Today marks the tenth anniversary of the judge's decision in the 'infamous' Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, but creationists in the U.S. continue to promote legislation to support the teaching of half-baked folk science as an alternative to evolution in the public schools.
This past week in Science, Nicholas J. Matzke, who was a public information project director for the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) and a key consultant for the legal team which supported the plaintiffs in the trial, published an unusual diagram representing the 'common ancestry' of creationist legislative attacks on evolution since Dover.
Matzke, who got his PhD in Integrative Biology from UC Berkley, is now pursuing research at the Australian National University, but he keeps an eye on the creationism debates in his home country.
Statue of the young Charles Darwin in the gardens of Christ College, Cambridge University. (photo... [+]
Over the years since the trial, he told Scientific American's Steve Mirsky, Matzke kept in touch with NCSE staff and they periodically discussed how anti-evolution bills introduced in different states looked like they were just being copied and modified. It would be useful (and amusing) to do a phylogeny of them all.
Once the number of bills reached about 60, he said, "I took all those bills, lined up all those texts, coded all the characteristics, all the variations between these texts, and then ran them through the standard phylogenetic analyses that we use for DNA. We use them for dinosaurs, they get used to study virus evolution. Those same programs can be used on texts that have been copied and modified.”
The results were illuminating, as Matzke wrote in his Science article.
The creationist antievolution movement has reinvented itself not once but twice in the decade since Kitzmiller. The first guise was “academic freedom” (AFA), but after the success of the Louisiana SEA (science education act), AFA proposals were almost completely replaced with SEAs. The inclusion of global warming in the SEAs indicates that societal debate over evolution education has the potential to leak into other societal debates where high-quality science education is inconvenient to certain established interests. The passage of SEAs in Louisiana and Tennessee have spread language devised in Ouachita Parish, population ~150,000, to negatively affect science education in two states with ~11.2 million people. Additional policies on the books in other states indicate that science educators have substantial work to do to ensure that science classes teach the best science available, rather than false critiques and controversies promoted by creationists. Advocates for science education should not be dissuaded by the strategic vagueness of SEAs: The creationist origins of modern antievolution strategies are clear, and at least 63 of 65 antievolution bills considered here can be tied directly to creationism through statements in the legislation or by sponsors.
Predictably, as Matzke wrote a few days ago at Panda's Thumb, some of the country's leading creationists are not happy with him.
The NCSE has marked the anniversary with a number of events and articles about the trial. This includes a review by Brown University's Kenneth Miller, a co-author of the high school textbook at the heart of the case, and the key witness for the plaintiffs.
The intelligent design movement started back in the early '90s with a lot of fanfare and high hopes. The leading organization, the Discovery Institute in Seattle, found some influential allies at first (William F. Buckley perhaps being the most notable), but as the years went by and no research ever emerged from their self-funded 'labs', the movement has shrunk to nothing more than a public relations firm for the promotion of creationist books.
The folks at the Discovery Institute occasionally complain about being called creationists, but it's hard to see why given the number of young-earth creationists listed as their supporters and the simple fact that not one of their scholars is willing to even endorse common ancestry. Apparently there is a huge difference between those who believe God created the world in six days --and those who believe He tinkered here and there, taking His good old time about it.
But at all costs they will not endorse the methodology of modern science, and that's the main reason scientists do not take them seriously.
Two excellent accounts of the trial are Lauri Lebo's The Devil in Dover and Monkey Girl by Edward Humes.
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