In 1922, just after his second term as US president, Woodrow Wilson was asked for his thoughts on evolution. “Of course, like every other man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution,” he replied. “It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised.”
More than eight decades later, the state education superintendent for Georgia is now proposing that the word “evolution” be banned from school biology classes and textbooks to appease biblical fundamentalists.
During the past few weeks the correspondence columns of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution have carried many angry protests from scientists and secularists. The Republican governor of Georgia, Sonny Perdue, who was installed with the backing of the Christian coalition, felt obliged to stage a small tactical retreat by conceding that evolution could be called by its name — but only if teachers emphasised that it was no more than a theory.
“What concerns me,” he said, “is that many times you’ll have teachers in the classroom with impressionable students who go beyond that and teach it as proven fact . . . I think we need to have academic freedom, but we need academic balance as well.”
On one side is the idea that living beings evolved over many millions of years — yes, only a theory, but one that is supported by the fossil record and much other evidence. On the other we have the book of Genesis and the belief that the world began a few thousand years ago with Adam and Eve. For this to be true, all surviving dinosaur bones would have to be fakes. Yet the governor of Georgia thinks the two sides of the scale can and should be balanced.
How often we have heard this alluring but bogus justification for equating probable truth with palpable nonsense. During his presidential campaign of 2000, George W Bush often attacked the relativism that “liberals” had inflicted on America — the idea that nothing was right or wrong, true or false. Yet only a few months earlier, when Christian fanatics on the Kansas board of education voted to remove evolution from the state’s science curriculum, Bush paraded his own relativism by arguing that creationism should be taught alongside evolution since “the jury is still out” and “children ought to be exposed to different theories about how the world started”.
Even his Democratic rival Al Gore, who had acquired a reputation as the “Mr Science” of the Clinton administration, seemed reluctant to disturb this spurious equilibrium. On hearing the news from Kansas, candidate Gore said that although he personally favoured the teaching of evolution, “localities should be free to teach creationism as well”.
Gore thus maintained the ignoble tradition of politicians from Tennessee, the state that made itself the laughing stock of the civilised world in 1925 by prosecuting a young schoolteacher, John Scopes, for teaching Darwinian theory in biology class, thereby breaching the state’s new anti-evolution statute. Scopes was fined $100.
The great reporter HL Mencken, in one of his many lacerating dispatches from the Scopes trial, suggested that Tennessee hillbillies “are not more stupid than the city proletariat; they are only less informed”. Why, then, were even the most intelligent Tennesseans so reluctant to repudiate the antediluvian nonsense taught in local schools and endorsed by local nabobs? “Politics is what keeps them silent and makes their state ridiculous,” said Mencken. “Most of them seem to be candidates for office, and a candidate for office, if he would get the votes of fundamentalists, must bawl for Genesis before he begins to bawl for anything else.”
Fortunately, as history confirms time and again, America is not dependent on politicians to protect its intellectual standards and values. It may be infested with flat-earthers and TV evangelists, but it also has more Nobel prizewinners than anywhere else — and plenty of citizens who will strenuously defend the Enlightenment legacy of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
After the Kansas vote four years ago, The Washington Post struck a Menckenesque note by publishing this spoof memo from God to the Kansas board of education: “Thank you for your support. Much obliged. Now, go forth and multiply. Beget many children. And yea, your children shall beget children. And their children shall beget children, and their children’s children after them. And in time the genes that made you such pinheads will be eliminated through natural selection. Because that is how it works.”
It’s doubly easy for us to sneer at America’s pre-modern zealots. In Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, creationism has little appeal. Both the Anglican and Roman Catholic hierarchies have long since accepted Darwin’s theory: even Pope John Paul II has said that it is “more than just a hypothesis”.
Yet in March 2002 The Guardian revealed that Christian fundamentalists had taken control of a state-funded secondary school in northeast England and were striving to “show the superiority” of creationist beliefs in their classes. A senior member of staff advised colleagues that “a Christian teacher of biology will not or should not regard the theory of evolution as axiomatic, but will oppose it while teaching it alongside creation”.
Tony Blair is committed to building more “faith-based schools”, and the news from Gateshead strengthened the suspicion that some of them would proselytise rather than educate. True, the national curriculum says that evolutionary theory should be taught, but it also allows teachers to stress “the limitations of science . . . uncertainties in scientific knowledge and the ethical issues involved”. This gives creationists plenty of room for manoeuvre, especially if they use religious education classes (not covered by the national curriculum) as an antidote to the science syllabus. The scope for mischief is even greater in the new state-sponsored “academies”, which have more autonomy.
Two years ago the prime minister was asked in parliament if he was “happy to allow the teaching of creationism alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution in state schools”. A simple “no” was surely the only possible answer, especially as he was due to deliver a speech to the Royal Society a few days later in which he would extol “proper science” and warn against “a retreat into a culture of unreason”. But it was not the answer he gave.
Blair said that the creationists of Gateshead were doing a splendid job: “In the end, a more diverse school system will deliver better results for our children.”
Georgia’s anti-evolution proposal may seem of little relevance on this side of the Atlantic: so far as I can discover, it hasn’t been reported in our national press at all. Like many American fashions, however, it could be here sooner than we expect.
Francis Wheen’s new book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions, is published by Fourth Estate at £16.99
