August 27, 2005
The Evolution Revolution
by Joel Lang
Hartford Courant
Kenneth R. Miller, a 57-year-old biology professor at Brown University, occupies a unique position in the nation's longest-running culture war: the one over teaching evolution to schoolchildren. Miller is both one of the science's most clever and tireless defenders, and a practicing Roman Catholic. His religion gives him, as another veteran of the evolutionary war observed, "strong propaganda value."
As far as the American public is concerned, the war began 80 years ago this summer with the Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tenn. There, outdoors on one day in July, the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow cross-examined the equally famous political orator William Jennings Bryan about his belief in the Book of Genesis. (Did Bryan really think God created the Earth in six days? Darrow asked, getting an evasive "He could have," from Bryan.) The trial instantly entered history. In doing so, it generated a series of illusions that persist to the present - persist at least for those in politically "blue" states like Connecticut, which view the evolutionary war from a distance.
One illusion is that the Scopes trial resulted in a decisive verdict for scientific truth over religious belief - that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution trumped the Bible's creation stories. In fact, John Scopes, a volunteer defendant, was found guilty of violating a state law that banned the teaching of evolution. The subject would not really enter school curriculums until the 1960s. And once it did, the battle over evolution resumed with the rise of the Moral Majority and Christian demands that evidence supporting the biblical account of creation be taught along with Darwin's theory.
Then in the 1990s, a newer, alternate creation theory emerged to challenge evolution. Known as intelligent design, its core premise is that the incredibly slow, chance processes of evolution cannot have led to such evidently engineered structures as the biochemical machinery of the living cell. Instead, such structures must reflect the work of an intelligent agent, one that its theorists are careful to say is unknown.
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