You Say You Want An Evolution

On the same day that the Kansas state school board passed a requirement that Intelligent Design must be considered as an alternative to Darwinian evolution in science classes, voters in Dover, Pennsylvania unseated the local school board members who mandated mention of Intelligent Design in its ninth grade science classes. Score one for each side?

Maybe. Except that the fight goes on in Kansas, while in Dover it’s over. There’s a good reason why.

I happen to know a teacher at the Dover high school, the wife of a close friend. They both live in a nearby town, also in the rural middle of Pennsylvania (my home state.) Like rural Kansas, Dover is very conservative. There were no polls to depend on for this school board election, so my friends were worried. They saw lots of campaign signs for the pro-ID candidates, and heard that several local churches were supporting them. The area had just been through a widely publicized trial on the issue that took place almost precisely 80 years after the famous Scopes trial on the teaching of evolution in Dayton, Tennessee.

Coincidentally, as the Dover trial was underway, L.A. Theatre Works was beginning its extensive national tour of “The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial,” a staged version of the radio play adapted from the Tennessee court transcripts by Peter Goodchild. I caught the first performance here in Arcata, which starred Edward Asner as William Jennings Bryan and John de Lancie as Clarence Darrow. (It will eventually make its way to York, PA, down the road from Dover.) This play was chosen to tour because the audio version was the Theatre Works production most requested by public school teachers.

Goodchild’s text and historical background makes clear that there was a great deal more at issue in the Tennessee trial than Darwin versus the Biblical creation story. In 1925, Darwinism was seen as justifying an amoral and violent struggle for dominance that demeaned human and Christian values of compassion and community. More specifically, it was seen as a prime influence on Germany (through Nietzsche) and its belief in conquest and might makes right that resulted in the carnage and societal upheaval of the Great War. It was an attack on the human spirit by godless, animalistic and mechanistic science.

These ideas had evolved from those held by Darwin’s opponents in his own time, when self-proclaimed Darwinists themselves proposed several dubious inferences with social and political implications. As George Bernard Shaw said, “Darwin had the luck to please anybody with an ax to grind.” Depending on whose ax it was, Darwinian evolution proved that human progress is inevitable, that human failure is inevitable, that the rich have a duty to be selfish because they naturally deserve to inherit the earth, and all that distinguishes humans from other animals is ethical and unselfish behavior.

We have as rich a stew of projections, derivations and inspirations in our time, though we tend to simplify the storyline to an either/or. It’s an easier story to fit into soundbites and fundraising appeals. It’s also irresponsible. Any subject as complex as Darwinian evolution, as science or as insight into the human condition or the nature of life, that winds up being the center of conflict between two opposing and dogmatic sides, is being distorted and misused, eventually by all sides.

Which brings us back to Dover. Sometimes the complicated is oversimplified, and other times the cacophony quiets to a few simple considerations. According to what I’ve read and what my friends tell me, a lot of people there didn’t like being subjected to all the attention, particularly by school board members who had never been elected, but were appointed to fill vacancies. They especially didn’t like what the controversy was doing within the high school. Most teachers were furious with the rule and civil disobedience was a real possibility.

The successful candidates, who ran as a group, talked about the church/state, science/religion issues, but also about returning attention to the school and above all, the students. And this may be where the ID battle was lost: parental concerns for the education of their children trumped everything else. After all the posturing and theorizing, all the grand principles at issue, it likely came down to parents who want their children to get the best education they can, which means from good teachers in a well-ordered school. Regardless of what they believe about the origin of species, they likely know that the same science everyone in the world studies is something their children will need to know in the twenty-first century.

Nobody knew for sure that this is how it would turn out in Dover. But it did turn out that way, and in most places, it probably will.