VIEWPOINT
AUGUST
23, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 8
Dorothy,
It's Really Oz
A
pro-creationist decision in Kansas is more than a blow against Darwin
BY
STEPHEN JAY GOULD
The
Kansas Board of Education voted 6 to 4 to remove evolution, and the Big
Bang theory as well, from the state's science curriculum. In so doing,
the board transported its jurisdiction to a never-never land where a Dorothy
of the new millennium might exclaim, "They still call it Kansas, but I
don't think we're in the real world anymore." The new standards do not
forbid the teaching of evolution, but the subject will no longer be included
in statewide tests for evaluating students--a virtual guarantee, given
the realities of education, that this central concept of biology will be
diluted or eliminated, thus reducing courses to something like chemistry
without the periodic table, or American history without Lincoln.
The
Kansas skirmish marks the latest episode of a long struggle by religious
Fundamentalists and their allies to restrict or eliminate the teaching
of evolution in public schools--a misguided effort that our courts have
quashed at each stage, and that saddens both scientists and most theologians.
No scientific theory, including evolution, can pose any threat to religion--for
these two great tools of human understanding operate in complementary (not
contrary) fashion in their totally separate realms: science as an inquiry
about the factual state of the natural world, religion as a search for
spiritual meaning and ethical values.
In
the early 1920s, several states simply forbade the teaching of evolution
outright, opening an epoch that inspired the infamous 1925 Scopes trial
(leading to the conviction of a Tennessee high school teacher) and that
ended only in 1968, when the Supreme Court declared such laws unconstitutional
on First Amendment grounds. In a second round in the late 1970s, Arkansas
and Louisiana required that if evolution be taught, equal time must be
given to Genesis literalism, masquerading as oxymoronic "creation science."
The Supreme Court likewise rejected those laws in 1987.
The
Kansas decision represents creationism's first--and surely temporary--success
with a third strategy for subverting a constitutional imperative: that
by simply deleting, but not formally banning, evolution, and by not demanding
instruction in a biblically literalist "alternative," their narrowly partisan
religious motivations might not derail their goals.
Given
this protracted struggle, Americans of goodwill might be excused for supposing
that some genuine scientific or philosophical dispute motivates this issue:
Is evolution speculative and ill founded? Does evolution threaten our ethical
values or our sense of life's meaning? As a paleontologist by training,
and with abiding respect for religious traditions, I would raise three
points to alleviate these worries:
First,
no other Western nation has endured any similar movement, with any political
clout, against evolution--a subject taught as fundamental, and without
dispute, in all other countries that share our major sociocultural traditions.
Second,
evolution is as well documented as any phenomenon in science, as strongly
as the earth's revolution around the sun rather than vice versa. In this
sense, we can call evolution a "fact." (Science does not deal in certainty,
so "fact"can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree that
it would be perverse to withhold one's provisional assent.)
The
major argument advanced by the school board--that large-scale evolution
must be dubious because the process has not been directly observed--smacks
of absurdity and only reveals ignorance about the nature of science. Good
science integrates observation with inference. No process that unfolds
over such long stretches of time (mostly, in this case, before humans appeared),
or at an infinitude beneath our powers of direct visualization (subatomic
particles, for example), can be seen directly. If justification required
eyewitness testimony, we would have no sciences of deep time--no geology,
no ancient human history either. (Should I believe Julius Caesar ever existed?
The hard bony evidence for human evolution, as described in the preceding
pages, surely exceeds our reliable documentation of Caesar's life.)
Third,
no factual discovery of science (statements about how nature "is") can,
in principle, lead us to ethical conclusions (how we "ought" to behave)
or to convictions about intrinsic meaning (the "purpose" of our lives).
These last two questions--and what more important inquiries could we make?--lie
firmly in the domains of religion, philosophy and humanistic study. Science
and religion should be equal, mutually respecting partners, each the master
of its own domain, and with each domain vital to human life in a different
way. MORE>>
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