AAAS Denounces 'Anti-Evolution' Legislation

By Clive Cookson
The Financial Times

Monday 20 February 2006

US scientific leaders have launched a new assault on political attempts to undermine the teaching of evolution in public schools. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, supported by 30 other scientific and educational organisations, adopted a declaration denouncing "anti-evolution" legislation that is pending in 14 states.

The bills varied in language and strategy but "all would weaken science education", said AAAS president Gilbert Omenn, professor of medicine at the University of Michigan. "They threaten not just the teaching of evolution, but students' understanding of the biological, physical, and geological sciences."

Some of the bills would require schools to emphasise "flaws" in the theory of evolution or "disagreements" within the scientific community, the AAAS said. Others would encourage teachers to explore intelligent design and other alternatives to evolution. But the declaration, released at the AAAS annual meeting, said: "There is no significant controversy within the scientific community about the validity of evolution."

Eugenie Scott, director of the National Centre for Science Education, said the anti-evolution movement had suffered a "stunning defeat" in December, when a federal court ruled that the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, could not mandate the teaching of intelligent design (ID), because it was a disguised way to introduce religion into the science curriculum.

"ID may be dead as a legal strategy but that does not mean it is dead as a popular social movement," Ms Scott added. She predicted that creationists would find other ways to undermine the teaching of evolution, as well as the standard cosmological view of the universe and its history.

"The ultimate solution is better scientific literacy among the American people," she said. "But we'd like the mainstream religions to do a better job making clear that evolution is consistent with their theology."

One step in that direction is the Clergy Letter Project, run by Michael Zimmerman at the University of Wisconsin, which has gathered signatures from 10,000 Christian clergy in favour of teaching evolution. "All the fundamentalists seem to have 'science envy'," Prof Zimmerman said. "The clergy who have signed the letter are so much more confident in their religious beliefs."

A leading Catholic scientist, George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory, took the opportunity to attack creationism. "The ID movement belittles God, making him seem too small and paltry," he said. "God is not an engineer who designed the universe. He did not design me - He loves me."

Prof Coyne conceded that the Catholic Church was divided on the issue. But he expected Pope Benedict to stick with the declaration made by his predecessor John Paul II that "the theory of evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis".