Essay: Dissent, Dogma and Darwin's Dog

The welfare of any modern nation depends on its science and technology. U.S. industry, national defense, even health, rely on progress in fields such as geology, physics and genetics. Science implies scientists, who must be accurately taught. In schools and colleges, there can be no contamination of the teaching of science by irrelevant philosophies or prejudices, no matter how time honored these may be.

Earlier in this century, Soviet geneticist Trofim Lysenko severely damaged Soviet agriculture by forcing on his colleagues a pseudoscientific theory of heredity that was ideologically pleasing to the ruling Stalinists. Dissenters were dismissed, disgraced and even sent to the Gulags.

In the U.S. last November, the California board of education faltered under pressure from religious right-wingers and overruled the state's curriculum commission to alter a guideline for the teaching of evolution in California's schools. Darwinian evolution will no longer be presented as fact, but as both fact and theory, an equivocation pleasing to the religious right because few understand that to scientists "theory" is not a synonym for mere "hypothesis." Among other concessions, mention of a 1987 Supreme Court decision denying scientific status to so-called creation science will be deleted.

Right-wingers may be correct in claiming "a very significant victory." In a pale but disturbing analogue of the Lysenko affair, scientific judgments have been alloyed, if only slightly, with politico-religious dogma, creating / an unwelcome precedent for a nation that needs to stay even -- in some cases to catch up -- with its competitors. The camel's nose is now in the tent.

Since California is the leading purchaser of textbooks in the U.S., publishers could be economically motivated to spread these slippery equivocations nationwide, while extremists will be encouraged to increase pressures on educational authorities, including individual science teachers.

As a college freshman in 1925, I was sure that the Scopes trial, in which Clarence Darrow in effect made a monkey of William Jennings Bryan, had put an end to any serious debate. Even earlier, President Woodrow Wilson had confidently declared as much, and no important politician contradicted him, until, in 1980, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan won cheers from the religious right by announcing, "Evolution is only a theory" -- meaning, of course, a mere hypothesis.

Soon the argument attained a higher judicial level. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia with Chief Justice William Rehnquist, joining in dissent from the 1987 decision, cited testimony that "creation science" merits equal class time with Darwinian evolution as a competing theory of the origin of life.

Unfortunately, the testimony cited by the learned Justice and his Chief was in error, and this error has been allowed to skew the entire debate on the subject. There is no theory of life's origin in Darwin's work. True to his title, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Darwin confined himself to describing the process by which new species, including our own, have evolved from the old. In a letter to American botanist Asa Gray, he dismissed all theological pretensions on his part with the words: "A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton."