Cincinnati Enquirer

Editorial Page

April 16, 1998

Views on creation ‘science’ haven’t evolved very far

Columnist Tom Teepen

The Cincinnati Enquirer April 16, 1998

If you’re looking for a real scandal, forget all the skirts the president is said to have chased or may be listing toward even as we speak. Consider this: The National Academy of Sciences has issued a report urging that evolution be taught in public schools.
The scandal, of course, is that the academy felt, with cause, that it needed to speak.
On the very cusp of the third millennium, and little more than moments after the release of a study that found American students on average are mathematical and scientific dolts, it is necessary to champion a settled scientific principle against bullying Christian fundamentalists who have, for a contrary argument, only the fact that, well, they just don’t buy it.
"Christian" has to be specified because, so far in our religious polyglot, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist fundamentalists, and assorted others have not insisted that science defer to their various creation stories. (Though it might be useful if they did. The demands would help put the Christian clamor in perspective.)
Religious creation stories have power and purpose. They can inspire and instruct. The best known are the common intellectual property of humankind, to the benefit of us all. All reward study with the poetry of their imagery and the depth of thought they can provoke, the faith they can secure.

None is science, nor is "creationism," the fakey imitation that Christian fundamentalists have worked up as a substitute for evolution. Creationism is to science as those street vendors $10 Rolexes are to real Rolexes.

The academy of sciences has found - anecdotally, for these things are hard to quantify - that school boards are under increasing political pressure to require equal time for creationism if evolution is taught. No one has a handle on how many schools districts, or how many teachers on their own, have given up teaching evolution to avoid having to mislead students by giving comparable weight to pseudo-science.
Most schools book publishers, husbanding sales, fudge the topic; Alabama, in its continuing bid to become our first post-constitutional theocracy, requires that biology texts carry a disclaimer casting evolution as just a controversial theory.
In fact, evolution is a core principle of modern biology, and although there are of course arguments and unknowns in this field as in others, evolution is accepted as basic by a virtual unanimity of biologists.

Part of the bugaboo in this issue lies in the usual proximity of "theory" to "evolution". In everyday use, theory can bean nothing more than the passing thought your Aunt Ida just had about why the weather seems so strange this year. In science, "theory" describes something repeatedly demonstrated and tested by experiment and support by a variety of observations.
In physics, wave theory does not fail to explain light just because it is a theory. Should the schools, to keep everybody happy, equally teach a flat-light theory.

Conservatives like to carry on about the horrors of political correctness, most of it more silly than damaging. They might usefully ponder the consequences of this example from their own camp.