- On 10 July 1925, a drama was played out in a small courtroom
in a Tennessee town that touched off a far-reaching ideological battle.
John Scopes, a schoolteacher, was found guilty of teaching evolution (see
"The monkey trial - below"). Despite the verdict, Scopes, and
the wider scientific project he sought to promote, seemed at the time to
have been vindicated by the backlash in the urban press against his creationist
opponents.
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- Yet 80 years on, creationist ideas have a powerful hold
in the US, and science is still under attack. US Supreme Court decisions
have made it impossible to teach divine creation as science in state-funded
schools. But in response, creationists have invented "intelligent
design", which they say is a scientific alternative to Darwinism (see
"A sceptic's guide to intelligent design"). ID has already affected
the way science is taught and perceived in schools, museums, zoos and national
parks across the US.
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- In the US, Kansas has long been a focus of creationist
activity. In 1999 creationists on the Kansas school board had all mention
of evolution deleted from its state school standards. Their decision was
reversed after conservative Christian board members were defeated in elections
in 2002. But more elections brought a conservative majority in November
2004, and the standards are under threat again.
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- This time the creationists' proposals are "far more
radical and much more dangerous", says Keith Miller of Kansas State
University, a leading pro-evolution campaigner. "They redefine science
itself to include non-natural or supernatural explanations for natural
phenomena." The Kansas standards now state that science finds "natural"
explanations for things. But conservatives on the board want that changed
to "adequate". They also want to define evolution as being based
on an atheistic religious viewpoint. "Then they can argue that intelligent
design must be included as 'balance'," Miller says.
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- In January in Dover, Pennsylvania, 9th-grade biology
students were read a statement from the school board that said state standards
"require students to learn about Darwin's theory of evolution. The
theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence".
Intelligent design, it went on, "is an explanation for the origin
of life that differs from Darwin's view". Fifty donated copies of
an ID textbook would be kept in each science classroom. Although ID was
not formally taught, students were "encouraged to keep an open mind".
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- These moves are part of numerous recent efforts by fundamentalist
Christians, emboldened by a permissive political climate, to discredit
evolution. "As of January this year 18 pieces of legislation had been
introduced in 13 states," says Eugenie Scott, head of the National
Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, which helps oppose
creationist campaigns. That is twice the typical number in recent years,
and it stretched from Texas and South Carolina to Ohio and New York (see
Map). The legislation seeks mainly to force the teaching of ID, or at least
"evidence against evolution", in science classes.
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- The fight is being waged on other fronts as well. Scott
counts 39 creationist "incidents" other than legislative efforts
in 20 states so far this year. In June, for example, the august Smithsonian
Institution in Washington DC allowed the showing of an ID film on its premises
and with its unwitting endorsement. After an outcry, the endorsement was
withdrawn - officials insisted that it was all a mistake, although the
screening did go ahead (New Scientist, 11 June, p 4).
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- Also in June, a publicly funded zoo in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
voted to install a display showing the six-day creation described in Genesis.
The science museum in Fort Worth, Texas, decided in March not to show an
IMAX film entitled Volcanoes of the Deep Sea after negative reaction to
its acceptance of evolution from a trial audience. The museum changed its
mind after press coverage evoked an outcry, but IMAX theatres elsewhere
in the US have not screened science films with evolutionary content to
avoid controversy. Since 2003 the bookstores at the Grand Canyon, part
of the US National Park Service, have sold a young-Earth creationist book
about the canyon, repeating the creationist assertion that it was formed
by Noah's flood.
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- Anti-Darwin campaigners have not won everywhere. A Georgia
court ruled that stickers describing evolution as "theory not fact"
must be removed from textbooks. A bill in Florida that might have allowed
students to sue teachers "biased" towards evolution died. And
Alaska rewrote its school science standards to emphasise evolution. But
religious fundamentalists have succeeded in insinuating a general mistrust
of evolution. "Creationists depict evolutionists as a cultural elite,
out of touch with American society," says Kenneth Miller of Brown
University in Rhode Island.
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- Creationism has had less cultural impact in Europe, but
in the UK some state schools are incorporating it into science classes.
The English education system allows private donors to invest in the refurbishment
of state-funded schools in deprived areas, in return for controls over
what is taught there. Emmanuel College at Gateshead in north-east England
opened in 1990, financed by millionaire car dealer and Christian fundamentalist
Peter Vardy. It teaches both evolution and creationism in science classes
and, school officials say, lets children make up their own minds. Little
notice was taken until 2002, when Vardy proposed opening more schools.
A second opened last year in Middlesbrough, and a third will open near
Doncaster in September.
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- Last September, Serbia briefly banned the teaching of
evolution in schools. It changed its mind days later after scientists and
even Serbian Orthodox bishops spoke out. There was also uproar over creationism
in the Netherlands. The Dutch have several sects that teach creationism
in their own schools. But in May, Cees Dekker, a physicist at the Delft
University of Technology published a book on ID, and persuaded education
minister Maria van der Hoeven that discussion of ID might promote dialogue
between religious groups. She proposed a conference in autumn, but dropped
the plan after an outcry from Dutch scientists.
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- In Turkey there is a strong creationist movement, sparked
initially by contact with US creationists. Since 1999, when Turkish professors
who taught evolution were harassed and threatened, there is no longer public
opposition to creationism, which is all that is presented in school texts.
In another Muslim country, Pakistan, evolution is no longer taught in universities.
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- Fundamentalist Christianity is also sweeping Africa and
Latin America. Last year Brazilian scientists protested when Rio de Janeiro's
education department started teaching creationism in religious education
classes.
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- The fear among creationism's critics is that a pattern
is emerging that will culminate in a new wave of creationist teaching.
They are worried that this will undermine science education and science's
place in society. "The politicisation of science has increased at
all levels," says Miller. "What is happening is a political effort
to force a change in the content and nature of science itself."
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- THE MONKEY TRIAL (from above)
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- In 1925, John Thomas Scopes was a 24-year-old physical
education teacher at the secondary school in Dayton, Tennessee. He was
put on trial after confessing to teaching evolution while acting as a substitute
biology teacher - something Tennessee had recently made illegal. The so-called
"monkey" trial became a media circus and struck a powerful chord
in American society.
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- The reasons are still with us. Natural selection provides
an explanation for the origins of living things, including humans, that
depends entirely on the workings of natural laws. It says nothing about
the existence, or otherwise, of God.
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- But to many believers in such a God, if humans are just
another product of nature with no special status, then there is no need
for morality. Worse, evolution with its dictum of survival of the fittest
seems to encourage the unprincipled pursuit of selfishness. At the time
of the Scopes trial these were not merely academic concerns. The first
world war had convinced many of the brutalising effects of modernity.
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- Scopes lost. The newborn American Civil Liberties Union
paid his $100 fine and planned to appeal to the US Supreme Court, where
they hoped laws like Tennessee's would be declared illegal. They were thwarted
when the verdict was overturned on a technicality.
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- In Dayton, though, it appeared that Darwin had won. The
anti-evolutionists and rural, religious society generally had been held
up to nationwide ridicule by the urban press covering the trial. As a result
there were few overt efforts to pursue such legal attacks on evolution
for decades.
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- But for some historians Scopes was no victory for Darwinism.
The prosecutor, populist politician William Jennings Bryan, was seen as
speaking for the "common people". Those people, repelled by an
alien, arrogant, scientific world that seemed opposed to them and their
values, developed a separate society increasingly bound to strict religious
laws. Before the trial, evolution had not been an important issue for these
people. Now it was. For many Americans, being in favour of evolution is
still equated with being against God.
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- http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7647
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