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June 2007

Darwin in Court

Eighteen months after the “monkey trial” in Dover, Pennsylvania,
a bumper crop of books puts the battle in perspective and asks, What’s next?

By Richard Milner

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Scopes Trial newspaper cartoon, 1925

Collection of Richard Milner

Every few years in America (and nowhere else) God tells someone to haul

Click book covers for ordering information.
Charles Darwin and evolutionary biology into court. No other scientific theory—not atomic theory, not string theory, not the big bang—has ever been put on trial in a court of law. That may be because “Darwin matters,” to borrow a phrase from Michael Shermer, a historian of science and self-labeled “former fundamentalist.” Shermer’s essential little book, Why Darwin Matters, shows how the revolutionary

By Michael Shermer
(Times Books, $22.00)
Darwinian time bomb is still ticking. Subtitled The Case Against Intelligent Design, the book refutes creationism’s latest incarnation and chronicles the recent brouhaha over high school textbooks in Dover, a small town in rural Pennsylvania.

Three years ago, members of the Dover school board decided to require teachers or administrators to read a formal disclaimer in ninth-grade biology class, urging students to be skeptical of Darwin’s “theory” of evolution and to consider intelligent design (ID) as an alternative explanation for the origin of life. They also sought to introduce an auxiliary textbook that promotes ID, Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins, by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon. Tammy Kitzmiller, a working mother with two daughters in the high school, along with ten other parents, sued the board for violating their constitutional rights under the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District was the first time anyone had challenged a public school district in the federal courts about the teaching of ID, which the parents argued was not a scientific theory at all.

Board members protested that their agenda was not about religion, but rather about teaching an important new scientific idea. A new idea? Hardly. In 1831, when Charles Darwin, then a young theology student, set sail aboard HMS Beagle, he believed in design by a Creator. He also accepted the church-approved doctrine that the Earth’s species had been created instantaneously and in their present form. Like the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley, Darwin thought that such marvels of natural engineering as the human eye and the eagle’s wing were “evidences” of the Creator’s handiwork.

Edited by John Brockman
(Vintage, $14.00)
Paley’s famous watchmaker analogy—if you find an intricate timepiece, you must conclude it had a maker—was a well-worn form of argument for the existence of God, traceable back to Thomas Aquinas and beyond.

In John Brockman’s anthology Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement, the historian of science Frank Sulloway of the University of California, Berkeley, has concisely traced Darwin’s path in rejecting those ideas. During the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin began to see that animals and plants had been patched together and modified throughout a period of organic evolution. Evolutionary history, with all its quirky and sometimes inefficient pathways, is embedded in our bones.

Does nature ever produce a downright unintelligent design? That question is addressed (unforgettably, but alas, unsatisfactorily) in the lighthearted documentary Flock of Dodos, made by Randy Olson, a marine-biologist-turned-filmmaker. In Olson’s film, James Hanken, the director of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, gives his Award for Most Unintelligent Design to—of all animals—the rabbit. “It’s a truly disgusting design,” he adds.

(comedic-documentary film: 85 minutes) Written and directed
by Randy Olson, Prairie Starfish Productions, home video to be distributed by New Video, August 28,
2007; $26.95

When rabbits chew and swallow their veggies, Hanken explains in the film, they shunt the food past both large and small intestines to a special fermentation pouch, known as the cecum, from which they expel marble-size pellets called cecotropes. Then, at night, your pet bunny eats its own droppings. This time, however, they are processed in the intestines, where the half-digested food is absorbed, and the resulting waste discharged as true feces. Who knew? Olson’s night-vision camera shows a rabbit filmed in the dark, and, sure enough, you can actually see what’s up, doc. “For every example of intelligent design in nature,” says Hanken, “I can cite you ten others of unintelligent design.”

But that’s just one way of looking at it. The rabbit works well enough to have survived, after all, so it must be a successful design—no matter what we might think about the “intelligence” of a design that requires an animal to eat its own excreta. Indeed, it is peculiar for a biologist to maintain that some living things are less intelligently designed than others. If all biological systems arose from natural, mechanistic processes, they’re all unintelligently designed.

Although the phrase “intelligent design” does invite “unintelligent design” as its opposite, the operative word is “design.” Creationists believe that you can’t get something as complicated and finely tuned as a rabbit through unplanned, intermediate steps. The greater the intricacies, they insist, the higher the intellect must have been to create it. That biologists think that they could improve on the design of the rabbit is ultimately no answer to the creationists’ argument, particularly if the improvements merely reflect human prejudices about what is an optimal or beautiful design.

But if biologists can’t shed their human constraints, neither can the advocates of ID. Throughout the film, they keep showing Olson pictures of Mount Rushmore, insisting that any fool can see that the granite presidential portraits must have been designed, rather than the result of natural forces shaping the mountain. “Yes,” Olson keeps adding, “by a human designer.”

Olson and his film crew crisscrossed the country, interviewing creationists and ID advocates, as well as evolutionists. Some of the opponents of evolution turn out to be disarmingly likable, whereas some of the scientists can be arrogant and off-putting. During a poker game among Ivy League biologists, when the conversation turns to ID, the profs sound as smug and condescending

By Matthew Chapman
(HarperCollins, $25.95)
as any entrenched priesthood. In so doing, they have thrown away a winning hand.

Both sides, in the filmmaker’s view, are silly, vulnerable dodos. Like those extinct birds, creationists cannot adapt; they’re unaware that their understanding of nature was decisively displaced more than a century ago. But the evolutionary biologists are equally behind the times. They seem blind to the information revolution, in which public relations gurus and spin doctors promote disguised religious agendas with spectacular success.

Matthew Chapman is no dodo. A Hollywood screenwriter, he covers the Dover trial with an ear for idiosyncratic language and a dramatist’s eye for the nuances of character. His reportage in 40 Days and 40 Nights is a tour de force, hilarious without sacrificing seriousness of purpose. Chapman, by the way, is a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin: his is a personal quest for the meaning and impact of his family legacy.

Chapman squelches any inclination he might have had to imitate H.L. Mencken, the acerbic American journalist who, during the 1925 Scopes trial, sneered that the creationists were hicks and hillbillies, and who coined the enduring term “Bible Belt.” Rather, Chapman argues, to dismiss militant religionists as harmless and trivial is to invite being blindsided. Most scientists, he writes, simply cannot imagine that religious fundamentalists “might eventually, through sheer force of will and faith engendered by bitterness or fear, emerge victorious.”

By Edward Humes
(HarperCollins, $25.95)
Edward Humes, a nonfiction writer and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, and Gordy Slack, a science journalist, also covered the Dover trial, apparently often bumping into Chapman and each other. They, too, have produced excellent, if inevitably overlapping, accounts. Humes gives the most detailed coverage of the testimony and cross-examination of witnesses. His account of the cross-examination of Michael J. Behe, an amiable biochemist from Lehigh University and the only major proponent of ID to take the stand, is particularly compelling. Behe is well known for his argument that a mousetrap exemplifies “irreducible complexity,”

by Gordy Slack
(Jossey-Bass, $24.95)
because it could not work if even one element were missing from its design. But the plaintiffs’ lawyers mousetrapped Behe into contradicting his own ideas.

Judge John E. Jones III, an appointee of President George W. Bush, presided over the case. Slack describes Jones as having “something of the conservative 1950s father figure about him.” A lifelong Republican, Jones has flatly stated that he is not a judicial activist. Yet the judgment he eventually reached outraged some of his fellow conservatives.

Among the various scientists, theologians, atheists, deists, and politicos who appeared before Judge Jones (it was a bench trial, without a jury), one was Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California. Slack, who dubs her the Empress of the Evolutionary Forces, describes the center as “the only national organization dedicated solely to keeping evolution in public school classrooms and creationism out.”

Edited by Eugenie C. Scott and Glenn Branch (Beacon Press, $14.00)

As it happens, Scott and her deputy director, Glenn Branch, have edited their own book, a concise volume of counterarguments to ID titled Not in Our Classrooms. The book features essays by biologists, educators, philosophers, and theologians, each approaching the subject from a distinct perspective. Branch offers his own handbook for activists, and others attack ID not only as pseudoscience, but also as an exemplar of pandering politics, poor pedagogy, and tacky theology. The collection gives teachers plenty of ammunition for fighting verbal battles or answering students’ questions.

Of all the witnesses to testify at the trial, the chroniclers agree, the hero was Barbara C. Forrest, a philosopher and historian from Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond. Forrest had co-authored a damaging exposé of the

By Barbara Forrest and
Paul R. Gross (Oxford University Press, $19.95)

creationists’ organizations, tactics, and goals: Creationism’s Trojan Horse. She and her co-author, Paul R. Gross, a biologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, tracked the creationist movement’s history—through the group’s own internal documents—and revealed that its objective was never scientific, but had always been religious. The movement’s agenda is to manipulate the issue of evolution as a wedge that will lead to a change in the very definition of science. Supernatural causes would be allowed to replace the hated “naturalistic materialism” of science. And the creationists’ own, literal interpretation of the Bible would become the highest authority on morals, culture, and knowledge of the natural world.

For the trial, Forrest had also analyzed the Dover school board’s new proposed textbook, Of Pandas and People. Conducting a word search in successive versions, from the original draft in 1983 until its initial publication in 1989, she found the only substantive changes were to replace every instance of the words “creation” or “creationism” by the phrase “intelligent design.” (As the book defines it, “Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact.”) Tellingly, the switch had occurred after the creationists lost their 1987 appeal to the Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard. The ruling in that case had blocked their attempt to introduce their faith-based “science” into Louisiana public schools.

When school board members took the stand, the depths of their ignorance appalled even those who might have been sympathetic. One woman cheerily testified that she knew nothing about either evolution or ID, but had voted to require the disclaimer because another school board member (an ex-cop and corrections supervisor) was “in law enforcement.” Reading Chapman’s account, you can almost hear the author’s jaw drop when it dawns on him that “an auto repairman” (the school board chairman) had appointed the ex-cop, “a biblical literalist without a shred of knowledge,” to decide which books the kids should learn from—backed up unquestioningly by “a woman who had no curiosity about anything, even her most deeply held beliefs.”

In the final moments of the trial, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Patrick Gillen, asked the judge a question: “Your Honor . . . by my reckoning, this is the fortieth day since the trial began and tonight will be the fortieth night, and I would like to know if you did that on purpose.” Jones, smiling at the allusion to the length of time Noah’s ark was tossed about in the Great Flood, instantly replied: “Mr. Gillen, that is an interesting coincidence, but it was not by design.” And Matthew Chapman got his book title.

In the end, Judge Jones ruled against the school board, concluding that ID was grounded in a particular sectarian religion, not in science, and thus violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. It is worth noting the stern tone of his concluding opinion:

It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise their real purpose. . . .
. . . The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

One thing about creationists, though: they constantly evolve. Over the years they have repeatedly reinvented themselves: from fundamentalists to creationists, to creation scientists, and now to ID scientists. The draft of Design of Life, essentially Of Pandas and People under a new title, includes a new phrase—“sudden emergence”—for another old idea, that of the spontaneous appearance of species by Divine fiat. An attorney for the plaintiffs read the definition for the court: “Sudden emergence holds that various forms of life began with their distinctive features already intact, fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers and wings, animals with fur and mammary glands.” He then commented to the judge, “Hopefully we won’t be back in a couple of months for the sudden emergence trial.” “Not on my docket,” said Jones, “let me tell you.”

The battle no doubt will go on, but there may be one saving grace in the fabric of American culture: vast apathy. Attempting to interview teenagers about the case, Chapman discovers that many have absolutely no interest in the controversy. Slack finds the kids he speaks with equally clueless. “So this is the front line of America’s culture war,” he writes, “pimply kids who don’t have the foggiest idea, or care much, if at all, what natural selection or ’irreducible complexity’ are, let alone which one suggests a better explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.”

During a recent boat cruise, on which I lectured about Darwin’s voyage as we retraced some of his steps through the Galápagos Islands, I met a practicing Christian named Frank Wheeler. Wheeler has wide contacts with Christian philanthropic and other groups, and he genially wrote to me after our cruise: “During nearly twenty-seven years of participation in Christian organizations, I cannot recall any discussions of evolution or how it and other science might be in conflict with Bible teachings.” Since returning from our trip, he continues,

I have sent a number of e-mails to a wide group of people from many walks of life, including several pastors, and they generally share my views that most American Christians are both “evolutionist and creationist” and see no conflict. If God set the world in motion in a way that opened the door for living things to evolve, most seem to think this was even more amazing and awe-inspiring than creating at the snap of a finger. . . . Most of us are more concerned about helping people improve their lives than in a literal interpretation of Genesis.

After all the hoopla, the drained emotions, and the wasted money, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” It’s the same story that played out in the Scopes trial of 1925, and more than a century and a half ago, when the English novelist Samuel Butler accused Charles Darwin of single-handedly depriving mankind of faith, hope, and purpose. But sixteen years after Darwin’s death, perhaps with his longtime adversary in mind, Butler penned an extraordinary sonnet about immortality called “The Life After Death.” Its concluding lines seem eerily prescient, reminding us that though the players change, the game remains eternally the same:

We shall not argue saying “’Twas thus” or “Thus,”
Our argument’s whole drift we shall forget;
Who’s right, who’s wrong, ’twill all be one to us;
We shall not even know that we have met.
Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again,
Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.

Richard Milner

A Darwin scholar and historian of science, Richard Milner is an associate in anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and a contributing editor to this magazine. His work for Natural History has included editing a special section on Darwin and evolution (November 2005) and, most recently, co-authoring an article on hominid portraits. He is currently working on a book titled Darwin’s Universe: Evolution from A to Z, which will be published in 2008 by the University of California Press. Based in New York, Milner has traveled worldwide presenting his one-man show, Charles Darwin: Live & in Concert; he recently performed it on a cruise ship in the Galápagos Islands (left: shown at the summit of Bartolomé volcano in Darwin’s beloved Galápagos. Photo by Frederick Golden).

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