Taking on textbook terrorists

Press, 30 August 1989, Page 20

Taking on textbook terrorists

The “Economist” on battles with creationists

THE BATTLE over whether to teach American children a little of the pernicious doctrine known as evolution has moved from the law courts back to the textbooks. The creationists’ attempts to have "creation science” taught alongside evolution in State schools were thwarted by the Supreme Court, on the grounds that creationism is not science but religion and therefore its teaching is unconstitutional. They have been more successful in watering down any mention of evolution in biology textbooks. This year, the evolutionists are fighting back.

California and Texas are choosing new textbooks from which to teach their children biology, as they do every six years for every subject. The size of these two states, and the fact that the same textbooks are chosen for the whole state, make them the markets to which publishers pay the most attention when editing the books. Formulating the guidelines for the textbooks becomes an intensely political buiness. American biology textbooks eschewed evolution almost entirely until the 1960 s when, in the wake of Sputnik, a wave of reform swept science teaching. But since the early 19705, the textbooks have been gradually reducing their coverage of evolution again, segregating into a separate chapter in each book, and replacing it with euphemisms such as "origins,” “change” and “development.” Successive editions grew vaguer and vaguer until any mention of the subject was hedged about with phrases such as "some scientists believe ...”

Scientists were allowed to be dogmatic about gravity, or atoms, but not about evolution,despite its more central and

indispensable role in biology than those theories’ roles in physics and chemistry. By 1984, People for the American Way, an organisation that fights censorship among much else, could find no mention at all of evolution in one-sixth of the biology textbooks used in schools. Under pressure from creationists, Texas had issued guidelines saying not only that alternative theories should be mentioned in textbooks but that evolution should be presented as “only” a theory. This is like insisting that flat-

earthism be taught alonside the only-a-theory that the earth is round. (Scientists use the word theory to mean a rather watertight and tested set of ideas; colloquially, people use it to mean the opposite — a top-of-the-head guess.) California’s book-adoption board, under the influence of the state’s energetic education superintendent, Mr Bill Honig, has been rejecting this “dumbing down” since 1986. This year it drew tough guidelines for its biology textbooks: the discussion of creation, it ruled, belongs to

religious books, not biology books.

Texas may now be plucking up courage to follow California’s lead. In March it suggested that its biology books should include evolution. This made the creationists furious. One of them predicted that “it would plunge our schoolchildren into scientific darkness and make them act like animals” (this is a common argument: a Georgia judge in 1980 described the teaching of evolution as the direct cause of incest and adultery). After a campaign orchestrated

by fundamentalists, Texas relented, but not all the way: it now calls for the teaching of alternative theories to evolution “if any.”

There has been a curious reversal of roles here. In the Scopes trial in Tennessee in 1925, the creationists won the verdict (Scopes was convicted and fined for teaching evolution), but the evolutionists won the argument.

This was less to do with content than appearance. Scopes was a persecuted martyr to free speech. Now, cleverly, the creationists have turned the tables and disguised their educational terrorism as an appeal for free speech.

In Idaho one biology teacher who taught that the earth was 6000 years old and fossils were put there in Noah’s time, has been championed by the local community after being attacked by both the state and the church. The sympathy is with the underdog as it was in Scopes’ days.

One poll, by the “Dallas Morning News” in 1987, found 70 per cent in favour, of teaching creationism. All we ask, say the creationists beguilingly, is for equal time: tell children about both creation and evolution.

Here is a perverse result of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids an established religion. Freed to teach the Bible in State schools, fundamentalists might leave biology alone (as they mostly do in Europe).

Few biologists would object to the contamination of children by religion outside the biology class. After all, Charles Darwin trained for the priesthood.

Copyright — The Economist