evolution 2006: creation vs. evolution
Today’s special panel on the Kitzmiller vs. Dover School District Case discussed the controversy that pitted intelligent design proponents and evolution proponents against each other in the school board and local community. The panel was composed many important actors in the case, including one of the plaintiffs, the lead attorneys, as well as expert witnesses.
Over the course of the day I wrote down my thoughts as I listened to the accounts and conclusions stemming from the trial. Here, I summarize some of them:
“It wasn’t reason & logic that won the election …it was public perception.”
–Brian Rhem, on his election to the Dover School Board replacing those that advocated the teaching of intelligent design.
**This theme would persist through the entire symposium- the idea that perception is important in the creationism/evolution so-called controversy. I personally remember the Evolution meetings in 2000 in Bloomington, IN. There, Mike Lynch introduced the need for the Society for the Study of Evolution to address creationist inroads that threatened federal funding for evolution research. The result was the creation of a whitepaper led by Doug Futuyma that outlined what, specifically, research in evolutionary was all about and it’s relationship to society. My cynical view is that it took funding threats to instigate any response to the problem from the evolutionary biology community. What has been done since then (~6 years) to improve public perception? After all, creationists have 1000′s of years of art and visual “evidence” to support public perceptions. At best, biologists have been presenting visual evidence for evolution for 150 years- not to mention that it only became illegal to teach creationism in public schools in 1968. Given Michelangelo Sistine Chapel or a phylogenetic tree diagram, which would you “believe”?
Human Phylogeny from Tree of Life
“Does it matter that evolution is largely a verbal narrative when creationism is both verbal and significantly visual”, I asked of Brian Alters after he finished his talk on good pedagogy.
His answer unfortunately did not satisfy me much in that same way that Richard Lewontin’s response to Jay Lemke’s question about the role of visual metaphor seemed to simply suggest that its place is complicated and mostly subservient to verbal articulation (this question was asked at a recent talk given at the university of michigan- not at the evolution symposium).
Has anyone checked to see if the forthcoming SPORE video game from the creator of the SIMS is consistent with evolutionary theory?
?? As the living world becomes increasingly designed by biotechnology and landscape development, what additional challenges can we expect when providing evolution as an alternative to intelligent design ?? My question is based on the idea that people are prone to interpret life as designed and that evolutionary theory is non-intuitive.
–A solution: compare the visual weight of evolutionary theory with that of intelligent design theory…literally.
Reporter Laurie Lebo: “[Evolution] lacked any of the obvious elements of drama.”
Here’s a nice graph by Nick Matzke that (pretty much) won the case for the plaintiffs.
