Chapter I

Concurrent with the Pennsylvania flap, several antievolutionary gears were meshing over in Ohio as the Ohio Board of Education (OBE) began a mandated review of their K-12 school proficiency standards. The Columbus Dispatch devoted lead space to explaining some of the protagonists and issues, Lore (2000) and Mahoney (2000), and familiar sticking point issues surfaced in early editorials and letters. For example, U.S. District Judge James Graham (2000) reflected one of the commonest antievolution tropes (and one that would figure in the subsequent debate) by focusing on the mystery of “the origin of life” rather than the many billions of years of evidently natural changes cropping up in life after that. Graham also expressed concern over “the problem of stereotyping” whereby design proponents “are often miscast as biblical literalists” and how “emotionalism” led “to ridicule, name-calling and exaggerated claims instead of reassured debate” without once venturing an opinion on the skills or expertise of any of the people actually getting involved in the Ohio case. Ohio State University evolutionary ecology professor W. Mitchell Masters (2000) did remind Graham, though, that the ideas of Phillip Johnson and Michael Behe that the jurist had invoked in an earlier editorial did not “have evolutionists perplexed.”

As the OBE got into action local reportage kept pace: Mangels & Stephens (2002a-c), Stephens & Mangels (2002a-b), Stephens (2002a-d), Candisky (2002a-c) and Sidoti (2002a-b). Gura (2002) covered the case for Nature, while an unfavorable review by Charlesworth (2002) of the new No Free Lunch ID volume by Dembski (2002a) earned a riposte from Dembski (2002h). The more ambivalent Christian Science Monitor (2002) did not deny the solidity of evolutionary science in reporting on the Ohio case but kept the door propped open for “discussion, questions, and possible alternatives.” Vicki Johnson (2006) later supplied a concise summary of the Ohio affair for The Educational Forum.

As for how many “biblical literalists” there actually were on hand as the OBE commenced its work, this was the state that geocentrist Gerardus Bouw called home, and the region had a creationist star right next door: Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis (having grown in only a few years to a $5.5 million annual budget) was embarking on its Creation Museum near the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport, Kinney (2000). The Young Earth Creationist Club followed the OBE’s initial efforts from their perspective, where two creationist chemists testified on supposed fossil and radiometric dating problems, Paul McDorman (2000) and Joseph Guthrie (2000).

Several OBE members explicitly favored offering “alternatives” to evolution into the standards, such as lawyer Michael Cochran and University of Akron marketing professor Deborah Owens-Fink, ebulliently looking forward to being on “the cutting edge” of the impending ID science revolution by making Ohio the first state to include it in education—though the strongest opponent of Intelligent Design on the board, retired business executive Martha Wise, identified herself as a creationist but felt religious faith on the role of God in creation had no place in science class, Clines (2002a). Moreover, a survey of science and technology issues conducted by the Ohio Academy of Science had identified no interest in either downplaying evolution instruction or giving Intelligent Design a leg up, Geis (2002), suggesting the OBE was about to embark on a solution in want of a problem.

Industrial chemist Robert Lattimer, director of the Hudson, Ohio chapter of Robert Simonds’ Citizens for Excellence in Education (recall that organization’s roll in the Pennsylvania case above), went beyond mere testimony by getting on the OBE writing committee itself. Lattimer was an old hand at griping about textbook inadequacies, such as the multicultural one that drew his scorn a few years earlier for including “too much on how various minorities have been victimized,” while “many caucasians were treated poorly in their history, but you don’t read much of that in the book,” quoted by the National Coalition Against Censorship (1996).

Joining them was the Intelligent Design Network, founded to defend the 1999 Kansas standards by lawyer John Calvert (licensed in Missouri for practice, though not in Kansas ironically), nutritional biochemist William Harris and zoological illustrator Jody Sjogren (she provided images for Wells’ Icons of Evolution), Beem (2002) and CreationWiki (2011g). The Intelligent Design Network developed three divisions: Calvert and Harris’ parent Kansas operation, an Ohio branch run in 2011 by patent lawyer Roddy Bullock, and the aforementioned (section 1.4 above) New Mexico division shepherded by Creation Ministries International-friendly Joseph Renick, who despite considerable effort (and post hoc spin) failed to derail New Mexico’s resolutely evolution-friendly science standards, Janofsky (1999), Berman & Thomas (2005) and David E. Thomas (2007).

After the defeat of the 1999 Kansas antievolution standards, Young Earth creationist activist Paul Ackerman embraced the new style of Calvert and company as a welcome tactical development: “the way they are framing the issue is certainly acceptable to the creationist side,” Stephens (2002a). Just how acceptable this was would be shown later when Ackerman was welcomed onboard the Kansas Intelligent Design Network as their director.

Given this YEC subculture running not very far below the wave crests in his own organization, as well as the obvious creationist component in the 1999 standards (let alone its geocentric-congenial contributor Willis) the Intelligent Design Network was set up to promote, it is of some note that Calvert has paid no attention whatsoever to any of this in the many statements he has made on the subject, such as Calvert (2000; 2001b-c; 2005), Calvert et al. (2000; 2001a-b), and Harris & Calvert (2003; 2005). Nor did Phillip Johnson (2002b) allude to the YEC or Willis factor in a Weekly Wedge Update praising Calvert as “one of the friends of freedom” whose yeoman efforts in Kansas were thwarted by the Darwinists employing “their media monopoly and political power to intimidate the people of Kansas.” Instead Johnson held the Kulturkampf banner high: “We will fight again, and eventually the leaders of science will learn that the costs of imposing a pseudoscientific materialism on America are too great for them to bear,” and quoted a summary of the developing Ohio case by Calvert extoling in turn the splendid assistance of Bob Lattimer.

The remaining players in Ohio represented a cloud of outside interests conjoined by their common Kulturkampf concerns.

Science Excellence For All Ohioans (SEAO) was “a project of the American Family Association,” SEAO (2002a-c; 2003) and Lattimer et al. (2002), inspiring the later Sjogren et al. (2005) encountered in section 1.3 above concerning Punctuated Equilibrium. SEAO appears to have consisted mainly of Sjogren (who also acted as director of the Ohio wing of the Intelligent Design Network), Bob Lattimer, and mechanical engineer Walter L. Starkey.

Information technologist Douglas Rudy was mentioned as director by SEAO (2003), but apart from contributing to Sjogren et al. (2005) has left hardly a trace beyond Rudy (2014), a superficial collection of derivative and dated antievolutionary secondary quotes at his Xenos religious website aimed at demonstrating how evolution fails to “discredit the Bible.” Starkey ranks only slightly higher, a minor niche antievolutionist of the Richard Milton stripe who eventually got a jab by The Sensuous Curmudgeon (2011i) as “Self-Published Genius #11” but been cited only peripherally, such as by David Noebel (2013b), another marginal creationist who listed a 1999 version of Starkey’s self-published Cambrian Explosion book among the slim end references in a rambling piece on “The End of Darwinism” for The Schwarz Report but didn’t dwell on him in the main text.

Calvert and the SEAO were the faces of the ID campaign interviewed by Matt Pyeatt (2002) for Brent Bozell’s Conservative News Service (later renamed Cybercast News Service), reprised in turn at the American Center for Jaw and Justice (Pat Robertson’s legal organization run by Jay Sekulow). But the Discovery Institute also got involved. Having defended the 1999 Kansas antievolutionary standards from afar, the DI felt ready to dive in feet first to put their mark on Ohio’s K-12 science education, and Dembski’s side of the ID argument was featured by Chuck Colson (2002a) for Breakpoint, a posting included secondarily among the pro-ID Access Research Network Ohio coverage, ARN (2002).

Cheering from the sidelines was Phyllis Schlafly (2002) for the Eagle Forum, showing about the same breezy willingness to repeat the claims of Icons of Evolution (laced with some creationist quote mining, such as one misrepresented from Colin Patterson and another misattributed to Louis Bounoure, to be covered in due course) than she had when recommending the science lectures of Kent Hovind. Over at Concerned Women for America, Tanya Green (2002) reminded their readers that “The backlash was horrendous” in Kansas over the 1999 standards (no mention of the scuttled Big Bang or Willis’ part in that) but singled out John Calvert for promoting “evidence-based science education” there and now in Ohio. On a not unrelated Kulturkampf track, Green (2001) also insisted Margaret Sanger somehow had a “Eugenic Plan for Black Americans” despite the many African-American supporters of Planned Parenthood at the time, as Jersild (2001) took pains to remind Green. Green’s concerns may be compared to the general “chaos rhetoric” found at Concerned Women for America, Eric C. Miller (2014b).

Five of the nine members of the OBE Standards Committee favored incorporating Intelligent Design, and in January 2001 John Calvert was invited to give a pro-ID talk, though as John Mangels & Scott Stephens (2002a) noted in their coverage for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, scientists attending the meeting who wanted to respond to his half hour presentation were denied the opportunity. SEAO (2003) did not allude to that in their self-serving post hoc précis of the “Ohio Firestorm of 2002”. Calvert (2001a) was shy on technical detail in his presentation but long on philosophy, and defined the nub of the matter thus: “There are essentially only two scientific hypotheses about our origins. The Naturalistic and the Design Hypothesis.”

Sound familiar? It should—recall Scalia’s summary of the Creation Science argument fifteen years earlier in Edwards v. Aguillard: “There are two and only two scientific explanations for the beginning of life—evolution and creation science.” All Calvert had done was dust off this “It’s Either Us or Them” Two Model creationist approach, where the “Design Hypothesis” can slip under the limbo bar without having to earn its place in the game first through a strong body of empirical findings establishing “Design” on its own merits (though Design advocates definitely don’t see it that way, thinking the likes of Behe and Dembski had already slam-dunked it).

Like Creation Science before them, any inadequacy of naturalistic evolution is taken as de facto evidence in favor of the Design alternative (as seen in Scalia’s summary of the Edwards v. Aguillard arguments). The road is never allowed to run the other way, though, with any problems in the Design argument being accepted as supporting evolution, but then logical consistency has not been one of the salient properties of antievolutionism generally, whether Creation Science or Intelligent Design.

Once more, the nature of what constitutes acceptable “evidence” clouded the ID-is-not-Creationism mantra. Sounding a lot like the Dean Kenyon (1984) Louisiana affidavit trying to wring the Creation out of Creation Science, Calvert (2001a) stressed that the Design “evidence is not ‘creation science’ as defined by the courts. It does not lead to a young earth, a world wide flood or any other religious text or religious account about the origin of life. It derives its authority solely from investigation, observation and analysis per the scientific method.”

Except that Creation Science had consistently said the same thing about the empirical basis of their alternative, and maintained as well that the scientific evidence does lead to a young Earth and a global Flood, if only those uniformitarian scientists would give throw off their godless Naturalism blinders and embrace the evident truth of the facts as only they consistently see them. Ohio had plenty of domestic creationists waiting in the wings to bring polonium halos, radiometric dating problems and humans coexisting with dinosaurs to the “science evidence” party in exactly this spirit, such as Young Earth Creation Club (2002c), and if Calvert had any doubt about what they would have in mind, he had only to take up reading Acts & Facts or any of the many Answers in Genesis publications—and then try explaining how he would propose to keep the YEC camp from bringing their evidence to the table too. And no cheating, by using any “Naturalism” in the answer, either.

SEAO (2001) was more comprehensive than Calvert in dodging the many creationist balls ready to be pitched at the restricted ID epistemology batter, parsing “creationism” so generously that even theistic evolution got in the mix, but once at the plate SEAO promptly threw down the bat and ran back to the dugout:

Intelligent design seeks to avoid these controversies by focusing on scientific, rather than theological, arguments. Intelligent design is a good scientific alternative to evolution, and “creationists” with differing perspectives have found that they can unite under the design banner and present as unified front to the science and education establishment. It has been relatively easy for evolutionists to defeat creation science initiatives in U.S. courts and school boards. The establishment is finding it to be much more difficult to defeat the design hypothesis, which is clearly a viable scientific paradigm, and not a religious concept.

Except of course such a tactic can only seem to work if the Design Hypothesis’ “scientific” argument is tailored never to trouble the sensibilities of all the varied brands of “creationism” that Calvert and SEAO are so resolutely claiming ID is not. So it happened that in his recommended revisions to the standards Robert Lattimer (2002) took careful aim at the one instance “in the origins science area that includes estimated dates for events or processes in the distant past,” namely that unicellular organisms appeared “about 4 billion years ago.” Now this might have been seen as a fine opportunity to specify more Deep Time benchmarks in the indicators—tracking the arrival of cyanobacteria (~2.5 Ga) then early nucleated eukaryotes (~2 Ga) and later primitive metazoans (~1 Ga and after), for example. But instead Lattimer argued that “since these estimated times vary greatly” for the first life the text should be revised toward the exceedingly vague: that those organisms arrived “shortly after the time when the earth first became habitable.” Lattimer did not venture by how much or according to whom these “estimated times” supposedly varied, and a February 2002 email enquiry of my own to John Calvert for clarification garnered no reply.

The downplaying of Deep Time facts to avoid wrinkling the sensibilities of creationist students or parents was not a feature unique to the Kansas-Ohio climate. As Lerner (2000) noted, the official standards in Mississippi, Tennessee and West Virginia came close to Kansas in reducing mention of an old Earth and universe, but it was also possible to accomplish this from under the radar.

A disgruntled Arkansas science teacher told Wiles (2005) how he had been explicitly “instructed NOT to use hard numbers when telling kids how old rocks are. I am supposed to say that these rocks are VERY VERY OLD ... but I am NOT to say that these Ordovician rocks are thought to be about 300 million years old.” This mandate (which extended to not mentioning “evolution” or even “natural selection”) was done solely to avoid the ire of any creationist parents or students or politicians who might (but hadn’t yet) raised a fuss. (A situation not unique to Arkansas, as I know of a local high school science teacher in my area who currently has to keep geochronology off the table in his classes.)

Wiles discovered the avoidance of evolution was not uncommon in the state, and where objecting to this could be a career-ender for teachers, risking accusations of atheism and being reported to the governor (Mike Huckabee at the time, who not only favored creationism being taught in the state’s schools while oblivious to evolution’s being downplayed by their own teachers, he was serving as chair of the Educational Commission of the States). Thus, even though the Arkansas scientific community had successfully blunted a Kansas-style standards revision in 1999, Hobson (2001), such that the state’s official science education guidelines recognized a 4.5-billion-year age for Earth, and measures like Holt’s House Bill 2548 had flopped in the legislature, the social conditions on the schoolroom floor rendered those victories Pyrrhic.

The disconnect between the legal situation regarding teaching creationism in schools and the de facto reality was seen again when local church members in Columbus, Indiana sent a petition with over 1200 student and adult signatures to the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corporation Board requesting a creation science class by offered either as an elective or incorporated into regular instruction, Maschino (2002). Never mind that what they were proposing had been unconstitutional since Edwards v. Aguillard (Scalia notwithstanding), the BCSC superintendent said he was considering it. One of the speakers at the board’s meetings stressed that “creation science involves scientific research and is not just about religion,” and a student wanted the course to “be taught by someone who is knowledgeable in the field,” which presumably would not require (or accept) anyone inoculated with the Discovery Institute’s aversion to taking on YEC arguments.

Another Indiana example: a student campaign to get YEC content included in their courses at Jefferson High School in Lafayette was supported by a creationist chemistry teacher there (likely Daniel Clark, to be met with again shortly), and coverage of accurate geochronology was not appreciated either, Randak (2001), one student complaining “It is bad enough that you teach the earth is old, you should not be able to attack my evidence that the earth is young.” Calvert is welcome to try “teaching the controversy” on that one.

The issue of chronological sequence meant participants in the OBE discussion were not always using the same playbook. The Columbus Dispatch press account by Candisky (2002a) mentioned Ohio State University science education professor “David Haury, who was on hand to help clarify terminology and pertinent legal precedent, called evolution and intelligent design different subjects that need not be at odds. ‘Evolution is how things change over time—it doesn’t say anything about how life got started—and intelligent design is about how life got started,’ he said.”

But Design advocates were frequently bringing up fossil matters like the Cambrian Explosion occurring long after the origin of life, so however reasonable Haury’s distinction was from an evolutionary perspective, this was not quite the position of the actual ID advocates on hand in Ohio. Board member Deborah Owens-Fink (2002) objected that the standards were not so neutral on “origins” as evolution advocates claimed:

The present draft of the Science Standards states this origin connection very specifically. Students are required and tested on their ability to:

“Know that life on earth is thought to have begun as simple, one-celled organisms, about 4 billion years ago.”

“Analyze how natural selection, and other evolutionary mechanisms and their consequences provide a scientific explanation for the diversity and unity of all past life forms.”

Sounds like origins of life issues to me.

The problem was that nothing in the statement described how that first life had come to be—the “origins” side of things (whether natural or supernatural) operating in Haury’s context—only the approximate time of that appearance (a geochronology matter disputed only by YEC ideologues) and the observation of what that first life consisted of (unicellular organisms only). Over in Oklahoma, one vocal supporter of antievolutionist battles over textbook adoption (related to the disclaimer tactic discussed more below) was kindergarten teacher Laura Dobson, who fully reflected this creationist misconception when she matter-of-factly said, “I disagree that single-cell organisms were first,” Cooper (1999). Which spirit lives on in creationists like Richard Peachey (2008) at the Creation Science Association of British Columbia, doing his darnedest to dismiss the earliest microbial fossils as real.

Ironically, even SEAO (2003) conceded the reference to the time of life’s first appearance “says nothing about how life might have originated,” but still balked at the mention of it as they targeted “the controversial ‘macroevolution’ theory (descent from a common ancestry)” without specifying in what way any of this necessitated Intelligent Design. This stance also implicitly collided with their own ID stalwart Michael Behe, whose putative acceptance of common descent had obviously shown no appreciable market penetration among fellow antievolutionists.

Popular coverage can reinforce these muddled views without even realizing it, such as the Columbus Dispatch (2000) providing a perfectly accurate “Evolution timetable” for their readers that explained: “The theory of evolution holds that simple life forms appeared on Earth about 3 1/2 billion years ago.” But it is not evolutionary theory hypothesizing that state of affairs (though it certainly was consistent with evolutionary expectations)—it is the factual discoveries of paleontology that have put those benchmarks on the table, and any theory of origins (including Intelligent Design) would have to address that sequence of appearance (no “origin” with bears being made first, for example).

It is the rest of the Columbus Dispatch (2000) list, and not the starting “origins” point, that poses the largest conceptual problem for many antievolutionists. There is a very long time (1.5 billion years) after “Microbial cells” appeared before more “Complex cells” show up, and almost as long again before “Multicellular animals” are found toward the end of the Precambrian, which is still tens of millions of years before the “Shell-bearing animals” show up in the Cambrian Explosion. To what extent this leisurely chronology would suggest a Designer (and only just the one?) prone more to mind-numbing lethargy than spunky ingenuity is not one of the “alternatives to evolution” design advocates are inspired to consider.

The Columbus Dispatch played onto another contentious subject by the items listed next, clearly aiming at our own parochial slice of the pie of life: “Vertebrates” (490 Ma), “Amphibians” (350 Ma), “Reptiles” (310 Ma), “Mammals” (200 Ma), “Primates” (60 Ma), “Earliest apes” (25 Ma), “Australopithecine ancestors of humans” (5 Ma) and “Modern humans” at 150,000 years ago (still around twenty times the age of the universe by the YEC yardstick)—by omission neglecting that lots of novel forms were showing up in other branches of life, and so unwittingly reinforcing creationist acceptance of humans as the primary object of creation in the Garden of Eden petting zoo.

All of this is a long way from the Genesis creation story of familiar plants and animals, with no recognition of those bacteria or place for the menagerie of extinct forms unknown in Biblical times. Owens-Fink and the SEAO were trying to pack their baggage on “origins” with a body of life history that was never going to fit their Bronze Age religious luggage any more than carnivorous tyrannosaurs dying out 65 Ma could be crammed into the much smaller YEC Flood Geology carryon travel bag.