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Dealing
Fairly with Bones of Contention
That complex human beings are the evolutionary descendants of primitive
simple protozoa is not, as Johnson asserts, "naturalistic doctrine,"
but rather a reasonable scientific inference drawn from all that
is known of the tree of life, the common chemistry of living things,
and the well-confirmed general processes of evolutionary development.
School biology and geology teachers are not teaching atheistic,
materialist metaphysics when they
discuss the evolutionary roots of the tree of life or the ancient
depositional origin of sedimentary rock formations any more than
English-language teachers are when they explain the Latin or Sanskrit
roots of the words students are to learn.
Indeed, many science teachers these days are barely even teaching
the basics of evolutionary theory at all. While teaching at a university
in Texas I asked students in my classes about what they learned
about evolution in high school, and was always dismayed at the large
number who did not even have a cursory exposure to it. My experience
seems to be typical; in a survey of close to a thousand first-year
college students who either had nonscience or undeclared majors,
one professor found that more than twenty-five percent said they
believed that God created the earth within the last 10,000 years
and formed human beings exactly as described in the Bible (compared
to forty-seven percent of the general population who had that view,
according to a 1991 Gallup poll). Another fifty percent said they
were undecided as to whether evolution is a valid scientific theory
or a hoax. (Interestingly, students who attended Catholic high schools
typically have had the best education in evolution, probably because
the Church has long held evolution to be compatible with Christian
faith.)
Even teachers who want to give their students a good education in
evolution often choose to avoid the topic in local districts where
creationist activists have made it a contentious issue for fear
of complaints from creationist parents. Eugenie Scott, director
of the National Center for Science Education, writes that "in
the face of parental pressure, principals and superintendents frequently
fail to support teachers, even when the curriculum mandates the
teaching of evolution." When this happens it puts science teachers
in a difficult position that seriously impairs their ability to
fulfill their teaching duties. Sadly, one even hears of a few individual
creationist teachers who place their religious ideology above their
professional responsibilities and who quietly use their classrooms
to proselytize their creationist views. Scott mentions a case in
Stanwood, Washington, where a teacher invited a creation-scientist
into the class to lecture on the "latest scientific findings"
about how humans and dinosaurs lived contemporaneously, and another
case in which a teacher was advocating the view that the earth was
very young.
The failure in the secondary schools to adequately teach the key
biological and geological findings and central explanatory theories
such as evolution leaves students ignorant of basic public knowledge
and unprepared for higher education. Moreover, students who enter
college who have learned science from the Bible or creationist materials
often have serious misconceptions about a whole range of facts related
to evolution. They regularly misunderstand
the mechanism of evolution, thinking that the theory says that organisms
evolved entirely by chance. Some think that the theory says that
humans evolved from the monkeys they see in the zoo, leading them
to ask why there are still monkeys around. The Bible is not a science
textbook and the mistakes that result from thinking that it is are
sometimes even more absurd than this. Robert Root-Bernstein, a professor
of physiology at a major Midwestern university, wrote of his shock
the first time he taught a course on this subject when a student
announced that she knew, even without looking, what the difference
was between the male and female human skeletons that he had displayed
for a class exercise. Males, she said, had one fewer pair of ribs
than females. Her belief, of course, had come from the Genesis account
of the creation of Eve from Adam's rib. Nor was she alone in her
belief; five more students in the same class expressed the same
view, and Root-Bernstein says that he has come to expect that at
least ten percent of students will tell him that males and females
differ in rib count.
If people insist upon interpreting the Bible as a science textbook,
then such absurdities are unavoidable and we cannot expect that
complete harmony of scientific and religious beliefs will ever be
possible. Johnson is right that scientists cannot contend that science
and religion are so separate that the former does not have any effect
on the latter. Even teaching the fact that men and women have the
same number of ribs bears upon and threatens some students' religious
beliefs. For those who interpret Genesis in the way that ten percent
of Root-Bernstein's students do, then there is indeed a direct conflict
between biology and their Christianity. But such conflicts are not
confined to evolutionary biology. In an earlier era, scientific
findings had contradicted Christian beliefs that the earth was fixed
in the center of the universe, and creationists today also take
issue with findings of geology, paleontology, physics, linguistics,
and so on.
What about the complaint, though, that science is philosophy? In
a simple sense, creationists are right about this too. The use of
the term "scientist" is actually a relatively recent development
in the evolution of the English language, and people we think of
as the 17th-century scientists who ushered in the scientific revolution
would have called
themselves "natural philosophers" and would have said that
they were engaged in "natural philosophy." It is also true
that science, then and now, has philosophical underpinnings (if
it didn't, as a philosopher of science, I'd be out of a job), but
so does every other human practice. If this were all there was to
the creationists' challenge, then we should have shrugged with indifference
and admitted defeat right at the beginning.
However, as we have seen, creationists are making much stronger
accusations, claiming that science itself is nothing but an ideology
that "simply assumes" the truth of evolution and denies the
existence of God "by fiat." Scientific naturalism, they say,
is an arbitrary, metaphysical dogma, and a relativistic, immoral,
anti-Christian, atheistic dogma at that. They impugn the intellectual
and ethical integrity of any scientist who accepts and teaches evolution,
asserting that it is a false, evidentially unfounded theory, and
that science educators know this but promote it nevertheless as
part of their intentional campaign to defend their cultural power
and to attack the Christian religion. We cannot afford to let such
accusations go without a reply, for they fly in the face of the
truth. Just as creationists' arguments are philosophically unjustified,
their insinuations about the supposedly anti-Christian motivations
of scientists and science educators are similarly unfounded. No
doubt there are a few atheistic science teachers who have used their
classrooms to attack religion, but I have never met one. In my experience,
Root-Bernstein's attitude is representative of that of the professionals
who teach science, and it seems to be the only fair and reasonable
way to deal with religious bones of contention:
I believe just as firmly in religious freedom as I do in the
scientific search for understanding. Thus, while I adhere rigorously
to teaching the best science and showing how scientists recognize
it as the best, I never insist that students believe scientific
results. On the contrary, I encourage them to be skeptical-as long
as their
skepticism is based on logic and evidence.
Root-Bernstein lets his students discover a bit of the evidence
for evolution on their own, having them examine skeletons and X-rays
directly. He notes that some of the students counted the ribs and
then reported that they had verified their preconceived notion,
and he said he had to stand beside them and have them repeat the
procedure two or three times before they agreed that the male and
female skeletons have the same number. He saves for last the clincher
that he himself does have one fewer pair of ribs than his mother,
not because he has had a pair removed-he
has the normal twelve-but because his mother had thirteen. And he
mentions the 5,300-year-old man found frozen in the Alps several
years ago, who had just eleven. Chance genetic variations do indeed
occasionally happen, just as evolutionary theory says, and such
anatomic differences are what drive evolution, he explains to his
students. He has them find homologies between human and chimpanzee
skeletons that are evidence of their common ancestry, examine the
underside of the bony back-plate of a tortoise skeleton to see how
it could have formed from the broadening and fusing of the ribs
of a reptile ancestor, and look at casts of the hooves of species
leading from the four-toed Hyrancotherium to the one-toed modern
horse to see some of the evidence for transitional forms. He also
has them compare the relative size of human brains and female pelvis
width to that of chimps, to figure out one of the reasons that sexual
dimorphism is more pronounced in the former-"Bigger brains
require bigger hips." But he tells them not to just trust his work,
but to check the skeletons for themselves: "Take nothing for
granted" he counsels his students, "That is what makes a scientist."
The best education in science involves learning not just the scientific
facts, but also beginning to understand how scientists reason and
how they test hypotheses against the empirical evidence, which is
to say, learning something of science's epistemic values. Root-Bernstein
provides a wonderful model of how to get students to understand
evolution and the evidence for it. This is not metaphysical indoctrination
or materialist propaganda. It is simply good teaching. |
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