ANALYSIS OF THE KANSAS BOARD OF EDUCATION’S DECISION ON THE TEACHING OF EVOLUTION: DYNAMICS AND CONSEQUENCES

By Zuleyma Tang-Martinez

Department of Biology

University of Missouri – St. Louis

The recent decision of the Kansas Board of Education eliminating the mention of evolution from the public school curriculum has an interesting public relations history and can be expected to have unfavorable consequences.

In making their decision, the Kansas Board of Education appears to have succumbed to political pressure from the fundamentalist religious extremists of the Christian Right. Fundamentalists and Creationists have been remarkably successful in using language to their advantage in convincing the general public that their view of creation is scientific and that evolution is nothing more that untested and unscientific speculation.

They have done this by a well-orchestrated public relations campaign that has emphasized the constant use of word-games in the form of the following phrases: "Scientific Creationism" and "Evolution is only a theory". Moreover, they have presented evolution and creationism as equivalent, but mutually exclusive, dichotomous alternatives, as the only two possible mechanisms for the existence of human life.

Scientific Creationism: It is important to understand what is, and what is not, "Science" and, therefore, which sorts of subject matters are appropriate for scientific study and which ones are not. Science has two, all-important, defining characteristics:

1. Science relies exclusively on empirical evidence (meaning evidence that can be observed and measured) and on deduction and inference from that evidence. Opinions, speculations, and beliefs held on faith cannot be accepted as empirical or as scientific evidence for a hypothesis. Even fields of science that are historical in nature, for example evolution, geology, and cosmology, must rely ultimately on observable, empirical data. Deductions and inferences are then made from these data these conclusions will always be open to re-interpretations and refutation. For instance, during our lifetimes, we have never observed asteroids or comets hitting the moon. However, we can see craters on the surface of the moon that have the shape and characteristics we would expect from collisions of asteroids or comets; we have also observed a comet hitting Jupiter, so we know such collisions can and do happen. From this information we can infer that the craters on the moon were likely produced by collisions with comets or asteroids. If, at a later time, new empirical evidence suggests a different cause of the moon’s crater (e.g., volcanoes), that evidence will be evaluated in view of all other existing empirical data and , if it is warranted by these data, the original conclusion will be revised.

This openness of science to new data, and its emphasis on empirical observations, differentiate science from religion. Beliefs bases on faith and on "divine revelation" are generally held, by believers, to be absolute truth and not open to refutation. Thus, to refer to the creation story in the Christian Bible as "Scientific Creationism" is an oxymoron. Belief in this story is a matter of religious faith, not science. This is not to say that an individual may not choose to believe, based on his or her religious traditions, Genesis creation account is true. However, the creation story is not, and cannot be, the subject of scientific inquiry because it is not based on empirical evidence (unless one believes that the Christian Bible is the literal word of "God" – also a matter of faith) and because such a belief must, by its very nature, be absolute and immutable, an attribute completely foreign to the integrity of scientific inquiry.

2. Scientific hypotheses must be testable and must be falsifiable (i.e., capable of being proved wrong). An idea that cannot be tested empirically is not scientific. If it is, a priori, impossible to obtain any evidence capable of refuting the hypothesis, then that hypothesis cannot be considered scientific. In principle, it is possible to obtain new evidence that would cause one to re-examine the theory of evolution and to conclude that our current ideas on evolution are not correct. It is not possible to obtain evidence that would disprove a belief in Godly creation that is based on a religious belief that the Bible represents the literal word of God. If one is religious and truly believes that the Bible is divinely inspired and contains a literal account of creation, then no earthly evidence can convince the believer that his version of events is false. Without falsifiability, there is no science.

"Evolution is only a theory": Creationists take advantage of the misunderstandings and ignorance of the general public with regards to what is a theory and what is a hypothesis. Scientists do not use these terms interchangeably; rather, each term has a very specific meaning. Hypotheses are educated guesses based on empirical observations. In other words, they are explanations of natural phenomena that deal with one or a few questions related to a larger and more general thesis. When many, many, many hypotheses related to this larger thesis have been rigorously tested and supported, and when the preponderance of the available data support the theses, then that thesis becomes a theory. Before any idea is designated a "theory" there has to be massive and diverse empirical support for the idea. Thus, theories are not flimsy ideological constructs but, rather, are buttressed by enormous amounts of scientific evidence. For example, if after careful study of the history, frequency, and magnitude of earthquakes in San Francisco, I predict that within the next five years the city will suffer a magnitude 9 earthquake, that is a hypothesis. If I state that earthquakes in San Francisco are caused by the Pacific Plate sliding northward past the North American Plate, the statement is grounded in Plate Tectonics, a theory. This theory could turn out to be wrong, but at present, the evidence in support of it is so overwhelming that it would be foolhardy for any scientist to ignore it. So, yes, evolution is a theory – it has been put to the test over and over and the bulk of the evidence from fields as diverse as paleontology, molecular biology, anthropology, and geology all support it. It is not untested speculation.

Another claim used by the Creationists is that is any question can be raised about evolution, then this proves that evolution is false and the Biblical account of creation is true. This is double-speak non-sense. For starters, evolutionary mechanisms and processes have been, and continue to be, the subjects of numerous investigations. Certainly, there is debate among evolutionary biologists about the most important mechanisms of evolution, and there are still gaps in our knowledge, but the theory of evolution itself is not seriously in question. A comparable analogy would be that one can debate whether the milk, the flour or the eggs are the most important ingredients of a cake, but this does not negate that the cake exists. Likewise, if we had assumed that "icing" was a necessary component for something to be called a cake and we then discover that icing is not a critical component, this would not lead us to conclude that cakes do not exist. Moreover, even if, in the future, new evidence caused scientists to abandon the theory of evolution as false, this would not mean that the Biblical account of creation would be the only alternative explanation. By framing the debate in falsely dichotomous terms, Creationists attempt to argue that "if not X the Y" – if not evolution then Creation. This, however, is not a logical formulation, because alternative explanations are possible.

The decision of the Kansas Board of Education, particularly if emulated by others, can have far-reaching and disastrous consequences on scientific education and on the scientific literacy of the next generation of Americans.

Modern biology considers evolution as the framework for understanding biological processes. Teaching biology without mentioning evolution would be equivalent to presenting a concert at which the musicians cannot read music and there is no conductor. Understanding the basic concepts of evolutionary theory is critical to an adequate understanding of biological fields as diverse as anatomy, genetics, physiology, population biology, development, ecology, and animal behavior. Students coming out of primary and secondary schools that fail to teach the fundamentals of the theory of evolution will be at a grave disadvantage in science courses taught at colleges and universities.

There is an even more troubling aspect to this decision. The Kansas Board of Education has opened the door to educational censorship and to the control of our schools by the Religious Right. Right now, biology and evolution have been the victims, but which other scientific field will be next? Where will it end? According to Genesis, the earth was created on the first day of creation, while the sun, moon, and stars were created on the fourth day. Clearly, modern scientific views or cosmology and the formation of the solar system do not agree with the Biblical account. Will the next step be to prohibit the teaching of modern theories of the origin of the universe, and of the formation of solar systems and planets? What other scientific theories will be scrutinized and banished to the brimstone and hellfire of the Creationists because they do not agree with Biblical accounts? And, once they are finished with the public elementary and high schools, will our universities be next?

The immediate results of the Kansas Board of Education decision is that young Kansans will not be receiving a decent education in the sciences and will be handicapped in competing with better educated peers from other states. If the Kansas decision is embraced by other states, however, the end result will be that the next generation of Americans will be scientifically ignorant and that the United States will be unable to compete scientifically and technologically with other countries that have more enlightened policies of science education. The Kansas developments are particularly ominous because they come at a time when both the National Science Foundation and the American Academy of Sciences have emphasized the need to improve coverage of science in public education, and have expressed concerns about an expected shortage of well-trained scientists in the new millennium.

On October 7, 1999, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, on page A17, reported that the Kentucky Board of Education and the Kentucky Education Department have deleted the word "evolution" from the curriculum guidelines for what students should be taught. The word "evolution" has been replaced with the phrase "change over time", prompting Ken Rosenbaum, Director of the Kentucky Science Teachers Association, to remark that this is akin to referring to "photosynthesis" as "plant food making". In a chilling confirmation of my comments about the discrepancy between creationist beliefs and scientific accounts of the origin of the universe, the Post Dispatch article also revealed that, in 1996, the Marshall County School District in western Kentucky had confiscated science books and glued together the pages of a book that dealt with the Big Bang theory because this version of the origin of the universe is contrary to the account in Genesis.