"Why is the antievolution movement so powerful in the United States?" It's because Americans are fucking morons. Science makes Idiot America cry.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16469687/

COMMENTARY | VOLUME 124, ISSUE 3, P449-451, FEBRUARY 10, 2006

Creationism and Evolution: It's the American Way

Eugenie C. Scott

The recent ruling in the Kitzmiller v. Dover court case that intelligent design is a form of religion and cannot be taught alongside evolution in science classes in US public schools garnered worldwide attention. But why is the antievolution movement so powerful in the United States?

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In late December 2005 in the United States, newspapers, weekly news magazines, television, and radio extensively covered the long-awaited decision in a remarkable Federal district court trial, Kitzmiller v. Dover. The court case was brought by Tammy Kitzmiller and ten other concerned parents in the town of Dover, Pennsylvania, against the Dover Area School Board. Their concern was the board's requirement that “intelligent design” (ID), a form of creationism, be taught as an alternative to evolution in ninth-grade science classes in Dover area high schools.

The teaching of evolution has been a contentious topic in Dover for several years. A skirmish took place a couple of years ago over a student-painted mural of human evolution, which was torn down and burned by a school district employee. In the fall of 2004, conservative school board members—concerned about the new Pennsylvania state science education standards requiring that evolution be taught in schools—set about finding ways to “balance” the presentation of evolution with something that would reflect the generally conservative religious views of the community.

In US public schools, students cannot receive religious instruction, although comparative religious views can be described. Unlike Canada and some other nations, the US does not have a publicly supported system of religiously affiliated schools; our constitution requires public agencies like schools to be religiously neutral. There are privately funded networks of Catholic and Protestant parochial schools for those who wish their children to receive religious instruction in school. Thus, in US public schools, it is not legal to advocate the six-day biblical view of creation as expressed in a literal reading of Genesis in any classroom, nor, since a 1987 Supreme Court decision, is it legal to teach a form of biblical creationism called “creation science,” invented in the 1960s. Creationists have sought to avoid the legal problems of teaching creation science by inventing ID (in content a minimalist subset of creation science). They have been lobbying for the teaching of ID as an alternative to evolution in science class not only in Dover but also in Kansas and elsewhere. Policies requiring the teaching of ID are extant in Bluffton, Indiana, and in Blount County, Tennessee, and efforts have been made to incorporate ID into the science standards of several states.

Judge John Jones III, the judge in the Kitzmiller case, was not persuaded that ID is a legitimate scientific alternative to evolution. “Judge Rules Intelligent Design Is Not Science!” was a typical headline, reflecting the judge's decision—laid out in a 139-page ruling—that ID was merely a form of creationism. His ruling that the new ID form of creationism is a form of religion and thus its teaching in science classes is unconstitutional is of course a great victory for science and science education. However, many newspapers commented that other communities around the country are still wrestling with creationism and that, even with the solid anti-ID decision in Kitzmiller, there may well be other Dovers and possibly other trials in the future. And, proving them correct, within a month, a small school district in southern California was embroiled in a lawsuit brought by parents against an intersession course on ID.

Outside of the United States, people are dumbfounded by events like these. They find it inexplicable that a powerful, modern industrial nation that routinely sweeps the Nobel prizes in science nonetheless is home to a population almost half of whom rejects one of the foundational ideas of modern science. Why do Americans have such a problem with evolution? There are a number of reasons for American antievolutionism, many of which lie in the social, political, and, especially, religious history of the United States.

The US constitution codifies the separation of church and state partly because the founding fathers knew the bloody history of religious warfare that had scarred so much of Europe. Religious history in the US is marked by a strong current of religious dissidence, having been colonized originally by members of sects with quite specific—and different—ideas about salvation. The US has also fostered a tradition of decentralized, do-it-yourself theology that produced many extant and extinct sects, including the Latter-Day Saints, Christian Science, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Shakers, and others (Scott, 2005). The tendency not to follow ecclesiastical authority has a long history on our side of the Atlantic.

The decentralization of religion arises partly from the dissident tradition and partly from our frontier tradition. For much of early American history, there were no central governing bodies, and, if a frontier settlement desired police stations, fire houses, schools, or other community services, they had to devise ways of providing them; outside help from territorial or state governments was generally unavailable or ineffective, and the federal government was too weak to extend services to frontier communities. If a community wanted churches, it often was on its own: it had to hire a minister (or someone in the community was “called” to serve) and raise funds to build and support a church. Local control and local orientation grows naturally out of a dissident, frontier history where hierarchy is neither possible nor desired.

In the United States, education is decentralized to a degree not seen in any other developed nation. This may reflect America's frontier history, in which local control of education was a necessity that became enshrined as an ideal. Americans are fiercely protective and defensive of local control of education, even when it results in great inequities of educational opportunity. But whatever the relative merits of local control of education—and there are of course advantages—control of curriculum is not one of them. When I talk to the foreign press, I usually have to preface discussion of the creationism/evolution controversy by explaining that, no, the US does not have a national curriculum in science and that, in fact, local school boards composed of well-meaning if largely scientifically uninformed individuals are ultimately responsible for deciding what gets taught and when. I explain that the US has approximately 17,000 independent school districts and that this administrative patchwork results in a highly irregular distribution of curricula. Some students learn the planets of the solar system in grade 2, some in grade 3, and some never get around to it at all. Some districts require teachers to teach evolution, and some ignore it completely. Understandably, this elicits surprise from those who live in countries where national curricula are viewed as the source of stability in instruction.

Standardization of curricula is beginning to take place, however. The Reagan administration's A Nation at Risk called for the establishment of subject matter curriculum standards, and the process was begun during the administration of the first President Bush. Because of the decentralization of American education, the national standards in math, history, and science would only be advisory guides for states as they developed their own standards and subject matter curricula. The National Science Education Standards (NSES) were published in 1996 (National Research Council, 1996 ), and were highly influential as states devised their standards. Because professional scientists had written the NSES content sections, evolution was well represented; evolution thus entered the curriculum of many states for the first time. Through a variety of carrot-and-stick provisions, states would coax or coerce local school districts into adopting the state standards—for example, by withholding state money from districts that did not adopt the state standards. Ironically, what began as an effort to improve the quality and quantity of science education—the standards movement—triggered the current increase in antievolutionism.

The federal 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education law requires states to administer periodic examinations to students; test content is based upon state standards. School districts will be rewarded or punished depending upon student performance; these are high-stakes tests indeed. Such high-stakes tests will determine the curriculum: what will be tested determines what will be taught. Because most state standards include evolution (Gross, 2005), evolution will be on the tests and will therefore be taught. When evolution is taught, antievolutionism increases. NCLB requires states to begin testing in science by 2007; this looming date helps to explain current squabbles over state science standards and other creationist activity.

Another important reason that has enabled antievolutionism to take root is that America has a tradition of free speech, fairness, and letting everyone have their say. This admirable cultural quality is a great advantage when making political and social decisions about which opinion should be considered. It is, however, irrelevant in science. Whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun goes around the earth is not a matter of opinion. Whether living things descended with modification from common ancestors or were specially created at one time is not a matter of opinion, though some Americans would like to think so. Scientific knowledge grows as we make inferences from empirical evidence and test explanations: the scientific community has inferred from an overwhelming amount of evidence that, indeed, living things have descended with modification from common ancestors. Like all scientific explanations, evolutionary theory changes with new information and new ways of looking at data, but the big idea of evolution—common ancestry—remains solid. Still, the idea of “fairness,” of “balancing” evolution with a religious idea, has enormous traction for the American public.

Another explanation for antievolutionism in the US is the popularity of biblical literalism in American Christianity, a religious tradition that is relatively rare in European Christianity. Between 1910 and 1915 a series of booklets were published called “The Twelve Fundamentals.” They outlined a back-to-basics type of American Christianity stressing the inerrancy of the Bible, which began a religious tradition known as Fundamentalism. It has been far more popular in North America than in any other part of the world, and it is within the biblical literalist tradition of Fundamentalism that antievolutionism finds its roots. The best kept secret in this controversy is that Catholics and mainstream Protestants routinely teach evolution in their parochial schools. Their formal theological positions on evolution are typically a form of theistic evolution—the view that evolution occurred, but it is part of God's plan and God works through evolution. Because of some confusion around this issue, the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, recently published an article by a scientist reiterating doctrinal acceptance of evolution. Historically, some of the most vigorous and effective opponents of creationism in the schools have been religious leaders.

It is safe to say that antievolutionism is largely an American problem. But it is being exported to foreign countries, and in the last couple of years, NCSE has received reports of creationist activity outside of the US. The pattern has been very different from American creationism. Creationist “flare ups” recently have occurred in Brazil, Serbia, and Italy, all of which have top-down education systems in which a central administrator has considerable authority to make decisions about education policy. In all three of these countries, antievolution policies were imposed from on high: the top education official made the decision. In Serbia, for example, Ljiljana Colic, minister of education, decided (apparently with no consultation with other administrators) to remove evolution from the curriculum. After an outcry from scientists, teachers, the clergy, politicians, and others, the decision was reversed and Colic resigned (Hamilton, 2004). This top-down education system is quite different from the decentralized American pattern, where antievolutionist pressure typically arises from grass-roots activity.

In the United Kingdom, a slightly different pattern has occurred with the establishment of “academies,” a charter-school-type system established by the British government to improve student performance in low-performing areas. Citizens can operate independent schools that nonetheless receive a large amount of public money. The academies are free to experiment with curricula, labor policies, and organization in a “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach to improving public education. A wealthy businessman, Sir Peter Vardy, has founded a series of academies where creationism is routinely taught alongside evolution. British scientists seem to be stunned by this occurrence but, unlike American academics, do not appear to be taking any action beyond the occasional outraged letter.

The decision in the Kitzmiller v. Dover court case that the new intelligent design form of creationism is a form of religion and thus its teaching in science classes is unconstitutional is of course a great victory for science education. The judge's decision was based upon 6 weeks of testimony, a great deal of which focused upon the nature of science, the science of evolution, and whether there was a scientific warrant for ID. Parts of the decision read like a good graduate student paper: When was the last time you read a legal decision that casually referred to exaptation? The “theory” of ID is pretty thin stuff. The main claim is that evolution is an inadequate scientific theory; therefore, it is necessary to explain certain biological phenomena by resorting to the direct actions of an “intelligent agent,” whom no one doubts is God. Accordingly, ID's proponents offer a list of long-refuted creationist arguments about the supposed inadequacy of evolution: gaps in the fossil record, the impossibility of building complex organisms through natural selection, and so on.

Because the religious underpinnings of ID were so clearly exposed in the Dover trial, ID is no longer a viable creationist strategy. The fallback creationist position will be to argue for “balancing” the teaching of evolution with alleged “evidence against evolution,” keeping the content of ID but avoiding the legally problematic intelligent agent. The leading ID think-tank, the Discovery Institute, is already promoting this view, which they call “teach the controversy.” Relying on the public's attraction to the fairness argument, they propose that students should be given “all the evidence” and be able to “decide for themselves.” Of course, the “evidence” is erroneous science, and few would argue that students' critical thinking skills are improved by teaching them incorrect information.

So antievolutionism will continue to be promoted by a well-organized and passionate minority of Americans, to the detriment of science education and science literacy. This is a matter of concern: We seem not to be producing well-educated high school and college graduates, and our graduate programs in the biological sciences already have a disproportionate percentage of foreign-born students. The lack of teaching of evolution in high school is probably symptomatic of a larger problem of the politicization of American education, which is resulting in a dumbing down of the curriculum. Foreigners are perplexed: While students in the scientific powerhouse that is the US are being taught creationism, learning misinformation about evolution, or not being taught evolution at all, students in foreign countries are learning evolution—and then are coming to the US for graduate training. The ruling by Judge Jones in favor of Kitzmiller may have been a victory for science, but the broader issue of antievolutionism in America remains.