When Science and Politics Collide: The Public Interest at Risk by Robert O. Schneider

Author:Robert O. Schneider
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-02-07T07:08:07+00:00

vide “a non-inflammatory, objective, and balanced viewpoint on issues.”

There is ample reason to believe that evolution and climate change are

among the main targets of this proposed legislation.12

Neither the bills proposed by state legislatures in 2017 nor any similar

proposals passed and enacted in recent years in states like Tennessee and

Louisiana are aimed at preventing the teaching of evolution. That was

long ago declared unconstitutional. In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court

ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas 13 that a state law allowing the teaching of creation, while disallowing the teaching of evolution, advanced a religion

and, as such, was a violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Con-

stitution. Creationists then started proposing and passing laws that

required teachers to teach evolution as an unresolved “controversy,”

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When Science and Politics Col ide

granting equal time to creationism. This tactic was also struck down by

the Supreme Court in 1987 in Edwards v. Aguillard.14 Many of the state

laws proposed today are designed to allow teaching things contrary to

science on the grounds it promotes critical thinking. Promoters and

defenders of this approach decry the “censorship” of nonscientific ideas

and advocate allowing teachers to teach “both sides” of scientific theories.

This is essentially the preferred method for conservative groups to cir-

cumvent a federal ban on the teaching of creationism in public schools.

Why, one may ask, almost a century after the Monkey Trial, do we see

state after state still introducing such measures? Is it simply a matter of

religion versus secularism?

It is true that religion played a role in the immediate 19th-century

reaction to Darwin’s landmark 1859 publication, but it did not play the

dominant role that it does today in the discussion of evolution in the

United States. It was in the aftermath of World War I that religion came to

dominate the public discussion of the topic. The devastation of and the

challenging uncertainties facing the nation after the Great War, combined

with the growing animosity of many American Protestants to historical or

literary criticism of the Bible, produced a popular reaction against mod-

ernism. Fear of what was seen by many as a dangerous and deliberate

departure from tradition and values once held to be beyond question, fear

of the pace of change in the world generally, and a discomforting uncer-

tainty about the future combined to create a reaction against newer forms

of thinking and a desire to restore traditional values. It was in this context

in the early 20th century that Christian fundamentalism as we know it

today emerged. It regarded evolution as an attack on the Christian faith.

Political animosity toward evolution, as we continue to experience it, is

ultimately the product of the religious animosity toward evolution as it

emerged in the early 20th century.15 Well into the 21st century, this ani-

mosity is still alive and well and continues to shape the dialogue in many

respects.

By the second half of the 20th century, ongoing studies and a conver-

gence of evidence from diverse fields had concluded with unmistakable

clarity that evolution was a scientific fact. Evolution had taken a central

position in the teaching of biology by that time. Professional, scientific,

and governmental organizations partnered to provide systematic curricula

to help students develop

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