A real monkey trial

At Kansas' mock trial of evolution, the creationist majority flaunted its ignorance of high-school level science. How close is the religious right to bringing God into the classroom?

By Peter Dizikes

May 13, 2005 | On the second day of Kansas' mock trial of evolution, Kathy Martin created a moment to remember.

Martin is a member of Kansas' Board of Education and part of a 6-4 majority that appears dead set on changing state standards so the creationist theory of intelligent design, and perhaps other religious ideas, can be taught in science classes along with evolution. Martin and her creationist colleagues are ready to override a report recently issued by scientists and educators on Kansas' curriculum committee, which wants to keep the state's solid science standards intact.

But Martin had trouble even articulating just what she dislikes about the current standards. Martin, you see, has not really read the curriculum committee's report, nor does she think such scrutiny is necessary.

"Please don't feel bad that you haven't read the whole thing," Martin told a creationist "witness" at the hearings on the science curriculum, "because I haven't read it myself." Audience members groaned. To clarify, Martin later explained: "I'm not a word-for-word reader in this kind of technical information." So it went at Kansas' evolution hearings, which concluded Thursday, a Board of Education event where a concrete understanding of all that pesky technical information involved in science was apparently considered unnecessary to reach a verdict on evolution.

"This is absolutely and thoroughly a kangaroo court," says Jack Krebs, a science teacher who co-founded Kansas Citizens for Science (KCFS), a pro-evolution group, to combat the state's notorious 1999 decision -- since reversed -- to drop evolution from its required science curriculum. "The board committee was not even capable of understanding science at the high school level. They had neither the desire nor the competence to be any kind of judge." Nonetheless, having staged its elaborate mock trial, complete with testimony and cross-examination, the board is expected to approve by August new guidelines that many feel will allow religious views to be a part of science education.

Fearing the fix was already in for creationism, scientists around the globe adhered to a KCFS-organized boycott of the event, regarding it as a publicity stunt concocted by officials. "It's frankly not a controversy," said Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, about the hearings. "In the scientific community, evolution is an accepted fact." Krebs, though, sat through the hearings, which began in Topeka on May 5, watching a parade of creationists testify about intelligent design, and working with evolution's lone advocate in the proceedings: Topeka civil rights lawyer Pedro Irigonegaray, who concluded matters with a presentation highlighting the religious underpinnings of intelligent design -- the contemporary version of the 19th century argument that life is too complex to have evolved incrementally from simple forms.

Krebs, like others around the country who have stood up for evolution in recent years, regards the current creationist fixation on intelligent design as a wedge, intended to open the door to the introduction of a wide range of creationist ideas in science classrooms. For that matter, he also views the entire struggle over evolution as merely a wedge in the religious right's efforts to tear down the constitutional wall between church and state. "This is all part of a bigger political struggle," says Krebs, matter-of-factly. And some creationists agree. "If you believe God created [a] baby, it makes it a whole lot harder to get rid of that baby," Terry Fox, pastor of the Southern Baptist Ministry in Wichita, told a Washington Post reporter this spring. "If you can cause enough doubt on evolution, liberalism will die."

Indeed, while the battle over evolution is not necessarily fought along strict party lines, it contains many of the familiar dynamics of contemporary American party politics. Evolution's advocates feel they have the facts on their side but admit they struggle with complacency within their constituency. The pro-evolution forces also acknowledge they must catch up to creationists in organization and strategy, in order to combat a well-funded, aggressive opposition with a penchant for slick sound bites, message discipline, and a current strategy of cloaking radical aims in innocuous-sounding rhetoric. More than any other event this year, the mock trial in Kansas -- timed for the 80th anniversary of Tennessee's famous 1925 Scopes trial, in an apparent signal to religious fellow travelers -- bring these issues into sharp relief and lay bare the strategies and tactics of the two sides in this struggle.

More than anything else, the nature of the struggle in Kansas demonstrates how much creationist tactics have changed since the state's 1999 anti-evolution episode. Now as then, the driving force behind the creationists is Steve Abrams, a veterinarian, former Kansas gubernatorial candidate, one-time chairman of the state Republican Party, and current chairman of the Board of Education. In 1999, however, Abrams and his allies backed a version of creationism heavily dependent on the biblical creation stories in the book of Genesis. By contrast, for this month's hearings, the Board of Education brought in a long string of advocates of intelligent design, who argued that standard evolutionary biology is based on incomplete evidence and that some sort of designer must have been at work to develop life.

Abrams himself still publicly admits he is a so-called young-Earth creationist -- one who believes Earth is as little as 5,000 years old, based on a reading of the Bible. Intelligent design advocates are more likely to acknowledge an age closer to the current scientific standard -- 4.5 billion years -- and, in their testimony at the hearings, held fast to the current creationist strategy of publicly de-emphasizing religion as the source of their beliefs.

Next Page: The creationists brought in a Muslim to argue that teaching evolution generates "anti-Westernism"

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