This entry continues my journey back through what’s motivated me to explore “The Mindful Ecological Citizen.” Most recently, I’ve been focused on learning from the Centre County solar power purchase agreement and “a prescient note on climate change to Jimmy Carter.” But I want to return to where I left off in a recent entry exploring the Dover School Board’s decision to pass an intelligent design (ID) creationism policy that led to Kitzmiller v. Dover.
In October 2004, the Dover Area School District’s Board of Directors would vote, 6-3, to require a statement be read to ninth grade biology students. This decision and the controversy it generated made it clear that the stakes of widespread institutional denial of climate change in the United States could undermine and damage civilization. But what is ID, what is it pushing against besides evolution, and how could it pose a grave threat? I’ll start with a little personal background, the Dover classroom policy statement, and then explore ID as a political movement in league with powerful polluters.
During college, I took general science classes in anthropology, astronomy, ecology, and evolution and read Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, and Jack Horner, the scientist that inspired Michael Crichton to invent Allen Grant for Jurassic Park. But I was also riveted by America’s evolution wars, digging around webpages in the late 90’s and early 00’s where creationists propagated all manner of just-so pseudoscience. I read histories on the evolution of radical Protestantism in America and its on-again off-again obsession with political power. Some of my thoughts as a much younger man on these matters are archived in the online vault of The Daily Collegian.
The Dover Board’s statement is a politically aware but scientifically inane piece of policy. It was written to pick a fight but look like it wasn’t picking a fight. When I read it, I was certain it was the newest front in America’s science and religion war. After another read, I had thoughts and questions. Let’s revisit each of the statement’s four paragraphs.
The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin’s theory of evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part.
Even if I’m not a big fan of standardized tests, I was glad Pennsylvania’s Academic Standards for Science and Technology include evolution, with specific learning objectives in tenth and twelfth grades. It defines the Theory of Evolution as “a theory that the various types of animals and plants have their origin in other preexisting types and that the distinguishable differences are due to modification in successive generations.”
Because Darwin’s theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations.
The Board was continuing the creationist tradition of vandalizing the words “theory” and “fact.” First, theories in science are not hunches or guesses. The Theory of Evolution is not like your “theory” to explain why Cliff Burton’s bass sound on Master of Puppets was better than Jason Newstead’s was on …And Justice For All. It’s not something based in taste or improvised ingenuity. In science, theories do not become facts. They explain facts. The Theory of Evolution explains the mechanisms by which life changes over time and how living things are related to one another. The use of the word “gaps” in the statement is inexact, provides no context, and was intended to undermine the fact that evolutionary theory is remarkably coherent. As would become clear in the trial, “fact” and “theory” were zombie words in America’s culture wars, used by right-wing sophists who wanted to win an argument and defend a political and religious identity rather than advance scientific knowledge.
Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, ‘Of Pandas and People,’ is available in the library along with other resources for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves.
Why is “gaining an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves” the only stated learning objective? ID is not in the PA Science Standards. What exactly is “intelligent design” and what’s in Of Pandas and People? Had creationism evolved? Why is this book specially located in the library and not in the classroom?
Intelligent design was the newest form of creationism. Its proponents argue that certain features of the natural world are best explained by an intelligent cause. Stephen Meyer and Michael Behe at the Discovery Institute say, “The theory of intelligent design simply says that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” Most often, this cause is assumed to be God. In the United States, that God is the Christian God. Like creationists, ID advocates argue that problems for evolution like complex organs, organelles, or “gaps” in the fossil record are arguments for intelligent design because they are arguments against evolution. There is never a mechanism put forward on how the intelligent designer did something because the designer is de facto untestable.
ID comes to conclusion largely by inference and analogy. “When we see complex things like an orb weaver’s web, bower bird nests, termite mounds, a book, a statue, or a computer, we know it has been designed by an intelligent creator. A bacterial flagellum is similarly or more complex (they use the term “irreducibly complex”) than these human artifacts. Therefore, it has been designed by an intelligent creator.” This inference is easy and seems efficient. It’s easy because we can make a parallel between complex things that humans have designed and complex things in nature. It also feels like an Occam’s Razor explanation: “of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. Occam’s Razor is also expressed as “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.”
There are at least two problems with this. First, ID hasn’t actually explained anything. It has given a biological structure a label–irreducibly complex–and declared that evolution could not have made it. Therefore, it was designed. How? There is no answer, making ID simplistic, not simple. But to a layperson, ID feels simple and efficient. To some religious people, it has also reinforced a pre-existing religious belief that is a defining characteristic of being part of a group.
That is where the second objection comes in: ID has smuggled in a designer that is itself untestable. There is no way to empirically detect anything about this designer. With orb weaver webs or human computers we have seen the designers actually design. We have not seen “the designer” sketch out and build a bacterial flagellum. ID multiplies entities beyond necessity.
Funny enough, Of Pandas and People was itself an unintelligently designed mutation of previous creationist textbooks. Both on the stand in the trial and in the book she co-authored with Paul Gross, Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, Barbara Forrest would “expose the scientific failure, the religious essence, and the political ambitions of “intelligent design” creationism. They examine the movement’s “Wedge Strategy,” which has advanced and is succeeding through public relations rather than through scientific research. Analyzing the content and character of “intelligent design theory,” they highlight its threat to public education and to the separation of church and state.” Importantly, they would show how Pandas was literally taken from a previous creationist text. The authors just replaced words. On the stand, Forrest’s testimony would prove lethal to the ID advocates’ and Dover board members’ arguments that this was all in the name of good science.
With respect to any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the origins of life to individual students and their families. As a standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on standards-based assessments.
The last paragraph is loaded with dog whistles. Once again, they abuse the word “theory.” Then they invoke the noble but slippery quality of open-mindedness. How open is a student’s mind supposed to be? In context, this is Orwellian open-mindedness. Additionally, the Dover Board intended the statement to be read by a science teacher. Their teachers are seen as experts in biology by students. If they read the statement, they would undermine confidence in the unifying theory of biology. This double speak would be confusing, scuttling the seriousness students should approach the subject and de facto affirming the rightness of whatever their pre-existing convictions were, religious or otherwise.
It also invites students to have “discussions” about the origin of life with their families. Of course, many American households hold supernatural beliefs about the origin of life and the special creation of humans by the Christian god. That is their business in a religiously free country. But the invocation of “families” is in a political tradition with the Moral Majority, the moral panic of the 1980’s regarding heavy metal and rap music, and today’s book-banning Moms for Liberty. Board members Alan Bonsell and Bill Buckingham wanted the church—their church anyway—to be the primary institution of modern life.
As I said at the top, the Dover Board’s statement was a political document designed to question contemporary science in an effort to defend and advance religious ideas and identities. In the next entries we will dig into the “wedge strategy” formulated at the Discovery Institute and how those attacking evolution were also attacking the science of climate change and defending fossil fuels.
Peter Walks for Democracy 
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