Chapter 3

Creationist Ideologues and Soviet Ideologues

Frederick Sweet

Frederick Sweet is Professor of Reproductive Biology in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. You can email your comments to Fred@interventionmag.com

Now that Creationists are in the White House, many public school teachers are afraid to discuss the science of evolution in their classrooms.

If the following artice proves anything at all it is that we have endless streams of ideology at war for prime time.what we have is ideology..............That there is this core of what they call “factual truth”...............fantasies woven by nut-cases the undeduacted, the untraine, the great scientifically unwashed. science is the participation mystique of the Noth Eurpean technocracy. The one value of sciece is that its preposterous certainties constitute the greatest social comedies of our time.

Colin Bennett
 

During his 2000 presidential election campaign, George W. Bush spoke about the Kansas Board of Education’s decree requiring each public school district in the state to teach Creationism alongside evolution. He told the Associated Press, “I’d make it a goal to make sure that local folks got to make the decision as to whether or not they said Creationism has been a part of our history; and whether or not people ought to be exposed to different theories as to how the world was formed.”

Bush took this position in spite of the fact that three years earlier the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Edwards v. Aguillard prohibited teaching Creationism in public school classrooms. The Court ruled that it constitutes religious belief. This decision was not arrived at casually. Seventy-two Nobel Prize winners testified as friends of the court that Creationism isn’t science. It’s basically religion.

Bush persisted by asserting his own preference: “Children ought to be exposed to different theories about how the world started.” Then just before he occupied the White House, Bush elaborated, “On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth [emphasis added].”

Secular listeners knowing the Court’s position probably misinterpreted Bush’s remark to be a gaffe on the campaign trail. But it wasn’t. Rather, it reflected a deeply held, paranoid belief among many American fundamentalist Christians that the theory of biological evolution could be used as an argument against the existence of God. Yet this has never been done by competent biologists. Religion is about God, and evolution is about science.

It’s only been one month into Bush’s second presidential term, and already reports are coming in about public school teachers saying they’re too afraid to teach evolution in their science classrooms. In a recent (1/30/2005) front page New York Times report, “Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes,” Cornelia Dean describes the growing fear among science teachers in America’s classrooms.

Afraid to Teach Evolution

Dr. John Frandsen, a retired zoologist and former chairman of the committee on science and public policy of Alabama’s Academy of Science, said that this fear made it impossible to say precisely how many teachers avoid the [biological evolution] topic.

“You’re not going to hear about it,” he said. “And for political reasons nobody will do a survey among randomly selected public school children and parents to ask just what is being taught in science classes.”

But he said he believed that the practice of avoiding the topic was widespread, particularly in districts where many people adhere to fundamentalist faiths.

“You can imagine how difficult it would be to teach evolution as the standards prescribe in ever so many little towns, not only in Alabama but in the rest of the South, the Midwest -- all over,” Frandsen said.

Dr. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, said she heard “all the time” from teachers who did not teach evolution “because it’s just too much trouble.”

“Or their principals tell them, ‘We just don’t have time to teach everything, so let’s leave out the things that will cause us problems,’” she said.

Sometimes, Dr. Scott said, parents will ask that their children be allowed to “opt out” of any discussion of evolution, and principals lean on teachers to agree.

Even where evolution is taught, teachers may be hesitant to give it full weight. Ron Bier, a biology teacher at Oberlin High School in Oberlin, Ohio, said that evolution underlies many of the central ideas of biology and that it is crucial for students to understand it. But he avoids controversy, he said, by teaching it not as “a unit,” but by introducing the concept here and there throughout the year. “I put out my little bits and pieces wherever I can,” he said.

Dr. Gerald Wheeler, a physicist who heads the National Science Teachers Association, said many members of his organization “fly under the radar” of fundamentalists by introducing evolution as controversial, which scientifically it is not, or by noting that many people do not accept it, caveats not normally offered for other parts of the science curriculum.”

Dr. Wheeler said the science teachers’ organization hears “constantly” from science teachers who want the organization’s backing. “What they are asking for is ‘Can you support me?’” he said, and the help they seek “is more political; it’s not pedagogical.”

There is no credible scientific challenge to the idea that all living things evolved from common ancestors, that evolution on earth has been going on for billions of years, and that evolution can be and has been tested and confirmed by the methods of science. But in a 2001 survey, the National Science Foundation found that only 53 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.”

Today, the United States stands apart from all other industrialized nations, said Dr. Jon Miller, director of the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University who has studied public attitudes toward science. Americans, he said, have been evenly divided for years on the question of evolution, with about 45 percent accepting it, 45 percent rejecting it and the rest undecided.

In other industrialized countries, Dr. Miller said, 80 percent or more typically accept evolution, most of the others say they are not sure, and very few people reject the idea outright.

“In Japan, something like 96 percent accept evolution,” he said. Even in socially conservative, predominantly Catholic countries like Poland, perhaps 75 percent of people surveyed accept evolution, he said. “It has not been a Catholic issue or an Asian issue,” he said.

Creationist Ideologues and Soviet Ideologues

In 1965, at the height of the Cold War, as a chemistry graduate student I was shocked to learn that in the USSR the teaching of the well-established molecular-electronic theory of resonance was forbidden in Soviet classrooms. How could that have been?

For openers, it was an American chemist, Linus Pauling, who had experimentally confirmed resonance theory in his studies on the nature of the chemical bond. Indeed, he had received a Nobel Prize for this. But a group of Communist Party zealots pinned resonance theory on the enemies of dialectical materialism. The nature of the chemical bond was linked to bourgeois anti-Soviet revisionism, and resonance theory was out.

Their American Creationist counterparts have twisted biblical doctrine into pseudoscience and replaced testable, biological evolutionary theory with mumbo jumbo, which cannot be experimentally tested. But, of course, it’s not biological truth they’re after. What they really want is power.

Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, recently said he thought that the great variety of religious groups in the United States leads to competition for congregants. This marketplace environment, he said, contributes to the politicization of issues like evolution among religious groups.

He said the teaching of evolution was portrayed not as scientific instruction but as “an assault of the secular elite on the values of God-fearing people.” As a result, he said, politicians don’t want to touch it. “Everybody discovers the wisdom of federalism here very quickly,” he said. “Leave it at the state or the local level.”

But let’s hear from the Creationist ideologues themselves. In its newsletter, the Creation Social Science and Humanities Society states, “We will endeavor to show that the only true and sure foundation of man’s knowledge of himself [psychology] -- of his relationship with other men [sociology] -- of his communications and creativity [literature and fine arts] -- of his institutions of social order [administration of justice, economics, political science] -- of his activities and their descriptions [history] -- is the creation of man in God’s image as infallibly revealed in the Bible. All other attempts to account for man are in vain and doomed to failure.”

Today’s Creationist ideologues feed on America’s body politic. Public school classrooms are their launching pads for seizing power. Progress in Soviet science was hampered for decades by zealous Communist ideologues gaining influence and power in the areas of science and technology, and eventually the USSR couldn’t compete with American know-how. Now, the Soviet Union is gone.

Avoiding a similar fate in America will require widespread recognition that the non-scientific, indeed anti-scientific, Creationist ideology is equally dangerous to America’s scientific and technological health. It is self-evident that whatever threatens America’s science and technology also menaces our nation’s economic well being and, by extension, our national security.