The Washington Post has an opinion editorial by Paul Hanle, the president of the Biotechnology Institute in Washington.
I recently addressed a group of French engineering graduate students who were visiting Washington from the prestigious School of Mines in Paris. After encouraging them to teach biotechnology in French high schools, I expected the standard queries on teaching methods or training. Instead, a bright young student asked bluntly: "How can you teach biotechnology in this country when you don't even accept evolution?"
I wanted to disagree, but the kid had a point. Proponents of "intelligent design" in the United States are waging a war against teaching science as scientists understand it. Over the past year alone, efforts to incorporate creationist language or undermine evolution in science classrooms at public schools have emerged in at least 15 states, according to the National Center for Science Education. And an independent education foundation has concluded that science-teaching standards in 10 states fail to address evolution in a scientifically sound way. Through changes in standards and curriculum, these efforts urge students to doubt evolution -- the cornerstone principle of biology, one on which there is no serious scientific debate.
The irony here is that until the late 1950s, it was France, not the US, that opposed evolution, or rather they opposed the Darwinian version of it in favour of the more providentialist version of Lamarck, a native son. At that time, it was the United States that was the world's scientific powerhouse. Scared by the Sputnik disaster, in which their arch enemies the Soviets beat them to the punch, America started a major science drive to get kids interested in science and follow on to professional careers in it. Now, a large fraction of America's active scientists seem to be of foreign extraction, and that fraction is increasing by the year. And now France, as part of the renascent European Union, seems to be catching up on, if not surpassing, the American example.
Why does it matter? Can't Americans continue to buy in foreign scholars and researchers? Well, for now, maybe. But countries like Japan, India, China, Korea, and even Vietnam are doing what the US did in the 1960s, and it looks like soon they will find it worth their while to stay home, or go to each other's nations or Europe, in order to do their work, and moreover, the climate at home in the US will become increasingly more anti-science. Since a large amount of scientific funding comes from the US, this means less science will be done, and fewer innovations will originate there.
As an Australian, I am in two minds about this. On the one hand, the massive investment in science the US will start to wither, and we, the world, will lose that resource. Smaller countries like my own will find it harder and harder to get NIH and NSF grants. If America loses its edge, the world will suffer. On the other hand, this may indicate a shift in scientific focus from the English-speaking world to, say, Asian or South American and European countries, and that diversity can be very good for science.
Science is attacked in the English west by anti-vaccinationers, anti-global warming interests, religious groups, animal liberationists, anti-medical and anti-genetic advocates, and so on. Politicians, especially but not limited to the current US Administration and Congress, use only the science that fits their preconceptions and prejudices. Reform of medical care becomes harder when you have people who really think that medicine has to have magic bullets, and conservation of our environment becomes harder when the science is rejected in favour of intuitions or "common sense". It was common sense, remember, which told us that diseases were caused by imbalances in the humours. I have even met people, with doctorates in the humanities no less, who doubt that germs cause diseases.
Hanle says
This is not a war of religion against science. The two have thrived together for centuries. Nor is it a struggle of believers against godless materialists; many believers practice science and find inspiration for it from their faith. It is a battle between religious dogma cloaked as science and open inquiry that leads to new knowledge and understanding of the natural world.
Religious dogma is only a symptom of the problem, in my opinion. What we are seeing is a retreat from the modern in favour of the comfortable old platitudes of "common sense". As the US shifts back into these old ways of thinking, so too will go freedom of thought, equality before the law and all the other things that religion had to be tackled over at such great cost, freedoms that made America the shining beacon to the rest of the world. Religion and science have an uneasy coexistence - while they seemed for a while to have found an accommodation, there was always a shuffling for position, elbows out, between them, like siblings at the family Christmas dinner. Now we see the pope reintroducing the old saws about how reason needs to be restrained by faith, and how secular society should be informed by (his!) religion. All such attempts by whoever is the same thing, with only the preferred religion changed in each case.
Science doesn't work if it is controlled, because unlike those who have a priori goals and dogmas, science doesn't know where it is headed. It cannot be managed by priest or bureaucrats; it can only be allowed to explore unknown territory as best it can. But to deny that the territory even exists is stupidity of the highest order. And since to be a scientist, you need to have decades of education that actually teaches you, as opposed to being taught to pass the tests of bureaucratic curricula, as education gets watered down more and more, so too does the base from which science draws. The know nothings may applaud this. We should not.
I may have to start learning French. Or Cantonese. Or Portugese...
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I think we need to be careful not to accept uncritically the received opinions that sweep through op-eds and blogs in the US (which hopefully is easier for those of us who live on the other side of the world).
For instance on the question of biology, it is by no means clear that US public antipathy to evolution is any worse now than at any earlier period. To the Gallup question "God created mankind pretty much in his present form over the last 10,000 years" in 1982 45% of respondents agreed, in 1997 it was 44% and in 2001 45%. And I'd be willing to wager that this is at least no worse than if the question had been asked in the 1950s or 1930s, or if it were asked tomorrow. Similarly for scientific literacy in general.
The US has always been culturally and intellectually deeply polarised, with an astounding proportion of the population mired in parochial stupidities and ignorance but coexisting with an intellectual "class" of superlative achievement.
And I agree that "religious dogma is only a symptom of the problem" (though another more worrying symptom is the increased political power of the religious dogmatists). So what is "the problem", and has something in fact changed recently to actually increase the threat to science (and one might add Enlightenment values in general) from, say, the Eisenhower (and McCarthy) years?
Here I think the observation about the dynamism coming from Asia is highly relevant, since I would argue that the US has begun what is likely to be a protacted and painful process of relative economic decline within the world economy. The stresses - political and ideological - that this is placing on an already deeply polarised populace are clearly visible - the lunatic "war on terror" and its oil subplot being just the most obvious example, with now the self-declared beacon of freedom and democracy agreeing to the abolition of habeas corpus and the right to torture whomever the Executive deems to be its enemy.
These stresses are, in turn, mutating "we support science because it produces world-beating technology" into "we only support science when it produces technological benefits". This change is of course fatal for the practice of science but is perfectly consistent with a rejection of modernity that still wants the benefits of the modern world, an apparently paradoxical position that is equally characteristic of Al Queda and the US right-wing.
Anti-Americanism is not a helpful response in the face of these developments, but neither is keeping silent about the huge gap between the American self-image (shared by many scientists) and the deeply flawed society that has produced such delusions.
"To the Gallup question "God created mankind pretty much in his present form over the last 10,000 years" in 1982 45% of respondents agreed, in 1997 it was 44% and in 2001 45%. And I'd be willing to wager that this is at least no worse than if the question had been asked in the 1950s or 1930s, or if it were asked tomorrow. Similarly for scientific literacy in general."
The only problem I have with this statement is the fact that, while the percentage of people who disavow evolution has remained steady, the amount of evidence for it has grown at monumental pace. With the amount of growth one would hope to see some sort of change in peoples views.
I suspect that many people don't realize that the anti-evolution forces have been winning for the last 80 years. Although they have been prevented in some cases from teaching frank creationism; they have been remarkably successful in keeping evolutionary biology out of American high schools, which is why even people with advanced degrees are remarkably ignorant of the most basic features of Darwinian theory. The situation is similar in respect to religious indoctrination. Despite a great many legal decisions to the contrary, American public schools relentlessly promote Christianity. De facto trumps de jure.
It's my opinion that accepting the factuality of evolution is something that requires either solid study or acceptance of educational authorities; and having challenges to the latter made by noneducational "authorities" all the time means that there will be no general increase in that acceptance. The US has had this since the 1920s, as Jim notes, in part because evolution was tied into regressive political doctrines like eugenics that were (rightly) opposed in the US by Christians like William Jennings Bryan. But the continuation of opposition was based on doctrinal assertions, and so the general populace has not been exposed to the real evidence for many years.
In countries (like Australia) where until recently religious groups have had little influence on education (which has been overseen by professional bodies rather than elected popular officials), many fewer people reject evolution. Even so, it remains at around 25%.
Hanle is wrong that "This is not a war of religion against science." Of course, it's a conflict between religion and science. The Roman Catholic church and the mainline Protestant churches have thrived together with science for centuries but the fundamentalist evangelical protestants have not. Fundamentalist evangelicals have taken a powerful place in the Republican Party. They are imposing their religious beliefs on government policy decisions on the national, state and local levels.
The U.S. is not an anti-science country. It is a country which is now controlled by leadership that is anti-science. That leadership is following the precepts of an atavistic religious movement - right-wing, authoritarian, fundamentalist, evangelical protestantism. "The Rapture" is a religious heresy believed by many of the anti-science forces. There is no need for science if the world is coming to an end. That is what we are up against.
Just a footnote to my original comment: the abysmal level of biological evolution in the U.S. has not only resulted in people who reject Darwin without knowing what they're rejecting, but also in people who accept Darwin without knowing what they're accepting.
While my original post may have been accidentally right, I had meant to write about the abysmal level of biological education in the U.S.
Well here's something that may be VERY relevant to the situation in Australia which I stumbled across this afternoon while investigating other matters: of 9619 Australian males aged 16-60 who answered when asked their religion (as part of the 2002 Australian Study of Health and Relationships survey) 4577 or 47.6% said "none". The paper in question (Richters J, Smith AMA, de Visser RO, et al. Circumcision in Australia: prevalence and effects on sexual health. Int J STD AIDS 2006;17:547?54) is available at
http://www.cirp.org/library/general/richters1/
This is astonishingly high percentage of non-believers, even given that men are somewhat less religious than women. I am also inclined to think it is less contaminated by respondent calculation (than say the Census) as well, since the survey was actually about sex, so the demographic questions would probably not have been given much thought.