Here we go again.
Every year some hysterical backwater administrator in some Southern state manages to wield the Bible like a scepter in a futile battle against — get this — the word “evolution.” It seems that these people would rather our public schoolchildren be exposed only to the notion that God created all, affectionately labeled “creationist theory,” and that science is all just a bunch of bunk.
Laughably, these people don’t see the irony in proclaiming that evolution is an aberrant, sacrilegious theory and that their personal beliefs — their faith, if you will — are inarguable, concrete fact.
This year, the state of Georgia played host to the latest debacle. In a semantic battle not unlike the flap over whether certain people are entitled to use the word “marriage,” a dozen science teachers rallied to change the word “evolution” to “biological changes over time” in the state’s science curriculum, according to The Associated Press.
Apparently, the word “evolution” has become so loaded that to even utter it could be tragically blasphemous — perhaps sending all the schoolchildren straight to hell in one fell swoop? — and thus reducing the argument from a scientific debate to a religious and moral squabble. The whole affair reeked of Orwellian Newspeak, and the suggestion was eventually dropped after legitimate professors, educators and politicians spoke out.
At its heart, the evolution-creationism debate revolves around differences in microevolution, in which a series of small genetic changes can form new subspecies, and macroevolution, wherein large-scale evolution can form new taxonomic groups (i.e. apes to humans). Opponents of the word “evolution” generally tend to accept the tenets of microevolution. Experiments, such as Darwin’s work with finches, show that populations can change in small ways to adapt to their environments, and opponents rarely dispute these findings.
The contention lies in macroevolution. Opponents of the word “evolution” say it has no scientific legitimacy (read: no proof that any species used to be something completely different) and therefore should not be mentioned in a public school setting.
But most scientists disagree with the alleged lack of evidence for macroevolutionary principles. In fact, Douglas Theobald, Ph.D., of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Colorado at Boulder, cites 21 different pieces of evidence for macroevolution. His paper is posted at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc, a Web site dedicated to the evolution debate.
As the late Stephen J. Gould, a paleontologist from Harvard University, wrote in a May 1981 issue of Discover: “… evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don’t go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s in this century, but apples didn’t suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other yet-to-be-discovered.”
Humankind relies on science for progress and understanding about our origins and the world around us. This is the socially accepted means of public scholarship in a country where the church and state have been explicitly separated — although this fundamental aspect of our society seems to suffer assault on a daily basis. Because science is so accepted and so ingrained in nearly all elements of life, it is only reasonable that it be taught in public schools. If religious administrators have a problem with that, they can join private religious schools where the accepted dogma is not science but faith.