Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive
- From: "GWhyte" <gwhyte3003@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 12:43:44 -0400
Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive
By JODI WILGOREN
Published: August 21, 2005
SEATTLE - When President Bush plunged into the debate over the teaching of
evolution this month, saying, "both sides ought to be properly taught," he
seemed to be reading from the playbook of the Discovery Institute, the
conservative think tank here that is at the helm of this newly volatile
frontier in the nation's culture wars.
After toiling in obscurity for nearly a decade, the institute's Center for
Science and Culture has emerged in recent months as the ideological and
strategic backbone behind the eruption of skirmishes over science in school
districts and state capitals across the country. Pushing a "teach the
controversy" approach to evolution, the institute has in many ways
transformed the debate into an issue of academic freedom rather than a
confrontation between biology and religion.
Mainstream scientists reject the notion that any controversy over evolution
even exists. But Mr. Bush embraced the institute's talking points by
suggesting that alternative theories and criticism should be included in
biology curriculums "so people can understand what the debate is about."
Financed by some of the same Christian conservatives who helped Mr. Bush win
the White House, the organization's intellectual core is a scattered group
of scholars who for nearly a decade have explored the unorthodox explanation
of life's origins known as intelligent design.
Together, they have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as
the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto
the front pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive.
Like a well-tooled electoral campaign, the Discovery Institute has a
carefully crafted, poll-tested message, lively Web logs - and millions of
dollars from foundations run by prominent conservatives like Howard and
Roberta Ahmanson, Philip F. Anschutz and Richard Mellon Scaife. The
institute opened an office in Washington last fall and in January hired the
same Beltway public relations firm that promoted the Contract With America
in 1994.
"We are in the very initial stages of a scientific revolution," said the
center's director, Stephen C. Meyer, 47, a historian and philosopher of
science recruited by Discovery after he protested a professor's being
punished for criticizing Darwin in class. "We want to have an effect on the
dominant view of our culture."
For the institute's president, Bruce K. Chapman, a Rockefeller Republican
turned Reagan conservative, intelligent design appealed to his contrarian,
futuristic sensibilities - and attracted wealthy, religious philanthropists
like the Ahmansons at a time when his organization was surviving on a
shoestring. More student of politics than science geek, Mr. Chapman embraced
the evolution controversy as the institute's signature issue precisely
because of its unpopularity in the establishment.
"When someone says there's one thing you can't talk about, that's what I
want to talk about," said Mr. Chapman, 64.
As much philosophical worldview as scientific hypothesis, intelligent design
challenges Darwin's theory of natural selection by arguing that some
organisms are too complex to be explained by evolution alone, pointing to
the possibility of supernatural influences. While mutual acceptance of
evolution and the existence of God appeals instinctively to a faithful
public, intelligent design is shunned as heresy in mainstream universities
and science societies as untestable in laboratories.
Entering the Public Policy Sphere
>From its nondescript office suites here, the institute has provided an
institutional home for the dissident thinkers, pumping $3.6 million in
fellowships of $5,000 to $60,000 per year to 50 researchers since the
science center's founding in 1996. Among the fruits are 50 books on
intelligent design, many published by religious presses like InterVarsity or
Crossway, and two documentaries that were broadcast briefly on public
television. But even as the institute spearheads the intellectual
development of intelligent design, it has staked out safer turf in the
public policy sphere, urging states and school boards simply to include
criticism in evolution lessons rather than actually teach intelligent
design.
Since the presidential election last fall, the movement has made inroads and
evolution has emerged as one of the country's fiercest cultural
battlefronts, with the National Center for Science Education tracking 78
clashes in 31 states, more than twice the typical number of incidents.
Discovery leaders have been at the heart of the highest-profile
developments: helping a Roman Catholic cardinal place an opinion article in
The New York Times in which he sought to distance the church from evolution;
showing its film promoting design and purpose in the universe at the
Smithsonian; and lobbying the Kansas Board of Education in May to require
criticism of evolution.
These successes follow a path laid in a 1999 Discovery manifesto known as
the Wedge Document, which sought "nothing less than the overthrow of
materialism and its cultural legacies" in favor of a "broadly theistic
understanding of nature."
President Bush's signature education law, known as No Child Left Behind,
also helped, as mandatory testing prompted states to rewrite curriculum
standards. Ohio, New Mexico and Minnesota have embraced the institute's
"teach the controversy" approach; Kansas is expected to follow suit in the
fall.
Detractors dismiss Discovery as a fundamentalist front and intelligent
design as a clever rhetorical detour around the 1987 Supreme Court ruling
banning creationism from curriculums. But the institute's approach is more
nuanced, scholarly and politically adept than its Bible-based predecessors
in the century-long battle over biology.
A closer look shows a multidimensional organization, financed by missionary
and mainstream groups - the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1
million a year, including $50,000 of Mr. Chapman's $141,000 annual salary -
and asserting itself on questions on issues as varied as local
transportation and foreign affairs.
Many of the research fellows, employees and board members are, indeed,
devout and determinedly conservative; pictures of William J. Bennett, the
moral crusader and former drug czar, are fixtures on office walls, and some
leaders have ties to movement mainstays like Focus on the Family. All but a
few in the organization are Republicans, though these include moderates
drawn by the institute's pragmatic, iconoclastic approach on nonideological
topics like technology.
But even as intelligent design has helped raise Discovery's profile, the
institute is starting to suffer from its success. Lately, it has tried to
distance itself from lawsuits and legislation that seek to force schools to
add intelligent design to curriculums, placing it in the awkward spot of
trying to promote intelligent design as a robust frontier for scientists but
not yet ripe for students.
The group is also fending off attacks from the left, as critics liken it to
Holocaust deniers or the Taliban. Concerned about the criticism, Discovery's
Cascadia project, which focuses on regional transportation and is the
recipient of the large grant from the Gates Foundation, created its own Web
site to ensure an individual identity.
"All ideas go through three stages - first they're ignored, then they're
attacked, then they're accepted," said Jay W. Richards, a philosopher and
the institute's vice president. "We're kind of beyond the ignored stage.
We're somewhere in the attack."
Origins of an Institute
Founded in 1990 as a branch of the Hudson Institute, based in Indianapolis,
the institute was named for the H.M.S. Discovery, which explored Puget Sound
in 1792. Mr. Chapman, a co-author of a 1966 critique of Barry M. Goldwater's
anti-civil-rights campaign, "The Party That Lost Its Head," had been a
liberal Republican on the Seattle City Council and candidate for governor,
but moved to the right in the Reagan administration, where he served as
director of the Census Bureau and worked for Edwin Meese III.
In late 1993, Mr. Chapman clipped an essay in The Wall Street Journal by Dr.
Meyer, who was teaching at a Christian college in Spokane, Wash., concerning
a biologist yanked from a lecture hall for discussing intelligent design.
About a year later, over dinner at the Sorrento Hotel here, Dr. Meyer and
George Gilder, Mr. Chapman's long-ago Harvard roommate and his writing
partner, discovered parallel theories of mind over materialism in their
separate studies of biology and economics.
"Bruce kind of perked up and said, 'This is what makes a think tank,' " Dr.
Meyer recalled. "There was kind of an 'Aha!' moment in the conversation,
there was a common metaphysic in these two ideas."
That summer of 1995, Mr. Chapman and Dr. Meyer had dinner with a
representative of the Ahmansons, the banking billionaires from Orange
County, Calif., who had previously given a small grant to the institute and
underwritten an early conclave of intelligent design scholars. Dr. Meyer,
who had grown friendly enough with the Ahmansons to tutor their young son in
science, recalled being asked, "What could you do if you had some financial
backing?"
So in 1996, with the promise of $750,000 over three years from the Ahmansons
and a smaller grant from the MacLellan Foundation, which supports
organizations "committed to furthering the Kingdom of Christ," according to
its Web site, the institute's Center for Science and Culture was born.
"Bruce is a contrarian, and this was a contrarian idea," said Edward J.
Larson, the historian and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the
Scopes Monkey Trial, who was an early fellow at the institute, but left in
part because of its drift to the right. "The institute was living
hand-to-mouth. Here was an academic, credible activity that involved
funders. It interested conservatives. It brought in money."
Support From Religious Groups
The institute would not provide details about its backers "because they get
harassed," Mr. Chapman said. But a review of tax documents on
www.guidestar.org, a Web site that collects data on foundations, showed its
grants and gifts jumped to $4.1 million in 2003 from $1.4 million in 1997,
the most recent and oldest years available. The records show financial
support from 22 foundations, at least two-thirds of them with explicitly
religious missions.
There is the Henry P. and Susan C. Crowell Trust of Colorado Springs, whose
Web site describes its mission as "the teaching and active extension of the
doctrines of evangelical Christianity." There is also the AMDG Foundation in
Virginia, run by Mark Ryland, a Microsoft executive turned Discovery vice
president: the initials stand for Ad Majorem Dei Glorium, Latin for "To the
greater glory of God," which Pope John Paul II etched in the corner of all
his papers.
And the Stewardship Foundation, based in Tacoma, Wash., whose Web site says
it was created "to contribute to the propagation of the Christian Gospel by
evangelical and missionary work," gave the group more than $1 million
between 1999 and 2003.
By far the biggest backers of the intelligent design efforts are the
Ahmansons, who have provided 35 percent of the science center's $9.3 million
since its inception and now underwrite a quarter of its $1.3 million annual
operations. Mr. Ahmanson also sits on Discovery's board.
The Ahmansons' founding gift was joined by $450,000 from the MacLellan
Foundation, based in Chattanooga, Tenn.
"We give for religious purposes," said Thomas H. McCallie III, its executive
director. "This is not about science, and Darwin wasn't about science.
Darwin was about a metaphysical view of the world."
The institute also has support from secular groups like the Verizon
Foundation and the Gates Foundation, which gave $1 million in 2000 and
pledged $9.35 million over 10 years in 2003. Greg Shaw, a grant maker at the
Gates Foundation, said the money was "exclusive to the Cascadia project" on
regional transportation.
But the evolution controversy has cost it the support of the Bullitt
Foundation, based here, which gave $10,000 in 2001 for transportation, as
well as the John Templeton Foundation in Pennsylvania, whose Web site
defines it as devoted to pursuing "new insights between theology and
science."
Denis Hayes, director of the Bullitt Foundation, described Discovery in an
e-mail message as "the institutional love child of Ayn Rand and Jerry
Falwell," saying, "I can think of no circumstances in which the Bullitt
Foundation would fund anything at Discovery today."
Charles L. Harper Jr., the senior vice president of the Templeton
Foundation, said he had rejected the institute's entreaties since providing
$75,000 in 1999 for a conference in which intelligent design proponents
confronted critics. "They're political - that for us is problematic," Mr.
Harper said. While Discovery has "always claimed to be focused on the
science," he added, "what I see is much more focused on public policy, on
public persuasion, on educational advocacy and so forth."
For three years after completing graduate school in 1996, William A. Dembski
could not find a university job, but he nonetheless received what he called
"a standard academic salary" of $40,000 a year.
"I was one of the early beneficiaries of Discovery largess," said Dr.
Dembski, whose degrees include a doctorate in mathematics from the
University of Chicago, one in philosophy from the University of Illinois and
a master's of divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary.
Money for Teachers and Students
Since its founding in 1996, the science center has spent 39 percent of its
$9.3 million on research, Dr. Meyer said, underwriting books or papers, or
often just paying universities to release professors from some teaching
responsibilities so that they can ponder intelligent design. Over those nine
years, $792,585 financed laboratory or field research in biology,
paleontology or biophysics, while $93,828 helped graduate students in
paleontology, linguistics, history and philosophy.
The 40 fellows affiliated with the science center are an eclectic group,
including David Berlinski, an expatriate mathematician living in Paris who
described his only religion to be "having a good time all the time," and
Jonathan Wells, a member of the Unification Church, led by the Rev. Sun
Myung Moon, who once wrote in an essay, "My prayers convinced me that I
should devote my life to destroying Darwinism."
Their credentials - advanced degrees from Stanford, Columbia, Yale, the
University of Texas, the University of California - are impressive, but
their ideas are often ridiculed in the academic world.
"They're interested in the same things I'm interested in - no one else is,"
Guillermo Gonzalez, 41, an astronomer at the University of Iowa, said of his
colleagues at Discovery. "What I'm doing, frankly, is frowned upon by most
of my colleagues. It's not something a 'scientist' is supposed to do." Other
than Dr. Berlinski, most fellows, like their financiers, are fundamentalist
Christians, though they insist their work is serious science, not closet
creationism.
"I believe that God created the universe," Dr. Gonzalez said. "What I don't
know is whether that evidence can be tested objectively. I ask myself the
tough questions."
Discovery sees the focus on its fellows and financial backers as a
diversionary tactic by its opponents. "We're talking about evidence, and
they want to talk about us," Dr. Meyer said.
But Philip Gold, a former fellow who left in 2002, said the institute had
grown increasingly religious. "It evolved from a policy institute that had a
religious focus to an organization whose primary mission is Christian
conservatism," he said.
That was certainly how many people read the Wedge Document, a five-page
outline of a five-year plan for the science center that originated as a
fund-raising pitch but was soon posted on the Internet by critics.
"Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist
worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and
theistic convictions," the document says. Among its promises are seminars
"to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidence that support
the faith, as well as to 'popularize' our ideas in the broader culture."
One sign of any political movement's advancement is when adherents begin to
act on their own, often without the awareness of the leadership. That,
according to institute officials, is what happened in 1999, when a new
conservative majority on the Kansas Board of Education shocked the nation -
and their potential allies here at the institute - by dropping all
references to evolution from the state's science standards.
"When there are all these legitimate scientific controversies, this was
silly, outlandish, counterproductive," said John G. West, associate director
of the science center, who said he and his colleagues learned of that 1999
move in Kansas from newspaper accounts. "We began to think, 'Look, we're
going to be stigmatized with what everyone does if we don't make our
position clear.' "
Out of this developed Discovery's "teach the controversy" approach, which
endorses evolution as a staple of any biology curriculum - so long as
criticism of Darwin is also in the lesson plan. This satisfied Christian
conservatives but also appealed to Republican moderates and, under the First
Amendment banner, much of the public (71 percent in a Discovery-commissioned
Zogby poll in 2001 whose results were mirrored in newspaper polls).
"They have packaged their message much more cleverly than the creation
science people have," said Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center
for Science Education, the leading defender of evolution. "They present
themselves as being more mainstream. I prefer to think of that as
creationism light."
A watershed moment came with the adoption in 2001 of the No Child Left
Behind Act, whose legislative history includes a passage that comes straight
from the institute's talking points. "Where biological evolution is taught,
the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates
so much continuing controversy," was language that Senator Rick Santorum,
Republican of Pennsylvania, tried to include.
Pointing to that principle, institute fellows in 2002 played important roles
in pushing the Ohio Board of Education to adopt a "teach the controversy"
approach and helped devise a curriculum to support it. The following year,
they successfully urged changes to textbooks in Texas to weaken the argument
for evolution, and they have been consulted in numerous other cases as
school districts or states consider changing their approach to biology.
But this spring, at the hearings in Kansas, Mr. Chapman grew visibly
frustrated as his supposed allies began talking more and more about
intelligent design.
John Calvert, the managing director of the Intelligent Design Network, based
in Kansas, said the institute had the intellectual and financial resources
to "lead the movement" but was "more cautious" than he would like. "They
want to avoid the discussion of religion because that detracts from the
focus on the science," he said.
Dr. West, who leads the science center's public policy efforts, said it did
not support mandating the teaching of intelligent design because the theory
was not yet developed enough and there was no appropriate curriculum. So the
institute has opposed legislation in Pennsylvania and Utah that pushes
intelligent design, instead urging lawmakers to follow Ohio's lead.
"A lot of people are trying to hijack the issue on both the left and the
right," Dr. West said.
Dr. Chapman, for his part, sees even these rough spots as signs of success.
"All ideas that achieve a sort of uniform acceptance ultimately fall apart
whether it's in the sciences or philosophy or politics after a few people
keep knocking away at it," he said. "It's wise for society not to punish
those people."
.
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