Page 39 - Acoustics Today Spring 2011

explanations are not scientific. Talking about “weaknesses” of evolutionary theory makes as much scientific sense as talking about “weaknesses” of the atomic theory of matter.
At the national level, The Discovery Institute2 orches- trates a well-organized, well-funded propaganda campaign claiming that natural processes cannot explain the diversity of life on Earth. Discrediting evolution is only the tip of its strategic wedge. Among the goals listed in a Discovery- Institute fund-raising document3 are:
• “To see intelligent design theory as the dominant per- spective in science.”
• “To replace materialistic explanations with the theis- tic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”
These are astonishing goals, not limited to discrediting evolutionary science. Most people accept materialistic expla- nations of natural phenomena as easily coexisting with their understanding of God. That Discovery-Institute document says it wants to replace materialistic explanations with their “theistic understanding.” The anti-evolution campaign in Kansas was led by the Kansas office of the Intelligent Design Network, following Discovery-Institute tactics. So, I antici- pated similar activity by the Intelligent Design Network of New Mexico.
Anti-evolution propaganda and push-poll techniques4 claim quickly and implicitly that scientific doubts about evo- lution exist, and then appeal to our sense of fairness that all sides of a controversy deserve respect and attention. Most Americans swallow the bait about the supposed scientific doubts, because they don’t know much about evolution, so their positive responses to the accompanying appeal to fair- ness are perfectly logical. The campaign gains sympathy by saying that suppression of its position on evolution is censor- ship by hidebound authorities or immoral atheists. Thus, “Teach the Controversy”5 has been very successful with the general public and with some public officials, even though there is no scientific controversy.
At first tempted by the bait in early 2003, I bought and read the top three books6-8 that popped up when I searched amazon.com for “intelligent design.” One of them struck me as wishful thinking but not scientific, and the other two con- vinced me that intelligent design is religious instead of scien- tific. For example, Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins8 says “Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelli- gent agency, with their distinctive features already intact— fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.” There is no scientific evidence for that proposi- tion; on the contrary, fossil and DNA evidence indicate that fish and birds shared a common ancestor about 450 million years ago. To me, that Pandas proposition sounded like some- thing else I had studied in high school, though not in biolo- gy class—the creation narrative in the first chapter of the Bible9: “God created...all kinds of living, swimming creatures with which the waters abound and all kinds of winged birds.” So I came to regard intelligent design as one interpretation of
10
2004 the Dover, Pennsylvania, school district introduced Of
a sacred text, as a new variety of creationism.
(Famously, in
Pandas and People as a “supplementary biology text,” so the “controversy” would be taught in their high schools. The next year, a federal court declared in Kitzmiller v Dover11 that the omission of overtly religious language was no disguise. The court ruled that intelligent design is “an interesting theologi- cal argument, but...it is not science,”...and teaching intelli- gent design as science in a public school is unconstitutional, as a government promotion of religion. But Kitzmiller v Dover came long after our science-standards revision in New Mexico.)
Despite the fact that creationist alternatives to evolution are unscientific, it is vital that science teachers make all stu- dents feel welcome in the science classroom, no matter what the students, or their parents, believe about the history of life or of Earth as a matter of religious faith. There is plenty of sound guidance for teachers regarding how this can be done.12,13 (See Fig. 1) It is a matter of describing evolution matter-of-factly as the scientific explanation for life on Earth, without disrespecting other approaches to knowledge. If a teacher’s presentation of evolution contradicts something that a student has learned from a parent or some other authority, it will surely not be the last time the student finds that different adults, each deserving of respect, have totally different perspectives on a subject.
The little words
To convey the importance of evolution in the New Mexico science standards, we ended up with a half dozen standards in the high-school biology section, including, for example:
• “Describe the evidence for the first appearance of life on Earth as one-celled organisms, over 3.5 billion years ago, and for the later appearance of a diversity of multicellular organisms over millions of years.
• Critically analyze the data and observations support- ing the conclusion that the species living on Earth today are related by descent from the ancestral one- celled organisms.
• Understand the data, observations, and logic support- ing the conclusion that species today evolved from earlier, distinctly different species, originating from the ancestral one-celled organisms.”
Elsewhere, standards about the age of Earth and the uni- verse, radiometric dating, and fossils as evidence of the his- tory of life on Earth reinforce some of these evolution stan- dards. To encourage understanding that science doesn’t have all the answers, or cover all questions, we ended up with these standards in the high-school Science-and- Society section:
• “Understand that reasonable people may disagree about some issues that are of interest to both science and religion (e.g., the origin of life on Earth, the cause of the Big Bang, the future of the Earth).
• Identify important questions that science cannot answer (e.g., questions that are beyond today’s sci- ence, decisions that science can only help to make, questions that are inherently outside the realm of sci- ence).”
Sucked into the Culture War 35