LETTER FROM AMERICA: The US may have just fought the first war of the 21st century, using the science of the future. There are times, however, when one wonders if this huge country of contrasts is even ready for the 20th.
This week in Columbus, Ohio, shades of the infamous Scopes trial of the 1930s, the state school board, in the process of revising the science curriculum, convened a debate on the place of alternatives to evolution in the classroom. More than 1,000 people turned up to hear two defenders of Darwinism duel with two proponents of "intelligent design", the evolved "son of" biblical creationism in a new, more acceptable pseudo-scientific garb.
Currently the curriculum here and across the US prohibits the teaching of creationism but its advocates have targeted a number of states where they hope to insert provisions requiring teachers to teach it as a scientific controversy, in effect offering students the option to accept it as an alternative to Darwinism. They face strong opposition from the mainstream scientific community.
This week in an adroit tactical shift, Dr Stephen C. Meyer, a Washington state philosopher and leading intelligent-design supporter, suggested a compromise in which they dropped their call for its teaching to be mandatory and asked that the board would allow it as an option, raising the prospect of school-by-school battles across the state as campaigners enlist conservative parents to their cause.
Afterwards, several on the 19-member board said they would push to include such a compromise in the guidelines for the state's 1.8 million children.
"This is very clever of them," said Eugenie C. Scott, director of the California-based National Centre for Science Education. "Local control has always been the third rail of American politics, so just as they've cleverly exploited the argument for 'equal time', so they're quick to seize on the popularity of local control." The US Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the teaching of biblical creationism in schools. Its rulings gave birth about a decade ago to the intelligent-design movement, which holds itself as a strict alternative to evolution. Its proponents have put aside the old-fashioned literal interpretation of the creation in the Bible. They accept that the Earth is billions of years old but insist that, while evolution clearly exists in the natural world, Darwinism has gaps and fails to explain its order and complexity. That can only be explained by the idea of a guiding hand.
"The real danger is in trying to put God in the gaps," Dr Lawrence Krauss, the physics chairman at Case Western Reserve University, told the meeting. Dr Krauss argued that while much remained to be discovered about natural selection, Darwin's theory had only grown in strength through decades of repeated experimentation and discovery that intelligent design had not been subjected to.
"If this debate were fair, there would be 10,000 scientists vs. one representative of the Discovery Institute," Dr Krauss said to illustrate that the mainstream science community overwhelmingly rejects the notion of intelligent design. "There is an agenda here, no matter what you hear, to replace materialistic explanations with a theistic understanding of nature."
Dr Kenneth R. Miller, a biologist at Brown University, told the board that the state of "scientific controversy" being repeatedly claimed by the two speakers for intelligent design was non-existent among the vast majority of scientists. Instead, he said, it was "propped up from outside the scientific community" in a move to pressure legislators and school officials to overrule the scientific mainstream.
Noting that he is a religious person, Dr Miller said he worries that by forcing intelligent design into the classroom, students will feel pressured to choose between science and religion.
But Dr Meyer said a broader definition of science to include the controversy would enliven classroom teaching and improve science education in Ohio. He said he'd like to see more alternative theories taught across the range of sciences, not just in biology.
Dr Jonathan Wells, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle organisation dedicated to alternative scientific theories, asked: "Is the design that we all see real or merely an appearance?" The argument, he said, is like that of the lawyer who tells a jury that where there is a measure of reasonable doubt they must acquit. If, the intelligent-design movement argues, there is doubt about Darwinism providing the full answer, others must be given shot in the school system.
"Ohio should enact no definition of science that would prevent the discussion of other theories," said Dr Meyer, also a fellow at the Discovery Institute's Centre for the Renewal of Science and Culture in Seattle. "We think an honest critique of Darwin's theory will support our cause in the end." Although a similar debate over science standards two years ago in Kansas led the state school board to strip evolution from its standards - a decision reversed when voters unseated several board members who supported the removal - Ohio is the first state where intelligent design has become a state-wide issue.
Jim Parker, a science teacher at East Technical High School in Cleveland, took a day off to attend the discussion.
"I look to the professional organisations for guidance on what I should be teaching and they all say evolution," Mr Parker told the Columbus Despatch. "If intelligent design were allowed in, I would spend my time teaching why it's not science."
psmyth@irish-times.ie