Citizens Organize to Defend Evolution

Sunday's New York Times had a fascinating article about the growth of local citizens groups to fight the ever-increasing challenges to evolution in public schools. I found this of particular interest because I co-founded one of those groups, Michigan Citizens for Science, 3 years ago. We are building on the incredible work done by Jack Krebs, Keith Miller and their colleagues in Kansas Citizens for Science, who successfully fought off the now-famous attempt by creationists to gut the Kansas science standards of evolution and big bang cosmology in 1999. That was followed by Ohio, where Patricia Princehouse, Steve Rissing and others formed Ohio Citizens for Science and successfully won a battle against the Discovery Institute over the science standards in that state in 2002. Similar groups have sprouted up around the country - Georgia, Nebraska, Texas, Washington, New Mexico, Colorado - to fight the ongoing battle to water down science education with religious alternatives. The main challenge used to come from young earth creationists (YECs) like Duane Gish and the Institute for Creation Research. These days it comes primarily from Intelligent Design Creationists (IDCs). But the underlying reality hasn't changed; this is still an attempt to pit science against religion and put religion into science classrooms, regardless of the slick packaging and the technical-sounding terminology.

As the Times noted, much of this is due to the very active Discovery Institute, whose fellows have crisscrossed the country to testify in front of school boards and state legislatures and local school boards to try and get their "intelligent design theory" into the classrooms. And here is one of the things that galls me the most about the Discovery Institute, statements like this:

Dr. John West, associate director of the institute's Center for Science and Culture, said defenders of evolution want "to do anything but actually talk about the science; that's their public relations strategy."

This is absolutely stunning in its utter dishonesty. Talk about pots and kettles, for crying out loud, the last thing IDCs want to do is talk about science. The entire wedge strategy of the IDCs is built upon the tools of public relations. Despite their promise that the first phase of their plan was scientific research, they skipped over that step completely and jumped right to the public relations phase. That's why they don't publish any scientific research in the science journals but write popular books instead. That's why they cannot point to a single testable hypothesis that flows from ID and can be used to discern designed objects from undesigned objects in nature. That's why they can't give us a model of the natural history of the earth that can be tested against the evidence at all. That's why they spend all their time trying to poke holes in evolution rather than advancing a real model that can be tested - because there simply is no science there to be talked about.

The latest outbreak is in Darby, Montana, where the Ravalli County Citizens for Science has formed. And in a new twist, that fight has been led by students themselves:

On Tuesday, there was yet another confrontation at the board meeting, and on Wednesday, about 50 Darby High School students staged a walkout carrying signs with slogans like "Don't spread the gospel into school" and "Strike against creation science." There are 39 students in this year's graduating class.

"We decided to create this group to figure out what was going on," said Aaron Lebowitz, a senior who was a founder of Citizens for Science and the chief organizer of the walkout. Partly as a result of the group, he said, "awareness has been awesome."

50 students in a school of less than 200 students is incredible, especially in a small town atmosphere where there has been harrassment of the pro-evolution crowd as the creationists inevitably cast this as a battle between Godliness and atheistic science:

Mary Lovejoy, a member of the school board who also belongs to the Ravalli County Citizens for Science, said the fight had been bruising.

"Kids are harrassed," said Mrs. Lovejoy, who has a daughter in the high school. "There's been hideous name calling. I'm not a bastard child, I'm not narrow-minded, and I'm not an atheist."

This sort of thing is going on all over the country. Thankfully, parents, teachers, and even the clergy have woken up to the threat to quality science education and are organizing in response. Despite the inflated rhetoric from the IDCs that equates evolution with "materialistic atheism", their repeated attempts to attack evolution in the science curriculum have often been turned back by members of the clergy who insist that evolution is compatible with Christianity and that creationists only damage the church by fighting against it. In the McLean v Arkansas case in 1981, the plaintiffs, who successfully challenged a state law requiring the teaching of "creation science" along with evolution, included the Arkansas bishops from the Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal and Roman Catholic churches as well as clergy from all of those denominations and the Southern Baptists as well. The same was true in the Edwards v Aguillard Supreme Court decision. In the recent fight over science textbooks in Texas, one of the strongest voices against the IDCs and for evolution was the Texas Faith Network, a group of Christian ministers and believers who show that all of Phillip Johnson's bluster about fighting "naturalism" is nothing but a crude caricature.

For previous writings that break down the claims of the Discovery Institute and IDCs in general, see Fisking the Discovery Institute on Evolution in Georgia
, Intelligent Design as Roman Mythology, An Intelligent Design Creationist Tells the Truth, and Howard Ahmanson and the Battle Over Evolution.

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