University Place

The War on Evolution

I’m Emily Auerbach and I’d like to welcome you to today’s talk on the “War on Evolution: Why does it continue?” This talk is part of Eloquence and Eminence, Emeritus Faculty Lectures, a series in its 24th year sponsored by the Division of Continuing Studies, the Institute on Aging, the Anonymous Committee, and today in partnership with Wisconsin Public Television. This series features retired UW faculty members known for their teaching excellence and their scholarship. Today’s speaker is Ronald Numbers. Ron Numbers is Hilldale Professor Emeritus of the history of science and medicine and of religious studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught for nearly four decades. He has written or edited more than two dozen books, including many published by Harvard University Press, such as the “Creationists,” “Darwinism Comes to America,” “Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion,” and “Newton’s Apple and Other Myths About Science.” He is currently completing a biography of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the eccentric and puritanical inventor of flaked cereals. For a talk today entitled the “War on Evolution: Why Does it Continue.” Please welcome Professor Emeritus Ron Numbers. (audience applauding)

– Okay, thank you. Despite Charles Darwin’s announced effort to overthrow the dogma of separate creation, which was his primary goal, organized opposition to evolution did not appear for a number of decades. In fact it wasn’t Until the early 1920s that organizations grew up, sprung up, to oppose what they associated with so-called Darwinism. And for the general public, Darwinism meant one thing, monkeys to man. In the scientific community, there were debates over the role and efficacy of natural selection and other issues. But for the public, there was basically one issue. So finally, in the early 1920s, orthodox conservative Christians struck back. They did so primarily for moral rather than scientific reasons. And the leader of this anti-evolution movement was William Jennings Bryan, a name, I’m sure, familiar to all of you. Three times the nominee for president of the United States by the Democratic Party and probably the country’s most famous orator at the time. And in the early ’20s, about ’22, William Jennings Bryan became aware, probably for the first time, of what he considered to be the evils of evolution. Some people called it evil evolution, or evil-ution.

He was conserved about human evolution, although he though evolution generally was silly. He argued that if scientists should provide evidence, he had no theological objection to pre-human evolution. And he had several reasons for opposing human evolution. One was how the Germans had ostensibly used evolution and the idea of might makes right to mobilize their troops during World War I. And in fact, Stanford biologist, Vernon Kellogg, had written a book called “Headquarters Nights.” He had spent evenings with captured members of the German high command and they had explicitly told them, he said, how their ideology had been inspired by Darwinism. Well that certainly gave it a black name. The Germans, during and after World War I, were not very popular in the United States. Also being a very popular speaker, Bryan would travel from campus to campus, including the University of Wisconsin, and would learn from students and from their parents that many were losing their faith because of being taught evolution. And he reasoned that if you taught young people that they came from animals, you shouldn’t be surprised that they started behaving like animals. And then, a couple of years into his campaign, you had the notorious murder of Bobby Franks by Leopold and Loeb in Chicago, two young men who had been inspired by Nietzsche and Darwin and thought it might be cool to see how another person died. So they killed him. And of course, there was a sense that they had done that because of Darwin. Now, I should point out that there were no people called creationists in the early 1920s. They were anti-evolutionists, and that was the only thing that united the various parties. The fundamentalists had just been anointed with that name. And they were divided into three groups about the meaning of Genesis. One very popular one, endorsed by Bryan himself, and by the founder of the World’s Christian Fundamentalists Association, William Bell Riley from Minnesota, believed that Genesis properly interpreted told a story of the appearance of life over vast geological ages. This was called the Day Age theory, because they interpreted every one of the six days of Genesis as a vast, some said cosmic days, others said geological, paleontological days. But of course, that gave them an immense amount of time to account for everything that geologists and paleontologists had turned up in the past century or so. That was fairly popular among the better-educated fundamentalists.

Among the more rank and file was probably an even more popular interpretation, and that was called the Gap Theory. And it was argued in one of the most popular editions of the King James Bible that if you understood Genesis One properly, you would realize that not everything was explained. The first verse, “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.” Not a clue as to when that happened. And then the author of Genesis, presumably Moses himself, passed over an immense amount of time before he got to the recent six-day creation involving Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. And so, a good Christian fundamentalist could insert the entire geological column in that gap between the initial creation and the much more recent Adamic creation. In the early and mid-1920s, there was only a very small group of Christians who insisted on a recent six-day creation in 24-hour days. And they were mostly confined to a Christian sect known as the Seventh Day Adventists. Their founding prophet in the mid-19th century had been taken by God Himself to witness the creation and she had seen that it occurred in six days about 6,000 years ago. And if you became a Seventh Day Adventist, you automatically accepted her authority as God’s prophet. So, there was not much wiggle room for them. And one of her converts, a Canadian named George McCready Price, took up this cause in the early part of the century, his first book appeared in 1902, and by the mid-1920s, the editor of the journal Science was calling him the leading scientific authority of the fundamentalists. And he probably was that, although he was not trained in geology. Or paleontology. But there was one strange factor. Although virtually all the leading anti-evolution cited, anti-evolutionists cited him, they didn’t switch over to his interpretation of Genesis. So he became very useful in his promotion of anti-evolutionism, but not very influential theologically. And it wasn’t until the very end of that decade that he won his first prominent non-Adventist convert, and, the rest of this story I’ll say in a second. The point I wanna make is that among anti-evolutionists, including fundamentalist Christians, there was a terrible lack of consensus. So bad a one that some of them said that’s why they hadn’t really won in the 1920s in their campaign. Of course, the Scopes trial looms large during this period.

Probably most of you have at some time seen the movie “Inherit the Wind.” It’s a great movie, led to a number of Academy nominations. It is totally fake history. Virtually nothing about it is correct, not even the famous love affair. And Scopes wasn’t taken to jail, he volunteered to be a guinea pig in the trial. There wasn’t the animosity that was shown. But it is a great movie. At the end, strange as it may seem, the defense of Scopes, ACLU, which was a very new organization at that time with lawyers who’d come down from New York, well some were not from New York. But, I’m sorry? Oh, I thought I heard something. Conceded Scopes’ guilt. And they did so because they wanted to appeal this case. All the way to the State Supreme Court and to the U.S. Supreme Court. And he had to be found guilty for them to have these platforms. Unfortunately, the judge made a technical error, and so the State Supreme Court nullified the decision so they never got to go on. Another side point about the Scopes trial is many people think that it was argued on First Amendment grounds of separation of church and state. First Amendment was not even mentioned during the trial. 14th Amendment, due process, was. But it wasn’t until after World War II that the courts came to believe that the First Amendment applied below the federal level. So during the 1920s, it was thought it only applied to– You couldn’t have, say an established church at the national level, actually, the late 18th, early 20th centuries you did have established churches at the state level still.

The anti-evolution movement picked up steam after the Scopes trial, about 23 of the state laws that were introduced were done so after, in the three years afterward. And it wasn’t until 1928 that the anti-evolution movement lost steam. There are a number of reasons for that, probably, the states that were gonna do something did something, and the rest weren’t gonna do anything. And, it’s also been suggested that the democratic nomination of a Roman Catholic for president also gave them another enemy to kick around. So they turned away from evolution to Catholicism. All told, about 20 states debated evolution laws North and South. Three passed laws banning it, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas, two others damned it but didn’t outlaw it. At the end of the Scopes trial, the journalist HL Mencken, who had been there through most of the trial and left on the last day said that the fundamentalists were completely triumphant. And that’s the way it seemed. William Jennings Bryan died five days after the trial a hero. Clarence Darrow, who had represented the ACLU and was a notorious agnostic maybe even atheist who had argued for the defense of Leopold and Loeb only a year earlier, had been so, you might say rambunctious during the trial that even the supporters of Scopes didn’t want him to have anything to do with the appeals going up to the State Supreme Court. And some liberal journals were really critical of his attempts to be highly prejudicial to religion, that it wasn’t helping their cause at all. Moving along here, from the 1920s to the 1960s, the rule that prevailed in educational circles was neutrality based on science. So some municipalities passed the anti-evolution laws. The ones in the three states I mentioned remained on the books but basically, teachers didn’t talk about evolution. And they stayed out of trouble, and, textbook publishers, even before the trial, not as a consequence of the trial, had been watering down or eliminating coverage of evolution. One major publisher actually sent a copy to Mr. Bryan to see it if met with his approval. Not very neutral, I guess. So, whatever action there was on this front, it moved from courthouses to schoolhouses during this period. The end of those laws passed in the 1920s came in 1968 when an Arkansas high school teacher named Susan Everson filed charges that her First Amendment– First Amendment is now important in the ’60s– rights to free speech were being infringed on by the still-on-the-books Arkansas law.

And she won. Well that was a landmark in the history of relations between evolution and non-evolution, evolution and creation, in that it made clear that laws prohibiting the teaching of evolution, like the 1920s laws, were unconstitutional. So opponents had to come up with a new scheme. Another important development about this time, a little earlier than Everson, was that in response to the Russian success with Sputnik in 1957, the federal government had provided funding through the National Science Foundation for a group in Colorado to write new evolution textbooks. Both for the lower grades and high school grades, that would feature evolution in a way it had not been featured for a very long time in the United States. The group was called the Biological Sciences Curriculum Committee. And they produced a number of textbooks that were getting into the public schools by the 1960s. Creationists said they were trying to cram evolution down our students’ throats. Maybe they were, I don’t know. But it did create another tense moment in the relations between the evolutionists and the creationists. So, as I said, after ’68, the notion of outlawing evolution was no longer possible constitutionally. And so anti-evolutionists came up with a new approach called balanced treatment that, and they invented something called creation science that was the parallel of evolution science. And these balanced treatment acts of which two states passed laws, Arkansas and Louisiana, promoting this idea, or endorsing this idea. And creationists started producing books about creation science or scientific creationism as it was sometimes called.

And it was biblical creationism. With a twist. It didn’t mention Adam and Eve, and it didn’t mention Noah and his flood, which was so crucial to what was coming to be known as young Earth creationism, the George McCready Price Seventh Day Adventist version, and then perhaps I should give a little bit of background on what happened there. Price picked up a number of disciples over the decades following the 1920s, he lived into the early 1960s. But it wasn’t until 1961 that fundamentalists began shifting in large numbers away from the Gap and Day Age interpretation of Genesis to the notion that everything had been created about no more than 10,000 years ago, including for many of them now, not just life on this Earth, which was the original claim, but the entire cosmos, the entire universe was young. And had just been created with the appearance of age. Just think, if it’s hard to imagine that, if you had walked into the Garden of Eden the day after the seventh day, and met Adam, you would’ve sworn that he had been around for say 30, 35 years.

He was an adult man. He was created with the appearance of age. So they used that principle to go to all the universe. So you have objects in the heavens millions of light years away, God created the light in transit about 10,000 years ago. Now there are some misconceptions about these young Earth creationists. Although it’s true that in the 1920s, the now-called Old Earth creationists believed in the special creation of species. But that was a tough nut for the young Earth creationists. For two reasons. One is that the Bible says that on the sixth day of creation, in the Garden of Eden, Adam named all the kinds that had been created. They were running by him. Now given that biologists were discovering or inventing thousands upon thousands of species almost every year, it became a really serious problem for them. And even more serious was the centrality of Noah’s flood. For the young Earth creationists, the only way, since they didn’t have ages and they didn’t have gaps, the only way to account for the fossil record, the geological column, was to attribute it all to the one year of Noah’s flood. It had been truly catastrophic. But then you run into the problem that the Bible does give the dimensions, if you can figure out what a cubit really is, of the Ark, and– So in the early 1940s, one of these young Earth creationists, actually a former student of Price’s, came up with the notion that since the Bible never used the term “species,” it used the term “kind,” the challenge was to find out what was meant by kind. And so he called the originally created kinds baramins. Created kind. And just finish off this story, for a long time nobody knew exactly what a baramin was equivalent to biologically. But over the last 15 years or so, some very bright young Earth creationists have formed a Baraminology study group to solve this problem. And they have scientifically determined that a baramin, or a Genesis kind, is equivalent to the biological family. So they not only allow, they eagerly seek evidence of rapid speciation and hybridization.

Because they have to have– Say, if you had one family member or two of a kind on the ark, say canines, then in two, three, four, eight years or something like that, since the flood. Is that correct? Then, they have evolved into domestic dogs, coyotes, foxes, hyenas, whatever you got. That is evolution on fast-forward, and they’re quite happy with allowing natural selection to work. In fact they kinda like that more than a supernatural creation after the flood, there have been debates in creationist circles about that. If you should go and spend your money at the Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky, you will see a plaque stating unambiguously that kinds equal biological families. Now they do call all development or evolution within the families’ micro-evolution. So they continue to oppose macro-evolution, which is above the family, and embrace micro-evolution. Needless to say, most zoologists don’t use the term quite that generously. In the 1980s, the two laws, two balanced treatment laws that were passed were tried. And I can’t resist mentioning that I was asked to be an expert witness in the Louisiana case by both sides.

You can interpret that one of two ways, either I’m wishy washy and would go either side, or that I’m just fair and balanced. Take your pick. I had troubles, I was deposed for two days. And I had trouble with what was becoming the key legal method of deciding these cases. And that was appealing to demarcation criteria. And that’s how the Arkansas case had been won when a young philosopher of science from Canada named Michael Roust had tutored the judge on the way to demarcate or separate science from non-science, especially religion in this case. And being a historian, I knew that the boundaries of science, to say nothing of religion, had been endlessly negotiated and were not fixed. And late at night we finally agreed. I finally agreed with the attorneys from New York, that I could say that this creation science was bad science. And so we reached something of a compromise. Now I never testified in court, because the judge issued a summary judgment, it went straight up to the Supreme Court, which in 1987 decided that it was unconstitutional.

These laws were unconstitutional. In anticipation of the court voting otherwise, some creationists collaborated on a textbook, because they said, once the Supreme Court supports us, then there’ll be a huge demand. They told publishers they could make millions of dollars in a short time with these creationist books. So they almost had their manuscript finished when the Supreme Court said, no way. So they quickly went through and changed creation to intelligent design. And that became more or less the origins of the intelligent design movement. You’ve probably caught the narrative now that the whole goal in the United States over the years has been to get counter-arguments to evolution in the public schools. And so every time there’s been a major court decision, then there’s been a regrouping and reorganizing, and I’ll mention in a little bit what happened besides intelligent design. So in the ’90s, this became a very big issue. The Discovery Institute in Seattle set up a special center to promote intelligent design. Intelligent design is in some ways a very tricky concept to nail down. In one version, the one I call the “strong” version, it purports to be revolutionary, as revolutionary as Newton or Darwin. And that is, after 200 years of supernatural explanations being banned from the practice of science, they wanted to reintroduce, when warranted by science, they wanted to reintroduce supernatural explanations. Then there was a “weaker” version. Sometimes one person was arguing both of these. But a weaker version that emphasized irreducible complexity in nature. That you got to a certain point where natural selection couldn’t explain. And this must be the result of an intelligent designer doing that. Although they denied it, to me that strikes me as just another version of natural theology, which had been popular and continues to be popular in some circles. Intelligent design picked up a lot of momentum during the ’90s and early 20th century, both in Europe and in the United States. As I say, it was well-funded by the Ahmanson Foundation and by Davis Weyerhaeuser of the florist products group.

And many people, including quite a few journalists, because of the prominence of intelligent design, thought that young Earth creationism had probably withered and died. But that was anything but true. They were prospering. They had spread out from their original center, near San Diego, which housed the Creation Research institute, into an Australian, who had been at the Creation Research Institute, decided to stay in America and set up his own ministry, Answers in Genesis. And notice, this is not creation science with no references to the Bible. This is, we are biblical creationists. And we’re proud of it. And his ministry has spread all over the world. It’s clearly the dominant creationist ministry around us today. And he gets in the news quite a bit now. Much more than intelligent designers do. First with the earlier mentioned Creation Museum, a $27 million operation where he brought people up from Disney World. The striking feature about the Creation Museum is the role of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs for decades had been seen rather skeptically by fundamentalist Christians, maybe created by Satan even. But now, in the Creation Museum, there’re probably close to 20 dinosaurs, and in some of the vignettes that they have, they’re frolicking with humans in the Garden of Eden. So dinosaurs have become the darlings of young Earth creationists, and in the bookstore at the Creation Museum, you’ll see all kinds of books for children and adults and mugs and puzzles and whatever you want featuring dinosaurs, who are now primary evidence. Inspired by his success, and it truly has been successful, with the museum, Ken Ham plunged ahead to raise money for a life-size replica of Noah’s Ark, called the Ark Encounter. And it opened last year. It cost about $92 million. And unfortunately for him, it hasn’t been as successful as he anticipated. And he blames these problems that he’s having on atheist scientists and the media.

Okay. So, I’m back to intelligent design. I’m jerking you back and forth here between these two strands. They were quite successful, and especially in Dover, Pennsylvania, a fundamentalist church provided books to the school district there, the same book that had first started with intelligent design of pandas and people. And had announcement made in the classroom that if the kids wanted another interpretation, they should pick up one of these books. Well, they were sued by a bunch of parents. The leading one being a woman named Kitzmiller, so the case was called Kitzmiller versus Dover Area School Board. And at kind of the last minute, the Discovery Institute got a little skittish about the chances of winning. And as an organization pulled out. Although some people connected with them, were expert witnesses at the trial. The presiding judge of federal court, he became so upset with the shenanigans of these people and the lies of these church members that he denounced their activities as a breathtaking inanity. And, although it was in a federal district court, not the Supreme Court, that decision effectively killed off blatant attempts, effectively not all the way, to promote intelligent design. So. . . Another substitute had to be found. We have been seeing this all around us. In just the last 15 months, I’ve counted 13 cases in the states trying to promote anti-evolutionism. So it’s alive and well. And this is the substitive that’s taken place. In part as a result of the Discovery Institute and intelligent designers finding some post-Dover way to enter the schoolrooms.

So one of the most popular ones is for state legislatures or state boards of education to promote teaching the strength and weaknesses of evolution. Hm. I could do that. And you know, without violating the Constitution. But it’s only there, I’m convinced, to allow creationist teachers to teach about the weaknesses of evolution and not be subject to any consequences, negative consequences for that. Another version of this is to teach critical thinking, which is a popular intelligent design phrase. Teach critical thinking, who could be against critical thinking? And why would anybody think that critical thinking or teaching strengths and weaknesses violated the First Amendment of the Constitution? I mean the only way I think you could do that is to use a doctrine that lawyers call the fruit of the poison tree. That is, if you can show, as they did in Dover, that intelligent design had been sponsored by one fundamentalist church to carry out its mission, then the product, although itself not obviously religious, was poisoned. A Texas law. . . said they should examine all sides of science evidence. Another way of opening up to strengths and weaknesses. And one in Iowa in the last year or so said they should teach opposing points of view. And Indiana said, teach a diverse curriculum. So all these euphemisms now are floating around that would allow teachers to, to raise questions about the legitimacy of evolution. And I’m a historian, not a prophet. I don’t know what would happen if a case makes it up to the Supreme Court given the composition of the Supreme Court today. Two more comments. One of the problems we have in the United States is that biology teachers at the high school level are not prepared to teach evolution. In fact, polls have shown that in some states, 20 to 30% of them are creationists themselves.

So a recent study showed that about 60% of biology teachers, high school biology teachers, were being very cautious and avoiding saying anything about evolution. And I have run across this, you know, visiting in different places, that not that many biology teachers want to get involved, because they know parents will jump on them and maybe the school administration or the school boards. I wish I could tell you more precisely how many creationists there are. In fact, it’s almost impossible– I can do it– but it’s almost impossible for bolsters to choose between a young Earth creationist and intelligent designers and old Earth creationists. And I think for anti-evolutionists, it’s very hard to articulate. The oldest poll is the Gallup poll, the oldest one that’s been asking a question about beliefs in creation and evolution, goes back to 1981. And until just a year or so ago, 40-some percent, fluctuated between 40, low 40s and high 40s for decades, said they agreed with it with the statement, God created man, they have changed it to humans now, but this is the original one, pretty much in the present format one time within the last 10,000 years or so. Recently, that just dropped to 38%. The first drop below 40 since the poll began. It’s always fluctuated, so I’m not quite sure what to make of this. I do know that the question is not, or the statement is not adequate for the purposes that they’ve assigned it. That is, many old Earth creationists, day age and gap, also believe that humans didn’t appear until about 10,000 years ago. So it doesn’t identify a young Earth creationist in any precise way. Other pollsters. The Harris Poll, Angus Reid Public Opinion Poll, Ipsos MORI Poll, which is Paris-based, I think, have all asked questions and you get wonderful things coming from these, the Ipsos poll revealed that 54% of U. K. respondents favored teaching creationism including intelligent design along with evolution. And that seems to be about the same percentage in the United States, that about 60% would be open to teaching both sides instead of just two sides. The last thing I do wanna emphasize is for a long time, experts in this field were sure that anti-evolutionism would be confined to the United States and probably to the Southern states. In the 1980s, very distinguished scientist, Stephen J. Gould, was lecturing in the South Pacific and assured his listeners that creationism was such a distinctive America bizarrity that they needed to have no fear that it would ever come down to New Zealand or Australia.

And he repeated something similar in 2000. Well, I love the man, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. In recent years, it has circled the globe. We now see large groups of Muslim creationists. In 2000, conservative Jews created the Torah Science Foundation, which is a little bit like the intelligent design, largely Israel, members from Israel and the United States. There’s even a version of Hindu creationism, not young Earth, but sudden appearance of human. We know now that at least 20%, kind of a baseline of Europeans are self-identified creationists. It has just gone wild in Latin America. Brazil has a huge community of creationists, and over half the populations of Ecuador, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic identify as creationists. Sub-Saharan Africa, creationism is so popular that it’s been very difficult to establish a creationist organization. Because it’s almost the default position there, and, you can imagine, well it’s not (mumbles). Concluding comment, next month, I’m speaking at a symposium in Singapore devoted to the spread of creationism in Asia. And especially in South Korea. A few years ago there were like 15,000 or, 1,500 creation seminars in one year or something. It’s really huge in South Korea, and spreading throughout much of Asia. So, with those positive words, I think I’ll let you ask some questions. (audience applauding)