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The ‘intelligent design’ controversy
EIGHTY YEARS after the infamous ‘monkey trial’, when
John Scopes was tried for teaching evolution, fundamentalist Christians
in the US have stepped up their campaign against Charles Darwin’s ideas
under the name of so-called ‘intelligent design’.
Intelligent design holds that evolution is not a
proven fact and nature is so complex that a ‘designer’ must be
responsible. Although the intelligent design advocates do not say it,
there is no doubt they mean God is the designer.
Religious groups want to push intelligent design
into all American life. In June, the Smithsonian Institution, in
Washington DC, a prestigious government-funded museum, allowed the
showing of an intelligent design film on its premises. Also in June, a
publicly funded zoo, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, voted to allow a display
showing the six day creation described in Genesis. Since 2003, bookshops
at the Grand Canyon, part of the US National Park Service, have sold a
creationist book about the canyon, saying it was formed by Noah’s flood.
IMAX theatres across America have not screened science films with
evolutionary content to "avoid controversy".
In particular, the creationists want intelligent
design taught in public (state) schools. Disputes involving teaching
intelligent design along with evolution are bubbling in around 20 of the
50 states. The Christian right, which is behind the attack on science
education, got the public backing of George Bush, in September. The
born-again Christian president told reporters that intelligent design
should be taught alongside evolution, "because part of education is to
expose people to different schools of thought".
The reactionary character of today’s creationist
campaigners is revealed by looking at the ideas of the one of the main
Christian organisations behind intelligent design, the ‘Discovery
Institute’. The Institute has Karl Marx, as well as Darwin, in its
sights. Its ‘Wedge Strategy’, written in 1999, aims "to replace
materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature
and human beings are created by God".
The different US states and their elected boards of
education decide what is taught in public schools, but Bush can put
pressure on the Justice Department to support challenges to Darwinism.
In a federal lawsuit, eleven parents and the American Civil Liberties
Union are challenging the decision, last October, of the board of
education in Dover, Pennsylvania, to give intelligent design equal
status with evolution. Recently, the state school board in Kansas held
public hearings on the merits of including intelligent design in the
science syllabus.
Intelligent design derives from an early 19th
century explanation of the natural world given by the English clergyman,
William Paley. But the idea that the complexity of an organism is
evidence of the existence of God was overturned by Charles Darwin’s 1859
book, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. In this scientific landmark, Darwin
demolished the idea that a supernatural force (God) created life and
showed that humans evolved from lower orders – ape to man – over
hundreds of millions of years.
The struggle to have evolution taught in US schools
reached a turning point with the Scopes Trial in 1925. A teacher, John
Thomas Scopes, taught evolution in the small town of Dayton, in
Tennessee, and thereby broke the law of the state. But in an ensuing
trail, William Jennings Bryan, a three time Democratic presidential
candidate, who defended biblical creationism against Darwinism, was
demolished in cross examination by the criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow.
Scopes was successfully prosecuted for teaching evolution, but the case
saw a press backlash against creationism and a change in public opinion
across the US. As US society urbanised, making huge advances in science,
technology and industry, the US working class won better living
conditions, wages, education, and social and civil rights. Ignorance,
bigotry and prejudice were pushed back.
Biblical fundamentalism evolved its arguments, so
that by the 1960s they talked about "scientific creationism". Having
learnt from previous defeats, including the 1987 Supreme Court decision
that strict creationism may not be taught in state schools, the
creationists resorted to a more ‘sophisticated’ argument. They claimed
they do not want to ban Darwinism but just have a discussion about other
possibilities by "poking holes" in evolution. Today’s intelligent design
advocates re-hash Paley’s arguments by using molecular biology.
The vast majority of scientists in the US reject the
intelligent design arguments. The US National Academy of Sciences "said
intelligent design ‘and other claims of supernatural intervention in the
origin of life’ are not science because their claims cannot be tested by
experiment and propose no new hypotheses of their own". (The Economist,
30 July) A July editorial in the New Scientist magazine said the case
for teaching intelligent design alongside evolution is "no stronger than
the case for teaching students about supposed controversy between
astrology and astronomy".
Advocates of intelligent design dismiss evolution as
‘merely a theory’, as valid as their own. But evolution is supported by
a vast mountain of evidence. Evolution occurs all the time. The race
between medical science and ‘bird flu’, for example, sees scientists
struggling to develop new vaccines to deal with a world pandemic, should
the flu mutate into a form transmittable between people. In contrast,
"intelligent design’s appeal to supernatural forces by definition puts
it outside the scope of science", according to Eugenie Scott, head of
the US National Centre for Science Education. (New Scientist, 9 July)
Evolution is one of the central tenets of modern science and forms the
bedrock of all biological sciences. But if it was accepted that the
‘unexplainable’ in nature is due to an almighty ‘designer’, biological
research would be threatened.
Anti-evolution ideas have returned with force due,
in part, to the political and ideological aims of the Bush
administration and the powerful US Christian fundamentalists.
The attack on science is part of a broader
right-wing agenda that includes the destruction of the welfare system,
increased workplace exploitation, and making the super-rich even richer.
Growing poverty, social inequality and rising living costs show the
dead-end of US capitalism.
The Bush administration wades in on questions like
evolution, opposes stem cell research (which has the potential to end
diseases and disabilities, like diabetes and motor neurone disease) and
supported the Catholic hierarchy-backed campaign to keep Terri Schiavo,
a tragic brain-dead patient, artificially alive. Bush regards
conservative, Christian evangelical sections of society as a social base
from which to make neo-liberal attacks against the working class and to
pursue his imperialist policies.
Creationism is also resurgent in other parts of the
world. In July, Christopher Schonborn, the cardinal archbishop of
Vienna, rejected the "supposed acceptance" of the Roman Catholic Church
of "neo-Darwinian dogma". In Britain, millionaire car dealer and
Christian fundamentalist, Peter Vardy, financed Emmanuel College, in
Gateshead, in 1990, forcing the school to teach both evolution and
creationism in science classes. Vardy has since funded new ‘academy
schools’ in Middlesbrough and Doncaster. Last year, Serbia briefly
banned teaching evolution in schools and only creationism is now taught
in schools in Turkey. Evolution is no longer taught in universities in
Pakistan.
Fundamentalist Christianity is growing in Africa and
Latin and North America. Two-thirds of Americans think humans were
directly created by God, as opposed to 22% who think people "evolved
from an earlier species". Half do not think apes and humans had a common
ancestry. Concerning science education, 64% of people questioned in a
recent US poll said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism,
as well as evolution, in schools; 38% said they favoured replacing
evolution with creationism.
‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the
heart of a heartless world’, said Karl Marx. This is even the case in
today’s sole superpower. The pro-big business Republicans cynically
manipulate the big swathes of the US that have turned to evangelical
Christianity following decades of poverty, job losses,
de-industrialisation and union defeats, and after repeated ‘betrayals’
by the Democrats, who are equally pro-big business. "Creationists depict
evolutionists as a cultural elite, out of touch with American society",
says Kenneth Miller of Brown University, Rhode Island.
But it is working people in the US ‘bible belt’ that
suffer the most from the alliance of the Christian right and Bush. In
the Journal of Religion and Society, a researcher, Gregory Paul, showed
that in the US, "the strongly theistic, anti-evolution South and Midwest
[have] markedly worse homicide, mortality, STD, youth pregnancy, marital
and related problems than the Northeast where… secularization, and
acceptance of evolution approach European norms". (Quoted by George
Monbiot, The Guardian, 11 October)
Working people in the US need a party of their own,
a mass socialist party that will oppose Bush, the bosses and the
reactionary, right-wing ideas and prejudices that divide and weaken the
working class. A mass workers’ party would stand on the side of human
solidarity and progress, as part of the struggle for a new socialist
society.
Niall Mulholland
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