Battlefield Dispatches

Reports from the evolution wars continue to come in.  Here are more recent stories about the conflicts over the teaching of evolution and intelligent design:

• The race card:  Fiona Morgan on Salon.com trashes those who try to link Darwin to racism.  The cartoon shows Darwin with a dunce cap sitting in the corner, but Morgan says he is one of the good guys.
• Anti-modern heartland hicks:  That’s the description Andrew Gumbel gave of anti-evolutionists in L.A. City Beat.
• Revenge of the Sith:  Atheists organize to fight back, reports Greg Sandoval in the Bakersfield Californian.  A worship service included booing and hissing at a picture of Pat Robertson.
• Revenge of the Six Days:  MSNBC News highlighted the Creation Museum that is taking shape in Kentucky, which will “fire people up” about the Biblical view of origins.  Darwinists are appalled, but admit director Ken Ham is a better communicator than most mainstream scientists.  Jerry Falwell predicts it will become Cincinnati’s #1 tourist attraction.
• Culture war:  Yahoo News reported that the Kansas school battle is likely to spill over into all 50 states.  Both sides are calling the other side pseudoscience.
• Sticker shock:  MSNBC News reported that workers in Cobb County, Georgia, under court order, are removing 34,452 stickers from textbooks that stated evolution was only a theory, not a fact, and should be studied with an open mind.  The ruling is being appealed (see 04/09/2004, 11/23/2004, and 11/08/2004 entries).
• Soap box:  Stephen Meyer printed his letter that Nature wouldn’t (see 05/19/2005 entry) on the Discovery Institute website.
• Brazilian infestation:  Alan Leshner, CEO of the AAAS, wrote in the Kansas City Star that the plague of creationism is infecting Brazil.  Denyse O’Leary on Access Research Network quotes a Brazilian who says it isn’t so; the only anti-Darwinists are a small group of second-class citizens with no influence on society.  O’Leary quips, “Leshner is using Brazil’s second class citizens as a bug-a-boo to frighten his fellow science boffins.”
• Rationale and rationality:  Departing NAS president Bruce Alberts spoke his mind in Science,¹ commenting on various topics, including the debate over teaching evolution: “It says we’ve failed as scientists and science educators to convey the nature of science and its values to the American public, despite our world leadership in science and technology… We all fear that this movement toward a biblical interpretation of scientific facts will eventually make us look like some of the countries in the Middle East.  If we’re going to remain a world leader, we’re going to need all the scientific rationality that we can muster.”  (See also 04/27/2005 entry on Alberts.)
• Declination:  Robert McHenry on Tech Central Station ridiculed ID as “intelligent decline.”  Jonathan Witt on ID the Future responded that the article organizes all the bad arguments against ID in a single, convenient place.  Next day, Mustafa Akyol submitted a rebuttal on Tech Central.
• Scoping Scopes:  Chuck Colson on Breakpoint tried to clear up misconceptions about a historical event often compared with the Kansas debate: the Scopes Trial of 1925.
• World leader:  World Magazine led off with a cover story about the Kansas debate.  Detailing the histrionics in the board room, Timothy Lamer comments, “Lost in the propaganda and facial expressions is just how modest the proposed revisions are.  For all the comparisons to the Scopes trial, the roles in that trial have been reversed 80 years later.  Today, it’s the critics of Darwinism who want to introduce what they see as important scientific evidence into science classrooms and it’s the Darwinists who are fighting to keep out what they see as heresy.”

¹Jeffrey Mervis, “Bruce Alberts Interview: Attention, Class: A Departing NAS President Speaks His Mind,” Science, Vol 308, Issue 5725, 1108, 20 May 2005, [DOI: 10.1126/science.308.5725.1108].

Alberts should be ashamed of himself for insinuating that anti-evolution efforts will make America look like a Middle Eastern country.  He put three types of baloney in that sausage.  First, intelligent design is not “a biblical interpretation of scientific facts.”  ID does not rely on any theological position but rather on design detection using established scientific reasoning.  Second, the only Middle Eastern country with a Biblical view is Israel, which has a strong pro-science record and a modernized civilization with political freedom for all.  Why didn’t Alberts point his attack where it belongs, at those unsavory, tyrannical countries with a Koranical interpretation of scientific facts?  Third, evolution has absolutely nothing to do with making a country a scientific world leader.  Darwin, whose only degree was in theology, was an imposter (see 05/02/2003 commentary) who snuck naturalistic philosophy into a scientific tradition that was built on belief in design (see online book).  Of all people, Bruce Alberts, co-editor of The Molecular Biology of the Cell, and one who stated that the biology of the future is the study of molecular machines (see 01/27/2003 and 01/09/2002 entries), should realize that naturalism is hopelessly inadequate to explain the complexities of life.
    The taproot of the culture war is the debate over origins.  What carves the deep divide in our country and the world are the big questions of who we are, where we came from, and what we are here for.  The Darwinists have had free rein for over a century to tell everyone that “science” says we are the end result of a mindless, natural chain of unpredictable events, and therefore have no ultimate purpose.  They claim that the unfathomable designs in the living world and the universe are illusions, mere artifacts of stochastic combinations of chance and natural law.  They claim that our minds, our wisest and most sublime thoughts, our love, and our character are reducible to molecules in motion, and ultimately to particles that emerged out of nothing.  If you think these assumptions should be challenged, join in the biggest and most momentous battle of the century, where the arms are not swords or bullets, but facts – and the ability to wield them with knowledge, wisdom and skill.  Let Creation-Evolution Headlines be part of your armory.