Calling a Spade a Spade

Since Dr. Spade's thoughts might be dismissed by anyone who does not believe in evolution, he has turned to an appropriately trustworthy source:

Why is the government promoting a religious view, and one that many religions don't believe?

Conservatives say education should be left to "local control" (meaning without federal funding), except when they want to interfere.

The No Child Left Behind Act claims to insert "accountability" for schools. Of course, the White House isn't accountable: the latest, most comprehensive review of NCLBA (one commissioned by the White House itself) is deep with criticism.

Teachers are already accountable for a huge range of issues; education policy makers are not. If an individual school fails to improve, it faces several kinds of punishment. If education in America fails to improve, guess what happens to the Secretary of Education, and the President? Nothing at all, of course.

Just as deep down, every dieter knows there are, really, only two ways to lose weight -- eat better and exercise more -- our schools need better funding and support.

No tempting, lazy fixes (grapefruit shakes! vouchers! charters!) will change that.

American schools need adequate funding for small classes and adequate support for non-academic issues.

To teach well, they don't need more tests or more punishments: they need more time to be teachers.

There are two lies told in the current debate over the teaching of evolution. The first is that evolution is a "controversial" theory in science and the second is that there are reasonable competing theories.

Evolution isn't controversial in science, even though President Bush says "Both sides ought to be properly taught," or that Senator Rick Santorum inserted the No Child Left Behind Act the passage,

"Where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy."

Evolutionary theory is tremendously well accepted, with an enormous range of supporting evidence over a wide range of fields.

Conservatives try to poke chinks in its armor partly through the use of the word "theory," which makes Evolution sound like guesswork. But in science, something is called a Theory only once it has tremendous evidence behind it.

Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, for example, is so amazingly good that it shows true in the most demanding of tests, including our latest probe mission to Saturn. Radio waves from the spacecraft Cassini bend around the Sun just as Einstein predicted... just as they did in the first Viking mission to Mars.

Too far out? General relativity also helps calculate the precise positions used in GPS readings, thousands of times every day. It works. And it's a "Theory," because in science, "Theory" is a title used with great respect.

While Dr. Spade is sure you can find a few scientists who doubt evolution, he is also sure there are historians who believe J.F.K. is still alive.

The "controversy" of a theory is measured not by those at the fringe who challenge it, but by what portion of people in a given field take a different view. The vast majority of scientists believe firmly in Evolution.

Some pulpits. The Catholic church accepts evolution as compatible with religion (as does Dr. Spade). Many, many protestants believe in both God and evolution. Only a very narrow interpretation of the Bible causes any conflict.

The Bible cannot be read literally in all things, since it omits certain information and contradicts others. For example, when Cain is cast out from his family, he goes to join another tribe of people. Where did they come from? If Adam and Eve were the first humans with only their offspring, Cain cannot find other humans... yet he does. One way or another, God provided people for Cain to join. There's no trouble with that, unless you insist that Adam, Eve, and their sons were literally the only humans on earth.

Whether or not God created humans fully formed or from earlier life is a religious debate, and an interesting one. But it isn't science.

Senator Bill Frist and other Republicans are taking a religious point of view, and a narrow one at that. They're now trying to push it into the biology classroom. Americans of all sorts -- evangelicals to atheists -- should be just as wary of having the government promote a particular reading of the Bible, in any sort of classroom.

is the most popular of the "theories" competing with evolution. By "theory," of course, Dr. Spade does not here mean "Theory" as in a "highly tested, extensively supported tenet of science"; he means it with a small "t": "a guess about how things might be." Conservatives apply the term in reverse, dismissing evolution as just a "theory," but then use the word in an important, scholarly sense when discussing "the theory of intelligent design."

Intelligent design claims that some things in life are too complicated to be explained by evolution: "Look at the eye! It's amazingly complex. Can you imagine such a thing arising from random events? I can't! So God must have done it."

Some salamanders, for instance, have been shown to lose their sight once placed underground for generations, and intelligent design advocates accept that.

Some intelligent design theorists even accept the notion of a common ancestor for all life on Earth.

Intelligent design theorists accept that Earth is several billion years old, as do most cosmologists.

Of course, evolutionary biologists help support such findings, since their conclusions from fossil records match deductions made by cosmologists. Intelligent design does not help here, since it is not...

For instance, intelligent design claims that proteins used in blood clotting could never have evolved. Twenty of them must work in tandem for any effect, and that number seems to high to have mutated together.

If you believe that argument, you stop there, without any further understanding of the world.

Evolution, by contrast, allows biologists to deduce that primitive organisms, such as fish, would likely be missing certain blood-clotting proteins. Recent advances in gene technology have completed the first genome sequencing of certain fish... and they show that to be true.

DNA was discovered through evolutionary theory. So was the sequencing of the human genome, recently completed.

And by studying the skeletons of whales, biologists were able to deduce that they evolved from earlier water-dwelling mammals, with some anatomical features never before seen. In 1994, paleontologists discovered two such species, with those very features.

Intelligent design theorists love the eye. The eye is wild. It is complex and powerful. Surely, they say, such a thing could not have arisen at random. Like a mousetrap, it requires many separate elementals to work together for it to work at all.

Brilliantly explained in The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, this is perhaps easiest to follow from a PBS summary here, a step-by-step guide to the making of an eye, starting with light-sensitive cells.

If an eye were made by a clever designer, for instance, why would he ever carry signals from the eye to the brain by poking a hole in the retina? Those neural passageways block reception of light and give us a blind spot (it's even bigger in some animals, like horses).

Is it because it's impossible to design an eye otherwise? No. Octopi and squid have eyes similar to our own, but the neural link to their eyes goes from the exterior of the eye, creating no blind spot.

Intelligent design can't explain this in the least. Eyes were made the way they were, period.

Thankfully, evolution gives some help. Our retina evolved by modifying of the outer layer of the brain for light sensitivity. But mollusk eyes are wired optimally because rather than evolving from brain cells, which have wiring on the surface, they evolved from their skin cells with wiring below the surface. The different designs are consistent with the differing origins of each species... and that makes sense only if you believe their origins influenced their development.

The appendix? It has no use in modern humans, yet the risk of acute appendicitis is 7%, often leading to death. Intelligent design? No explanation. Evolution? It's vestigial... a leftover from a time when humans were an earlier sort of animal and digested cellulose from plants. Full explanation and nifty pictures here.

The Discovery Institute is the principal promoter of the theory, and it was founded by Bruce Chapman, a "contrarian... with a contrarian idea," according to historian Edward Larson. "It interested conservatives. It brought in money."

Lots of it. The Discovery Institute received $4 million in 2003, up from $1.4 million in 1997. Though $1 million of its recent funding comes from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which says the donation was "exclusive to the Cascadia project," on regional transportation) the majority of the rest is from foundations with explicitly religious missions.

The biggest donor over the years has been from the Ahmanson family, who helped found the Institute with a matching gift from the MacLellan Foundation, whose director says "We give for religious purposes. This is not about science."

Its 40 scientific fellows include Jonathan Wells, a member of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, who says "My prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism."

Former fellow Phillip Gold says, "It evolved from a policy institute that had a religious focus to an organization whose primary mission is Christian conservatism."

The Institute has opened a Washington, D.C., office and hired the same public relations firm that promoted the Republican "Contract with America" in 1994.

Through its efforts, the Institute has played a central role in revising Texas schoolbooks to reduce arguments for evolution, in pushing the Ohio Board of Education to "push the controversy," and as a consultant for numerous states considering changes to their curricula.

Dr. Spade has no problem with religious activity and respects faithful devotion.

But he doesn't like lies. Intelligent design is not science, and the people backing it are not a bunch of concerned scientists. Let's call a spade a spade.