Page 41 - Acoustics Today Spring 2011

throughout the year, always encouraging revisions that would be friendlier to intelligent design. They had not gotten as far as they wanted. Their press release seemed to be aimed at the Board, whom they hoped would amend the standards on the spot, and then adopt them.
I know I took two years of French in high school—my report cards show straight A’s, and I still remember the teacher’s name and what she looked like. But today I can remember only seven words of French, and zero grammar. Memory fades after many years of disuse. So I meant no dis- respect when I realized that these Board members might remember no more about science than I remember about French. They might have no more scientists among their friends than I had elected officials among my friends. In the face of that Zogby International poll and a related full-page newspaper advertisement a few days later, how could we con- vince the Board members that five out of six national-lab sci- entists did not endorse intelligent design? Did we have to convince their constituents, too?
The Los Alamos Fellows, appointed by the Los Alamos Director “in recognition of sustained outstanding contribu- tions and exceptional promise for continued professional achievement,” are limited to two percent of the technical staff. One might think of them as among the best of the scientists and engineers at Los Alamos. In response to the IDnet-NM press release, the Fellows wrote and adopted a position paper16 in support of the science standards without amend- ment. It focuses on the importance of good science education to a technically literate electorate and skilled worked force, but mentions incidentally that “advances in chemistry and biology have led to an understanding of the molecular basis of heredity and of other biological processes, uniting chem- istry and biology in ways that confirm and augment earlier understanding of the evolution of life. ... Biochemists have even begun to investigate the genomes of organisms near the roots of the tree of life billions of years ago, before multicel- lular organisms appeared.” There is, of course, no mention of intelligent design or weaknesses of evolution. The position paper was adopted by a vote of 53 to 1.
The President of Sandia National Laboratories publicly denounced the IDnet-NM poll as a “bogus mini-survey” with “no scientific validity,” and the Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory chimed in that “the ‘results’ come from less than one percent of the total employee base, hardly a response rate that can purport to represent the opinions of ‘all scientists’ at this institution.”17
One member of the Board of Education later said that IDnet-NM continued to stand by their poll results in one-on- one conversations with Board members, explaining that the leaders of the two national laboratories must have felt com- pelled to hide the truth about their scientists’ opinions on intelligent design.
In hindsight, it seems likely18 that IDnet-NM gave the Zogby pollster a carefully selected short list of laboratory employees, at best falsely representing the list as a random sample of scientists but often actually claiming (e.g., in their press release) that the questions were sent to 16,000 laborato- ry employees. Furthermore, the poll questions used the push-
poll techniques described above, which may have biased the results even more.
The Board decides
Over a hundred people played important roles in the development and adoption of these standards, but three indi- viduals were vital: Ms. Sharon Dogruel, Dr. Marshall Berman, and Dr. Steven Sanchez. In their stories are lessons for all of us who hope that reason can prevail.
Former chemistry teacher Sharon Dogruel worked in the New Mexico Department of Education from 1999 to 2004, under Steven’s supervision. Sharon led the diverse group of volunteers who created the science standards. Her degree in philosophy must have helped her see through intelligent- designers’ sometimes-tricky rhetoric, such as their conflation of the methodological naturalism at the heart of all scientific questions with the philosophical naturalism of atheism. Her tenacity brought the revisions to a high-quality conclusion on schedule. That high quality inspired enthusiastic support from New Mexico science teachers, national-lab scientists, university faculty, parents, and other science and education professionals, and some of these enthusiasts capitalized on the high quality by obtaining letters of support from out-of- state science organizations including the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Teachers Association, the National Center for Science Education, the American Institute of Physics, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, and the American Geological Institute, as well as from in-state non-science organizations including the New Mexico Conference of Churches and the New Mexico Business Roundtable. The Board was well aware of this enthusiastic support.
As others in New Mexico orchestrated this flood of sup- port, I realized that I was witnessing the climax of years of organizing and networking,19 and my sense of “we” expanded far beyond those of us who were writing and editing the stan- dards themselves. When I met physicist Marshall Berman in 2003, he was the leader of the advocacy effort for the science standards. He had served as an elected member of the State Board of Education from 1998 to 2002. During those years, Marshall earned the respect and trust of his fellow Board members by bringing his scientific habits to bear on issues unrelated to science. In a political world where many deci- sions are made on the basis of unsubstantiated opinion and rhetorical appeal, simply asking “How do we know that?” and habitually seeking evidence, without a predetermined or hoped-for result, can make collective decisions much better, working toward consensus where ideological or party-line voting might otherwise be the norm. Today, Marshall contin- ues to work in all three of the main pro-science activist organizations in New Mexico.20
As Director of Curriculum, Instruction, and Learning Technologies, my neighbor Steven Sanchez set the tone and oversaw the entire process of standards development in New Mexico. On August 13, 2003, he formally submitted the final revision of the science standards1 to the Board, with a 7-page cover letter, which included a few clarifying statements about evolution:
Sucked into the Culture War 37