The Discovery Institute advocates "teaching the controversy" about evolution, an approach that casts doubt on the biological validity of natural selection and gives credence to I.D. The term was coined about 20 years ago by Gerald Graff, an English professor at the University of Chicago, to describe a method of exploring cultural disagreements over whether, say, Huck Finn is a racist, rather than simply teaching one side or the other of a conflict.

Graff, a self-described "secular left-liberal" says he first felt as if his "pocket had been picked when the intelligent design crowd appropriated my slogan." But recently, in an essay in Inside Higher Ed, Graff suggests there may be a silver lining to the I.D.-evolution debate.

"I can at least imagine a classroom debate between creationism and evolution that might be just the thing to wake up the many students who now snooze through science courses," Graff writes. "Such students might come away from such a debate with a sharper understanding of the grounds on which established science rests, something that even science majors and advanced graduate students now don't often get from conventional science instruction."

Some teachers, such as Susan Sperling, an anthropology and interdisciplinary studies professor at Chabot College in Hayward, Calif., have adopted a version of this process. She is trying to teach the controversy without granting undue legitimacy to I.D. as science. This semester, Sperling, a Berkeley-trained physical anthropologist, is holding a course in which her students learn about evolutionary biology by reading Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species."

In connection with the course, Sperling organized a series of three public lectures about creationism, I.D. and evolution. "I thought it would be good to have students and others in our community provided with a forum for looking at intelligent design in its larger cultural context," Sperling says, "and to be able to see the debate from different sides."

I decided to attend the lectures for myself. I wanted to see how the largely working-class, middle-American students at Chabot would respond to the different lecturers: Elsberry, an evolutionary biologist; Ken Malloy, a young-earth creationist and author; and Philip Johnson, a retired UC-Berkeley law professor who is considered the father of I.D.

Elsberry launched the series to a standing-room-only crowd, with a detailed review of the history of evolutionary theory from pre-Darwin days until now. It was thorough and fair and totally lacking in hype or flair. As one who has long studied evolution and natural history, I managed to follow along. But judging by the drooping heads and the dozen or so empty seats when the lights came up, I'm not sure how many of the Chabot students did.

At one point, as Elsberry was zipping through his talk about the synthesis of species, the young woman next to me muttered "Jesus" in exasperation before abandoning her frantic effort to take notes. For the rest of the talk, she just sat there, eyes half shut, letting the names, facts and figures wash over her like a foreign language.

Elsberry's commitment to detail and lack of rhetorical flourish sent Sperling into a bit of a panic. "Dr. Elsberry is a wonderful and meticulous scientist, but I don't think he really could see how little of what he was saying his audience even understood," she said after his lecture. "And now, to be brutally honest, I'm worried that I may be undermining my own science teaching." In other words, she was afraid the next speakers, the anti-evolutionists, might win the day.

I could see what an uphill climb it is for biologists trying to compete for the hearts and minds of Americans that are undereducated in the sciences, especially in evolutionary biology. Evolutionary theory isn't Einsteinian relativity, but it is counterintuitive in many ways and a detailed explanation is needed for it to make much sense, while the essential I.D. argument has a strong intuitive appeal: Life is too complex and meaningful to be accidental.

Yet some Chabot faculty members were just happy to see students and the community showing up for a public science lecture at all. "I could never draw this kind of crowd with a straightforward lecture on astronomy," Scott Hildreth, a lecturer in astrophysics at Chabot, told me. "This is a great forum in which to teach students about the meaning of science, where its limits are, and what it's all about."

A week later, Malloy, the young-earth preacher, was before the same audience explaining his literal interpretation of Genesis: Earth is about 6,000 years old, Noah's Ark was real (it has been found in Turkey, proven authentic beyond a shadow of doubt, he says), and rescued not only two of every currently living species, but two of every species that had ever lived, including Tyrannosaurus rex. He explained that T. rex had had to be brought aboard as babies, due to space constraints. "I use the words 'evolutionist' and 'atheist' interchangeably," he said. He dismisses carbon and other dating techniques of fossils as simply inaccurate. It was almost surreal, an evolutionist's nightmare, seeing a fundamentalist creationist standing in a college lab teaching a biology lecture right out of the Bible.

The lab full of students sat up straight and paid attention during Malloy's talk. For one thing, unlike Elsberry's lecture, it allowed them to easily follow his drift, even if, as Sperling pointed out afterward, "he might as well have been a tribesman telling creation stories from the highlands of New Guinea."

"Even though he said his claims were true, there wasn't any mistaking them for science," says Chabot freshman Christopher Jacob. "It was just interesting to see how different someone's view of the world could be."

The next lecture, by Johnson, would be more problematic for the 18-year-old Jacob, who afterward said he was thinking of studying biology to protect science from "political attacks like this."

Johnson's 1993 book, "Darwin on Trial," the publication of which marks the birth of I.D., is a rhetorically powerful critique of evolutionary biology that avoids saying much about God or the Bible. In his lecture at Chabot, Johnson argued that the evidence for I.D. is strong, that evolution is full of logical and evidentiary gaps. "Science should follow the evidence wherever it leads, not draw some arbitrary line at the appearance of design," he said. "To say, 'Despite the evidence [for design], we won't look there' is very unscientific."

Although Johnson is recovering from a stroke that impaired his speech, he had no problem holding the Chabot College audience's attention. Even Sperling, a trained evolutionist, was compelled by some of Johnson's arguments, saying they caused her to "think hard and long about how the boundaries of science get drawn."

Now that the lecture series is over, Sperling says she is convinced "that the evidence, power and logic of evolution speak for themselves. As an evolutionist and teacher, I'm not in the business of compelling anyone's opinion. There are good reasons that evolution is the organizing theory of modern biology, and my students can see that and think critically and intelligently about what they are hearing."

Time will tell whether I.D. continues to thrive in the nation's public schools. In the meantime, John Hoopes, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas, has designed his own intelligent approach to teaching I.D. Next fall, he will hold a class titled "Archaeological Myths and Realities." It will cover UFOs, crop circles, ESP and intelligent design.

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