Happy Birthday, Big D!
In honor of Charles Darwin’s birthday, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (with various groups from Case Western) sponsored a public lecture/discussion on Saturday titled “Defending Darwin: Why Creationists Persist in Attacking Evolution Education.” It looked interesting, and as Ohio is a hot area for intelligent design stupidity, the girlfriend and I decided to check it out.
Oops.
As far as we could tell, Brian Alters, the “distinguished expert in science education” from McGill University and Harvard had no real point. His talk consisted of a few statistics showing that about 50% of the U.S. and Canada are at best confused and at worst ignorant about evolution, a few pictures of himself at creationist museums, and a few quotes from Stephen Jay Gould. His main idea, best as I could tell, was that belief in a creator and the theory of evolution are not mutually exclusive; if creationists just thought a little harder or listened to the many religious leaders that have no problem with evolution, they’d stop trying to attack it.
I’m not sure I agree with Mr. Alters. It seems like the goal is not so much to stop the teaching of evolution, but to include the teaching of Intelligent Design (or some variation of it), regardless of the fact that Intelligent Design is, by its very nature, unfalsifiable and therefore completely unfit for inclusion in a science class. Evolution is only a target because it’s a barrier to the introduction of religion into public school curricula. Of course, Mr. Alters’s proposal to teach comparative religion alongside traditional high school classes is interesting, but similarly, I don’t think it’ll satisfy Intelligent Design proponents. They don’t want kids to learn about several different Gods that could have started the process of evolution; that would just turn the kids into militant Muslims, stingy Hollywood-loving Jews, or stupid Buddhists (sorry, I ran out of the really hateful religious stereotypes).
Regardless of the title of his lecture, Mr. Alters didn’t seem to have any ideas on how to actually “Defend Darwin” except to beg teachers to cover evolution in their classrooms. In my opinion, this is a better way to go about things. It’s not really a defense of evolution (it doesn’t need defending so much as people need to learn what science actually is) as much as it’s a takedown of a NY Times op-ed advocating Intelligent Design, but it’s well-done. PZ Myers at Pharyngula has been doing lot of this lately (here, here, and here, for example), as is EvolutionBlog. Also, Left2Right has a nice post here.