Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive
- From: "MrPepper11" <MrPepper11@xxxxxx>
- Date: 20 Aug 2005 14:29:48 -0700
New York Times
August 21, 2005
Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive
By JODI WILGOREN
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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