10/22/02

In one sense, the language regarding evolution proposed by the Ohio Board of Education standards committee represents a great triumph for science education in Ohio. For the first time in the 77 years following the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, the word "evolution" appears in the proposed Ohio Science Standards, meaning that Ohio students will finally be guaranteed the opportunity to learn about this pivotal facet of modern biology. For this, the board should be warmly praised.

Unfortunately, the proposed standards also introduce language that can provide a victory for those who wish to introduce religion into state science curricula in Ohio and elsewhere.

Part of this strategy is to avoid explicit mention of religion, but to focus on attacking the "materialism" associated with mainstream science in general, and evolution in particular. As part of this strategy Johnson helped create a religious think-tank, the Center for Science and Culture.

In the 1998 document, "The Wedge Strategy," two specific goals are listed: 1) "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies," and 2) "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."

Specific actions (including attacking science teaching in public schools) were proposed to begin by 2003. There are now regular weekly wedge updates on the Web, describing progress toward achieving these goals.

As if on schedule, in 2002 two representatives of the Center for Science and Culture, including its director, Stephen Meyer, appeared before the Ohio State School Board to debate (with me and Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller) evolution vs. intelligent design. During this debate Meyer did not mention God, or any wedge strategy. Rather he suggested an apparent compromise he called "teaching the controversy," that is, requiring teachers to discuss what he argued was a growing controversy among scientists over evolutionary theory.

The language inserted into the proposed standards suggests that evolutionary theory alone, unlike the other fundamental scientific ideas such as atomic theory or Newton's law of gravity, is the subject of critical controversy among scientists. The language seems innocuous enough, suggesting students know "how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary science" - language that could be usefully applied to any scientific theory. Following as it does tremendous lobbying by the Center for Science and Culture, and also by several key board members who have been vocal in their support for intelligent design, and focusing uniquely on evolution, it gives these groups precisely the wedge they want without being so obvious as to cause overt comparisons with Kansas, where evolution was briefly removed from the state science curriculum.

Moreover, there is a complete lack of evidence of any such controversy in the scientific literature. In a recent survey of more than 10 million articles in science journals over the past 12 years, the keywords "intelligent design" appear 88 times. All but 11 of these are in engineering articles (where one certainly hopes there is intelligent design) and of the remaining 11, eight are critical of the scientific basis of intelligent design. The remaining three articles are not in research journals. (For comparison, 115,000 use the keyword "evolution," and most of these refer to biological evolution.)

The National Academy of Sciences, and a recent survey of 500 scientists throughout the state, both argue strongly that evolution is universally accepted by the scientific community as being a successful and well-tested theory that forms the basis of modern biology, just as Newton's Laws provide the basis of modern physics.

Debra Owens-Fink, a board member who has been a vocal supporter of introducing intelligent design into the curriculum, argued that evolution should be singled out because of the strong public reaction to this issue. It is true that evolution pushes many popular buttons. However, it is the business of the science standards committee to help promote scientific literacy, based on sound scientific scholarship, and not to cave in to political, religious or other popular pressures.

If this recommendation stands in the final December board decision, the wedge strategy may succeed a year early. In the next state that reviews its science standards, intelligent design proponents will point to the Ohio standards for evidence that evolution is controversial. It is a short step to then request equal time for alternatives that challenge the traditional scientific method, such as intelligent design.

The full board should reinforce the intentions of the standards committee by either removing this language, or placing it elsewhere and removing the specific reference to evolution. Of course, if this "wedge" remains in the standards, there remains one more option open to citizens of Ohio who wish to ensure the best possible education for their children. This is the option followed in Kansas, where in the election following their board's decision to remove evolution from the science curriculum, the leaders of that effort were voted out of office.

Krauss, a physicist and author, is the chairman of the Physics Department at Case Western Reserve University.