Monkey Business

At first, Darwin was laughed at, by clergy and scientists alike. Some people, however, thought that Darwin's ideas showed promise. His theory was put to the test. Fossil records were examined. Geography and population distribution were both examined. Even the age of the Earth itself was called into question.

The result of the testing was this: by the 1920s, the theory of evolution was accepted by most scientists as fact.

Enter Scopes. In 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, a teacher by the name of John Scopes was convicted of violating the Butler Act, and was fined one hundred dollars. The Supreme Court later overturned the verdict on a technicality.

The Butler Act was a law stating that

...it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normal and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole in or in part by the public school funds of the State to teach any theory which denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has decended from a lower order of animals.
(Eldridge, p.14)

In 1968, due to the efforts of a high school teacher from Little Rock, laws all over the United States that were similar to the Butler Act were repealed and called unconstitutional.

After the laws were repealed, there was a steady upsurge of science education in America. Evolution was taught with a vengance.

Enter the Scientific Creationists. Now, Creationism, as a belief, has been around for several thousand years. It is a very powerful belief, and demands absolute faith and loyalty from those who follow its doctrine. Scientific Creationism, is another kettle of fish entirely. Scientific Creationism is as much a political movement as it is a religious one. The main goal of Scientific Creationists is to see religion taught in public schools, and barring that, they want an end to the teaching of evolution. Starting in the mid to late 70s, the Scientific Creationsists began to organize themselves, creating groups such as the Moral Majority. Scientists were ill-prepared for the sophistication of these groups. Skilled debaters were hired to travel the country and stage "debates" with scientists at universities.

The debaters are typically people who have been educated in almost all aspects of science. Astronamy, physics, biology, geology, anthropology, and many other areas of science are well represented by the debaters. Since scientists are typically speacialized, they are unable to resond to the barrage of questions outside of their field. For them, the so-called "debates" are little more than a forum for public embarrassment.

In order to understand the debate a little better, it is necessary to understand the theories presented by bot the scientists and the creationists.

First, the scientists. To begin with, it should be stated that science "accepts nothing on faith, and acknowledges that it can never claim to know the ultimate truth." (Eldridge, p.18) Science requires observation to function properly, and therefore all scientific theories must be testable in order to even be considered. Creationism, while being an acceptable personal belief, can never be accepted scientifically, because it is not testable. Until some quantifiable method of communicating with the Creator is found, the notion of a Creator cannot be accepted by science. If it were ever accepted, then it would not be science.

Now, it would be purdent to examin the theory of evolution itself. Despite popular belief, the theory of evolution does not say the Bible is wrong. It does not say that God or a Creator does not exist. It does not say that religion is wrong. What it does say, is that all living things are fundamentally connected by the basic elements of life. What it does say, is that even if life was created by some kind of god, it was not created in the state in which it currently exists.

The basic, bare-bones idea around evolution is, simply, that the characteristics of organisms changed over a period of time because of necessity. The original theory involved Mendalian genetics (sort of) to the point where it stated that all of the varieties within a species already exist, they just need the proper conditions to bring them out. This is known as microevolution.

A common example of microevolution is the English peppered moth. Originally, the moths were generally white, and were camouflaged from the eyes of hungry birds, as the trees on which they lived were covered with white moss. Then came the industrial revolution. The moss was killed, and the trees became black with soot. The moths, of course, were now easy targets for the birds. The black moths, which were a minor variation in the moths previously, became dominant, and now the white moths are almost non-existant.

Another form of evolution is called macroevolution, and this is what the Scientific Creationists really have a problem with. this is the creation of a new species. This occurs,usually, when some members of a given species become separated from the whole. Due to geographic circumstances, and the reduction of the gene pool, over time certain new traits gradually become dominant, until the new group no longer resembles the old, and can in fact no longer mate with the old group. This is now when we can call the new group a species of its own.

Evolution is also thought to effect our thought patterns. For example, the human reaction to blood and the colour red. Carl Sagan, a noted scientist, had this to say:

We have over the years associated our own bleeding with pain, injury, and a violation of bodily integrity; and we experience sympathetic vicarious agony in seeing someone else bleed. We recognize their pain. This is almost certainly the reason the colour red is used to signify danger or stop (or down, as in elevator direction lights. Our arboreal ancestors had to be very careful about down.) in many diverse human societies.
(Sagan, p.191)

Now, we should examine the Scientific Creationists and their arguments. To begin with, it should be stated that the theories presented by Scientific Creationsists are far from science as we know it. Many of their theories are untestable, and in fact rely on that one simple fact. Their theories have never been published by a publisher that does not have some interest in their cause, or is in some other way associated with them. In fact, the researchers employed by the Creation Research Society (an organization founded to "prove" the theories of Scientific Creationists) are required to take an oath before joining the society. Bear in mind that all of these employees have some sort of scientific or technological degree. The oath is as follows:

The Bible is the written word of God, and because we believe it to be inspired thruout [sic], all of its assertations are historically and scientifically true in all of the original autographs. To the student of nature, this means that the account of the origins in Genesis is a factual presentation of historical truth.
(Eldridge, p.82)

Scientific Creationists have formulated many theories to explain away the evidence in favour of evolution, and probably one of the most outrageous of these is the theory they use to explain away the fossil record. The Scientific Creationists propose that the reason for the fossil record is Noah's Biblical flood. They propose that when the flood occurred, the smaller, rounder creatures (bacterium and so forth) sunk to the bottom first, while animals which were larger and more mobile were able to at least make an attempt to reach high ground and therefore occur higher in the fossil record. According to the Scientific Creationists, the tens of thousands of feet of rock that surround the fossils was put there as sediment from the flood. since the flood was (so far, anyway) a one time deal, there is absolutely no way to test this theory. Again this cannot, by definition, be science.

There was one forum created to deal with this ongoing discussion between science and creationism, and it is called "Creation/Evolution", and it is a newsletter published to give the scientists a place to retaliate from the so-called public debates.

Despite their overall power (for example the Moral Majority) the Scientific Creationists have made little headway in a society which is becoming more and more dependant on science.

The debate rages on, in the press, the media, and on university campuses. The creationists have thousands of years of belief and law behind them, while the scientists have a relatively new idea and the few hard facts available in nature. The debate will probably never end, as humanity has no way to quantifiably say which argument is correct.

In the meantime, people can take comfort in the fact that the two viewpoints can be reconsiled, in what is commonly know as theistic evolution. Theistic evolution works something like this: there is an old saying, that if you were to walk through the desert, and find a watch, then you would have to assume that there is, somewhere, a watchmaker. Creationism deals with the existence of the watchmaker. Evolution deals with what happens when someone winds the watch.