Utah's non-war over evolution

Utah's non-war over evolution

It's taught — but probably not believed


By Elaine Jarvik
Deseret Morning News

Anxious e-mails have been filling Karlene Bauer's inbox
this school year — messages about Cobb County, Ga., and Dover,
Pa., and all the other places where people are up in arms over
the teaching of evolution.
Photo
Photo illustration by Jessica Noel Berry, Deseret Morning News
Bauer, who teaches at Jordan High School and is on a
listserv of AP biology teachers across the country, says she's
happy to be in Utah, where Darwin's 146-year-old theory is
currently making neither waves nor headlines.
One might suppose, given that Utahns tend to be both
conservative and religious, that evolution would be a
contentious topic in Utah's schools; but yet another legislative
session has passed with no mention of Charles Darwin. And Brett
Moulding can count on his fingers the number of anti-evolution
phone calls he's gotten in the past 10 years, first as science
education specialist and then as curriculum director for the
Utah State Office of Education.
As Murray high biology teacher Steve Scheidell says, "It's
not a thing to panic about here."
That may be because not all biology teachers in Utah
tackle the touchiest part of evolutionary theory: how humans
came to be. And Utah students often don't believe what they've
been taught anyway, because they've learned something different
from teachers in LDS Church seminary classes.
As a whole, Utahns tend to be conflicted about the
intersection of evolution and public education. A Dan Jones
Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV poll conducted last week found that
64 percent of Utahns think evolution should be taught in biology
classes — and 70 percent think creationism, "Intelligent Design"
and other belief systems should be taught there too.
It is this desire for equal class time for Darwin and
"alternative theories" that has set off the latest battles in
America's 80-year-old evolution wars, whose most famous early
skirmish was the 1925 trial and conviction (later overturned) of
Tennessee teacher John Scopes, who tried to teach evolutionary
theory. In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana
law requiring equal treatment of evolution and "creation
science" was an unconstitutional violation of the First
Amendment, but that has hardly been the end of the friction.
Photo
Deseret Morning News graphic
The National Center for Science Education, a pro-evolution
organization based in California, reports that eight state
legislatures have considered evolution bills this year; and
there have been "33 incidents of significant anti-evolution
activity in local communities in 15 states." In many of these
cases, anti-evolutionists are pulling out the "academic freedom"
card, arguing that their First Amendment rights are being
trampled if alternative theories aren't discussed in the
classroom.
In Dover, Pa., the school board voted in January that
biology students must learn about alternatives to Darwin's
theory of evolution, a decision that is now being challenged by
the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for
Separation of Church and State. This winter a federal judge
ruled that the school board in Cobb County, Ga., must remove
stickers — "evolution is a theory, not a fact" — that the board
had previously ordered placed on all high school biology
textbooks. The school board is now appealing that order. Kansas,
whose state school board had ordered evolution removed from the
curriculum in 1999 then reinstated it in 2001, is now revisiting
the issue, with an anti-evolution majority now on the school
board. In state legislatures like Montana, Mississippi, Alabama
and Georgia, bills were introduced this year that would mandate
that teachers include "alternative theories" to evolution, or
would allow teachers to challenge evolutionary theory in the
classroom. Some of the bills failed to get out of committee,
some are still in play.
Darwin's theory was first articulated in "On the Origin of
Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of
Favored Races in the Struggle for Life." There is scientific
evidence, wrote Darwin, that the variety and complexity of life
on Earth are the result of two processes acting in concert —
random mutation and natural selection. Although most random
mutations are harmful to an organisms's chances of survival and
reproduction, there is occasionally a random mutation that is
helpful; natural selection is the process of harmful mutations
dying out and helpful mutations being passed on to future
generations, eventually producing new species. Humans, too,
according to Darwin, evolved in this way, and can thus trace
their ancestry all the way back to primitive life forms.
Utah's "science standards" require that public school
biology students "understand that biological diversity is a
result of evolutionary processes." Students, for example, must
be able to "cite evidence that supports biological evolution
over time (e.g., geologic and fossil records, chemical
mechanisms, DNA structural similarities, homologous and
vestigial structures)" and "identify the role of mutation and
recombination in evolution."
The standards do not mention human evolution in
particular, an omission that earned Utah a B rating in a 2000
survey of state science standards conducted for the Fordham
Foundation.
Utah biology teachers don't have to talk about human
origins, but they can if they want to — and many do. But some
teachers, says Jordan High biology teacher Bauer, "avoid the
leap that we have a common ancestor." Bauer herself shies away
from the topic, because human evolution "is when people really
bristle. That's when kids immediately forget everything else
they've learned."
Professor Duane Jeffery, a professor of biology at Brigham
Young University, estimates that "probably 90 percent of people
who are LDS think the church is against evolution. But they
don't get upset about it being taught in public schools." The
reason, he says, is the church seminary system, which provides
junior high and high school students with a class period of
religious instruction during school hours.
"Most parents feel their religion is being take care of in
seminary," Jeffery says.
Conservative gadfly Gayle Ruzicka, president of the Utah
Eagle Forum, sees it this way: "Utah's children, for the most
part are taught by their parents that evolution is not correct
science. The parents feel more control because they know they're
teaching their children the truth at home."
That truth, she says, is that "you are a child of God," a
phrase that Mormons learn from the time they can talk, she says.
"It's a year or two of learning about evolution vs. a lifetime
of hearing that you are a child of God. Evolution just doesn't
win out."
According to Randy Hall, assistant superintendent of the
LDS Church Educational System, seminary teachers are told to
refer to church statements included in what is known as the "BYU
packet," a collection of four official statements on evolution
made between 1909 and 1992. The statements are somewhat vague
but do include sentences such as "Man is the child of God,
formed in the divine image and endowed with divine attributes,"
and "Adam is the primal parent of our race." The packet does not
include more clearly anti-evolution — and oft-quoted —
unofficial statements such as those made by Elder Boyd K. Packer
of the Quorum of the Twelve in 1988.
"We ask our teachers not to go beyond those (official)
statements," Hall says, "because then it gets into private
interpretation, and that could as easily be misunderstood as
understood."
Seminary teachers, on the other hand, may be interpreting
the statements more narrowly. As one seminary teacher told the
Deseret Morning News, "the position we're told to take is the
one the church takes: that man does not come from lower forms of
life."
That's the message Woods Cross High School sophomore Isaac
Wood has taken away from his seminary class this year. Wood also
takes 10th-grade biology, where he has learned about evolution.
"That's just what Darwin thought," he has concluded, "and that's
great. but it's not what I believe. I'll study it if I have to
to get a good grade." But human evolution, he says, is "bogus."
BYU's Jeffery thinks Mormons misunderstand his church's
take on evolution. In the foreword to "Evolution and Mormonism,"
he writes, "Many people believe that if we are the spirit
children of God, then our physical bodies must be unique. They
believe that if our bodies are in any way related to those of
other animals, such a relationship is in some way degrading. We
see a striking parallel between this belief and the medieval
concept that if humans are the center of God's creation then
Earth must be the center of the universe."
He also points to a 1910 statement from the church First
Presidency in which divinely directed evolution was included as
an apparently acceptable possibility for the origin of life.
Evolution, as described by Darwin, does not require a God
or some other "designer." But it doesn't rule out God or another
creator, either. Darwin himself, in "Origin of Species," wrote:
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a
few forms or into one. . . ." Darwin, who identified himself as
an agnostic, added the phrase "by the Creator" in the second
edition.
There are many pro-evolutionists, including many
evolutionary biologists, who also believe that God had a hand in
the process, Jeffery says. In 1996, Pope John Paul II delivered
a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences saying that
"fresh knowledge has led to the recognition that evolution is
more than a hypothesis."
Utahns are almost evenly divided on the question of
whether Darwin's theory is compatible with a belief in God: 44
percent of respondents in the Dan Jones Deseret Morning
News/KSL-TV poll believe the two are compatible, 47 percent
don't.
While discussions of God's possible role — either setting
in motion the process of evolution, or creating humans from
scratch — should take place, they don't belong in science class,
says USOE curriculum director Moulding. "Religion is a very
different way of knowing. It relies on faith." The science of
evolution, on the other hand, "is a mechanism that explains the
observed, empirical evidence," he says.
Creationists, who believe that the Bible, read literally,
is an accurate description of how life began, have tried for
years to include God in science class. The current attacks on
the teaching of evolution add a new twist, an idea called
"Intelligent Design."
Intelligent Design's most vocal and organized defenders
are concentrated at Seattle's nonprofit Discovery Institute,
which takes pains to separate the movement from not only
Creationism but religion as a whole. When the Deseret Morning
News first contacted the Institute, spokesperson Rob Crowther
worried about an Intelligent Design story appearing in the
newspaper's religion section.
"We approach it as strictly a scientific topic," he said.
The crux of the ID argument is twofold: that the
scientific evidence supporting Darwinian evolution contains
flaws and is still open to debate, and that nature is full of
evidence showing that there was and is a "designer" at work.
"We don't seek to answer who the designer is," says
Crowther. "Just that there is empirical evidence of design in
nature."
The designer might be an advanced extraterrestrial
civilization, for example, or it could be God, explains
Guillermo Gonzalez, an Intelligent Design proponent who is
assistant professor of astronomy at Iowa State University.
Intelligent Design doesn't start with the assumptions that
Creationism does, he says. "But the implications could be
religious."
One evidence of a designer, say Intelligent Design
scientists such as Lehigh University professor of biological
sciences Michael J. Behe, is the concept of "irreducible
complexity." Natural selection, he writes, "can only choose
among systems that are already working, so the existence in
nature of irreducibly complex biological systems poses a
powerful challenge to Darwinian theory."
Examples, he says, are the human eye and the flagella of
bacteria — both, he says, are systems made up of parts that
couldn't exist on their own and therefore did not evolve. Not
true, say evolutionary scientists, who argue that the precursor
parts of the flagellum and eye could have been favored by
natural selection.
"If Behe wishes to suggest that the intricacies of nature,
life and the universe reveal a world of meaning and purpose
consistent with a divine intelligence," writes Brown University
biology professor Kenneth R. Miller in Natural History Magazine,
"his point is philosophical, not scientific. It is a
philosophical point of view, incidentally, that I share." But
the hypothesis of Intelligent Design, he says, "is
overwhelmingly contradicted by the scientific evidence."
There is no scientific controversy over evolution, argue
these scientists. And to detractors who argue that "evolution is
just a theory," they point out that in science "theory" does not
mean hunch. "A theory in science," says BYU biology assistant
professor Marta Adair, "is not like your theory about why BYU
has a lousy basketball team. A theory in science means something
nobody has been able to disprove."
Evolutionary biologists argue that DNA research,
particularly in the past two decades — including sequencing work
that shows how much DNA is shared by animals and plants — is
evidence that all life shares a common ancestry. Human DNA and
chimpanzee DNA are at least 98.6 percent identical, notes Utah
Valley State College biology professor Richard Tolman.
"Gene technology is the best evidence we have of human
evolution," adds East High biology teacher Laurence Burton. But
not all his students can square this information with what
they've learned in seminary. "I think they say 'Yeah, I can see
that.' But beliefs are so powerful."
Utah biology teachers are quick to point out that they
aren't trying to "convert" students to Darwin. "They're saying
it's the best explanation that science has to offer," says Larry
Madden, science coordinator for the Salt Lake City school
district and president of the Utah Science Teachers Association.
But to Utah Eagle Forum's Ruzicka, that still sounds like
"brainwashing." Parents have become too complacent about the
teaching of evolution in Utah schools, she says. "We need to
make sure the children of Utah hear both sides" in biology
class.
The Eagle Forum has been preoccupied with other issues but
now plans to tackle evolution, she says. Which may mean that
Karlene Bauer's e-mail inbox may soon be full of messages about
Utah.

Deseretnews.com