that the administration managed to avoid doing some of the things Congress wanted to do or adding things to bills that more closely reflected the administration's perspective did he was there a signing statement accompanying No Child Left Behind if there was it refer to evolution the thing about a a question that we got asked to Dempsey I see a lot in the last couple of weeks and the build-up to the change of administration's was how will the current in the incoming administration change what you do day by day and we had to say hardly at all because the creationism and evolution issue it's a curriculum issue and there is virtually zero influence of the federal government on curricular issues well the first thing I have to do when I talk to a foreign reporter from Europe or Great Britain or Japan or someplace like that is explained to them we don't have a national curriculum and they are just gobsmacked you what you don't have a national curriculum how crazy I have to explain to them that the American tradition and you know we've had a different history there's reasons for it the American tradition is decentralized education so a phenomenal number of decisions are made at that local school board level more decisions are made at the state level hardly any decisions and virtually nothing having to do with curriculum take place at the national level so you know for good or for ill we will continue to fight to these local battles a school district by school district state by state when it comes to the teaching of evolution we don't have a top-down if this were France no problem tomorrow you're going to teach this that's it the question was what is it about evolution that makes it so hard for religious fundamentalists it's not just religious fundamentalist okay if you look at the statistics then you look at the polls the surveys as Kevin pointed out about 25 to 30 percent of American Christians are conservative Christians more or less biblical literalist in some fashion it's understandable why evolution doesn't work for them if you believe that God specially created everything in its present form the idea of common ancestry is going to be a tough sell but there's an awful lot of American Christians who belong to Catholic and mainstream Protestant faiths that also are nervous about evolution because otherwise you wouldn't get that you know 40 to 45 percent rejection of evolution in the United States so part of it is biblical literalism that's probably the core the basic group but there are a lot of people who are very nervous about evolution for a variety of reasons one is that if one is what theologians call human exceptionalism if human beings are the result of the same processes that produced you know darwin's barnacles okay or warthogs or you know Vicki thinks viruses if we're the result of the same processes that all this other living things are the result of are we really special to God and a lot of crime a lotta there's theological you know ways of dealing with this but this is a worry of many people they believe that if God works through these secondary causes if God works through natural selection if God works through created law then then God has stepped back a couple feet and he's not directly involved with me and with you know answering my prayers and so forth now as I say there are plenty of Christian theologians that have dealt with these issues but those are the most common reasons given because human beings are being talked about rather than falling objects I mean you know it's much it's much more sensitive to deal with living things than it is to deal with relatively inanimate processes like why do the planets go around the Sun although that was a sticky issue at one point but you know the idea of God working through created law you know that that was Newton's big contribution really to theology I mean he argued that God was actually grander by having invented the the laws of motion and gravitation and so forth previous to Newton the idea was perfectly defendable that that God sent the angels to guide to the planets around the Sun in there or alternatively around the earth - but but you know the idea of you know God himself or the angels out there pushing the planets around was a perfectly reasonable explanation well Newton thought that God was much grander if like the great watchmaker we're talking sixteen hundreds now those metaphors were very popular if God could have created all of that and and managed to make the planets go around the Sun purely by natural law rather than having the Angels out there giving stuff nudges this was a much grander God much more worthy of worship that general idea hasn't quite sunk in about biology yet it has sunk in with Catholics it has sunk in with mainstream Protestants but in the United States we have a much more conservative form of Christianity than you find in on the continent or Great Britain and I've written about this in in my book and and others have written about it it's it's a fairly well known history that the particular form of Protestantism called fundamentalism was basically a homegrown American institution this was a fairly recent development in Christianity taking place in the early couple decades of the 20th century 1913 1918 approximately the 12 fundamentals the the booklets that outlined fundamentalist Christianity were written so you know the idea of a biblical literalism which is sort of where fundamentalism went within a few decades the idea of biblical literalism is is much more popular in the United States than it is in say European Christianity Kevin mentioned a book called explore evolution and earlier there was of pandas and people and in fact if you if you nearly were to google evidence against evolution you'd get lots of creationist sites I'm sorry her question was what what are they what is the evidence against evolution [Music] well things like explore evolution the book explore evolution has chapters critiquing the concept for example of homology which Kevin defined is referring to a similarity of parts and ultimately this is the result of common ancestry why else do we have the same why do our tetrapods have the same four limb pattern so forth critiquing the evidence or critiquing the idea of homology as being the result of common ancestry instead it's about blonde god made them on the same plan but of course they don't say that because the whole nature of the explore evolution book is to evolution didn't happen therefore creationism wins by default it's that two model approach [Music] rest assured there has not been any peer-reviewed literature no scientific experiments no experiments or observations or anything that could be considered legitimate science that would challenge the idea that living things had common ancestors as well you might [Applause] [Music] you you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

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Keywords: creationism, evolution, intelligent, design, teaching

Id: 4FUJiFx3lVA

Length: 57min 35sec (3455 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2009