Hildegarde

Not all the books I’ve been unearthing in my office have been light and shiny ones like the one on Piero della Francesca I talked about yesterday.  I read a lot of books about policy, and some of those have come to the surface, too.

One of those is a thing called The Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism, by Robert T. Pennock.   Pennock is (was?) an assistant professor of philosophy at the College of New Jersey.  That  name always shakes me up a little, because at the beginning of the country, “The College of New Jersey” was the official name of the place we now call Princeton.  This College of New Jersey seems to have nothing to do with Princeton, although from what I can see from their web site, they do like to go on about how very selective they are.

At any rate, Pennock was teaching philosophy there when he wrote this book, which is an analysis of the arguments put forward by people like Philip Johnson and Michael Behe and the then newly emergent Intelligent Design movement.

I say then newly emergent, because this book is not in any way new.  It was published in 1999.  At that point, there had recently been a couple of high-profile court cases on evolution in public education.  Some of them had concentrated on positive efforts to get Creation Science or Intelligent Design taught in publc schools. Others had concerned themselves with negative efforts to undermine the confidence of students in evolution as a fact as well as evolution as a theory.

The latter are those things like getting stickers put in biology textbooks to say evolution is “only a theory” or demands by school districts that the textbooks they buy not discuss evolution in any way.

(In that last case, what textbook publishers do is to take out the word “evolution” and replace it with something like “change over time,” and then just explain evolution as usual.  They have to.  Modern biology is based on evolution.  Without it, there’s nothing you can say about biology at all.)

Very often, when I come across books I haven’t seen for a while but that I remember with admiration, I reread them. 

And I took this book into the living room with me with just that in  mind.  It was well written.  It was informative.  It had provided me with a lot of useful information.  It’s always a good idea to revisit all that.

After I’d had the book out for about an hour, I changed my mind.  No, I didn’t remember anything discreditable about the book, and I hadn’t gone off the  idea  of reading about evolution.

What became clearer and clearer to me as I flipped through the thing, though, is that the nature of the evolution wars have changed significantly since 1999.

When Pennock made his case, the great push was to find away around court rulings that  banned Creationism in public school classrooms.  It was, in fact, a lawyer’s movement.  Philip Johnson was one, and the Discovery Institute had them. 

One of the things Pennock does very well in his book is to show how Johnson, especially, uses counsel-for-the-defense strategies to try to create “reasonable doubt” in the minds of laypeople, therefore–at least theoretically–making them more amenable to installing Intelligent Design in the curriculum.

The strategy did not work, and the whys and wherefores of why  it did not work are interesting in themselves.

But Pennock’s is not a book about that.  It is set of arguments meant to be  used by supporters of evolution in the particular kind of evolution war occuring at that time.

From what I can tell, that particular kind of evolution war is no longer occuring.

I don’t mean that we’re not fighting about evolution any longer.

Sometimes it feels to me that we’re not only still fighting, but that we’re fighting harder.

It’s just that the nature of the argument has changed.

In 1999, science still  had the upper hand.  The Intelligent Design people, and even t he Creationist  proper people, usually went to great lengths to at least appear scientifically respectable. 

These days, it’s as if the Creationist side has stopped caring. More and more school districts with Creationist-friendly school boards seem to be simply installing whatever version of Creationism they want to teach and daring the other side to go to court,  or plastering their curricula with anti-evolution messages and letting whoever wants to complain complain.

Fifteen years ago, most people arguing against teaching evolution in the schools were convinced that their fellow citizens had a great respect and admiration for science, even if they didn’t themselves.  And they assumed that that respect and admiration had to be placated, if nothing else.

Now it’s almost as if they’re convinced of the exact opposite–that their fellow citizens disdain science just as much as they do, that to designate something as “science” now is to use a pejorative.

And, of course, that their fellow citizens will agree with them.

This would be bad  news no matter what the circumstance were that made it show up, but it makes me much more nervous because I’m almost certain that the evolution wars are not about evolution.

Dozens of good and dedicated men and women spend their time these days trying to convince people that evolution is true.  They marshal evidence, outline arguments, put up web sites with links to all the data.

And none of it matters.

I have a friend with whom I’ve been arguing about evolution for years.  Every time we do, I send her a link to TalkOrigins and their transitional fossils FAQ.  It’s all laid out there, transition after transition, transitions within species, between species,  in long descent lines from one species to another to a third.

There are nearly 30,0o0 documented cases, all properly footnoted and everything.

Every time we have this argument, I send her there.  Then the argument stops, and when it starts up again six or ten months later, it’s as if she’s never heard of TalkOrigins before.

Part of this  may be self protection.  She adheres to a brand of Protestantism that insists she take Genesis more or less literally, and she doesn’t want to endanger her faith.

But I think the bigger problem is this:  she doesn’t bother to look at the evidence, because the truth or falsity of evolution is beside the point.

Evolution isn’t what we’re really talking about.