This must be Kansas, Dorothy!
2006; Wiley; Volume: 4; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1890/1540-9295(2006)004[0108
ISSN1540-9309
Autores Tópico(s)Evolution and Science Education
ResumoAt the risk of offending practically everyone: Where is John Scopes when we really need him? A raw nerve was touched in Kansas last year, when the Thomas B Fordham Institute (Washington, DC) gave the state a failing grade in science education because of the State School Board's requirement that the definition of “science” include creationist maxims. Just how raw the times are is evidenced by a Kansas politician who stated in December that “evolutionists are saying that Jesus was half-chimpanzee, so were Mohammed and Buddha”. While we lawyers are proud of our simian heritage, the controversy continues. The legal issue over teaching evolution versus creationism, or some middle ground, came to a head in October 2005, when the Dover (PA) Area School District adopted intelligent design (ID) as a teaching option. Dover's policy required students to hear a statement about ID before ninth-grade biology lessons on evolution. The statement said that Charles Darwin's theory is “not a fact”, has inexplicable “gaps”, and refers students to a textbook, Of Pandas and People, for more information about the concept. This issue has been around for a while. Many scientists and other critics contend that creationists have simply repackaged old ideas in scientific-sounding language to get around the 1987 US Supreme Court decision of Edwards v Arkansas, which struck down a state law that required the teaching of the biblical story of creation. Of course, both sides claim exclusive competence to decide the issue, but now a Federal court has taken another stab at it. Central to this battle is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which reads in part: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”. The plaintiffs argue that injection of ID into curricula violates this clause; the defendants argue that ID should simply be presented as an option. Parents brought suit, Kitzmiller v Dover, in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania against the School Board to have ID removed from the District's curriculum. The plaintiffs argued that the policy essentially promotes the biblical view of creation, and therefore violates the constitutional separation of church and state enunciated in Edwards. Commentators are all over the map, arguing everything from ID as “speculative philosophy” to “creationism in pretty paper”. Voters in the Dover area were pointed in their criticism: eight of the nine Dover school board members who voted to allow ID to be taught as an alterative to evolution were removed from the Board in November elections. On December 20, 2005, after 6 weeks of what some termed “the New Monkey Trial”, Federal Judge John E Jones III ruled in a detailed 139-page opinion that the Board's decision was not only a “breathtaking inanity”, but also unlawful. Meanwhile, Kansas is at it again. In 1999, the State Board of Education eliminated most curriculum references to evolution. Two years later, after voters replaced three Board members, the Board reverted to evolution-friendly standards. Elections in 2002 and 2004, however, changed the Board's composition again, making it more conservative and creationist, and now the Board has decided that schools should redefine the very word “science”. Notably, this dictum requires that science cannot be limited to a search for “natural explanations for phenomena”. While decisions on what exactly is taught in the schoolroom rests with some 300 local school boards, the State will presumably measure their performance against creationist standards. In Minnesota, in late 2005, a local school board, perhaps in view of the Pennsylvania and Kansas debacles, voted 4–2 against including ID in their science curriculum. In Georgia, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals recently heard appeals from a lower court ruling requiring ID stickers to be removed from Cobb County science books. The stickers, which promote ID at the expense of evolution, were placed on about 35 000 books in 2002. This appeal comes after Georgia's state schools superintendent last year proposed a statewide science curriculum that dropped the word “evolution” in favor of “changes over time”. However, the plan itself was dropped because of protests by outraged teachers. One Texas clergyman seems to have found a middle ground: “The proper concern of religion is not declarations of truth, but the search for meaning”. Nevertheless, the Utah Senate has passed an anti-Darwinian measure this January and Oklahoma, Alabama, and Mississippi are all considering bills authorizing ID instruction to offset the teaching of evolution. Meanwhile, creationists have attacked the Dover opinion as continuing evidence of the “secularist reign of terror”. While there are those that say that the law evidences little in the way of intelligence in its design, litigation is sure to evolve – and appellate courts will be hearing a lot of passion from both sides. Douglass F Rohrman Lord, Bissell & Brook LLP, Chicago
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