Too proud to come from apes

Many people I talk to find it hard to believe that the American society in general is a very religious and conservative society too, in many ways like the Indian societies. They simply cannot comprehend this possibility when they are used to imagine America as the land of blonde women, lots of money and yes, gratuitous sex. I can’t debate with them at length, or spend considerable time trying to convince them, but I try to present to them a few examples, such as it not being cool to make out in public, and even if kids smoke weed, they are not as open and brash about it as many college kids I see in India.

Before I descend into my one of my favorite hobbies of deriding the sad state of the youth in India today, let me quickly get to the point of my post. Since I joined Drexel way back in 2001 till today, I can clearly feel a marked rise in the Christian orthodoxy in the United States, maybe perhaps because President Bush came to power (among other means ;-) ) riding on the support of the great red mid-west. I think the hallmark of this rise in religious fundamentalism and even chauvinism, if I may call it, is the subject of evolution.

Many God-fearing, religious Christians in the United States believe that evolution is a hoax, and man is a result of intelligent design. It becomes an issue when people ask for their children’s schools to stop teaching the concept of evolution but teach their children the concept of intelligent design.

First, what is intelligent design? According to many, implying man evolved from chimps is demeaning, and an insult to their human intelligence. How can a human being be comparable to an unintelligent animal? They believe in the truth of the Bible instead, saying that man has not evolved, but is a product of a higher being, obviously referring to God as envisaged in the Bible.

It first began in the American mid-west, as I said earlier, where parents of a school district asked that the school teach Intelligent Design as a theory side by side with the theory of evolution. The Kansas Evolution hearings took place in 2005, when a religious institute posing as a non-profit think tank called “The Discovery Institute” led the Kansas State Board of Education to initiate hearing into teaching intelligent design in their schools. This “institute” calls evolution – Darwinism in a clear attempt to lessen the universalism of evolution and reduce it to the product of one man’s work (or fantasy, as I am sure they believe).

The Board, which was controlled by the Christian right, proposed among several things that evolution be called a theory and not a fact in the school books, say that science is not limited to natural explanations (clearly pointing to their belief that everything in the Bible happened in real) and introduce intelligent design as an alternate theory to evolution. Fortunately, the far right could not succeed in introducing their unintelligent designs in Kansas schools.

Another controversy took place in PA in 2005 when parents of children in the Dover Area School District sued the school district that required its schools to present intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. Fortunately, the fundamentalists lost that case well.

A major part of these fundamentalist scientific posers’ campaign to promote their cause is to discredit evolution. They say it is unproved, or questionable, and that it went against God! Despite all the ID proponents’ desire to mask it with science or philosophy, in the end it comes down to its strong religious connotation – that God created man. The net is full of this story, and this whole situation still evokes strong emotions in my mind. At Drexel, the ridiculousness of this whole “intelligent design” propaganda rattled not just me, but all of my friends. We would laugh our guts out at whoever said that Satan planted dinosaur fossils on Earth to deceive the humans.

Of course since then I think, or at least used to think that, the “theory” of intelligent design has mostly been discredited as a wet dream of the American Christian far right, but this news in The New York Times got me thinking about the subject again. It seems maybe intelligent design is not so dead after all, or perhaps America is getting more and more fundamentalist?

On Evolution, Biology Teachers Stray From Lesson Plan

Researchers found that only 28 percent of biology teachers consistently follow the recommendations of the National Research Council to describe straightforwardly the evidence for evolution and explain the ways in which it is a unifying theme in all of biology. At the other extreme, 13 percent explicitly advocate creationism, and spend at least an hour of class time presenting it in a positive light.

That leaves what the authors call “the cautious 60 percent,” who avoid controversy by endorsing neither evolution nor its unscientific alternatives. In various ways, they compromise.

The survey, published in the Jan. 28 issue of Science, found that some avoid intellectual commitment by explaining that they teach evolution only because state examinations require it, and that students do not need to “believe” in it. Others treat evolution as if it applied only on a molecular level, avoiding any discussion of the evolution of species. And a large number claim that students are free to choose evolution or creationism based on their own beliefs.

Eric Plutzer, a co-author of the paper, said that the most enthusiastic proponents of creationism were geographically widely spread across the country.

It’s actually a very scary thought to imagine these schools teaching children not about evolution but about how God created humankind. Perhaps they will bring an “Introduction to the Bible” at kindergarten level next. That compromise by the biology teachers is sad, implying they are either fundamentalist themselves, or scared of the rabid far right parents who they do not want to cross hairs with. Sad, considering President Obama’s talking about his country’s next sputnik moment. God will help them no doubt to take on the Godless non-WASPs.