Chapter I

In 2004 antievolutionists regained a 6-4 majority on the Kansas State Board of Education (KSBE) and set up a 25-member committee to revise the state’s science standards, with eight of their camp on it, including William Harris, physician Tim Crater, retired high school biology teacher Greg Lassey, and a group with no subsequent discernable trail: Rick Reeser, Wayne Stringer, Dick Unruh, and John Yost. What would be the core reason for the acrimonious dispute to follow turned on a profound difference of opinion on what constitutes relevant evidence when it comes to testing theoretical claims, and how examples of it are to be evaluated. While the majority of members were tackling their task of translating those precepts into a working science education standard, in December 2004 the creationist subgroup bypassed the normal procedure and submitted their own streamlined Minority Report directly to the Board, once more chronicled by local activist Jack Krebs (2005) and put in broader legal context by Kirwin (2006).

Playing a prominent role in this Kansas “Scopes II” maneuver was John Calvert’s Intelligent Design Network, focusing by now on his one paramount issue, summarized in Calvert (2006): the “scientific materialism or methodological naturalism” that in his view is used to suppress all that “extraordinary evidence of design in living systems.” The Kansas 2005 standards would likewise incorporate the wordplay of Calvert’s exclusionary definition of science as a process seeking “more adequate” (but not explicitly natural) “explanations of natural phenomena,” Kirwin (2006, 694).

The quintessential new breed of ID advocate, Calvert was by now adept at distancing ID from any public linkage to Kulturkampf Christian dogmatism even while addressing his message to exactly that clientele, such as stressing “the messages of DNA” in his interview with Francis Slobodnik (2006) for Crusade magazine, a very conservative Catholic magazine put out by “The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property” with articles like D’Agostino (2005), warning how the world faces “demographic suicide” as lower fertility rates and “the encroaching materialistic and hedonistic values from the apostate West” lead to a “global underpopulation” crisis.

The Crusade Magazine worldview is very receptive to the broader Kulturkampf message of Calvert’s Intelligent Design: their coverage of the rise of Intelligent Design in the issue Calvert’s interview appeared in was explicitly titled Cultural Wars, Jeremiah Wells (2006). “His main contribution to the downfall of Western culture lay in his pretension that all life results from undirected natural causes,” Wells insisted of Darwin, dismissing the history of the theory and its scientific reception (outlined per section 1.4 above) with the facile summary: “He arrived at his fanciful ideas by 1838 and spent the next 20 years trying to prove it without much success by today’s scientific standards.”

And what “Cultural War” was Crusade out to fight? A reader survey showed 51% of their readers were expecting “a chastisement to the world in your lifetime” by God over mankind’s continued sinning, Crusade Magazine (2005b), but that 95% were sure world peace could be secured after all if only more people showed “devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.” What they had in mind here was reflected in Horvat (2007) on Fighting the Whole Cultural War, with their cover identifying salient targets they were set to tackle once the abortion issue was resolved to their satisfaction (which they expected to be soon): Atheism, Blasphemy, Cloning, Communism (this as the communist theme parks were fading from history and China retooled to embrace all the most troubling aspects of a Party-run monopoly capitalism), Contraception, Euthanasia, Free Love (and when has that term been in vogue since the era of crank-start cars and speakeasies), Immodesty, Homosexuality, Immoral Fashions (unpack that veil and longer hemlines, ladies), Paganism, Pornography, Promiscuity, Satanism (there’s a groundswell popular threat for you), and Sex Education. Poor Evolution didn’t even make the cut this time.

However temperate and scholarly the witnesses at Kansas II might sound, discoursing on scientific evidence and freedom of inquiry, hovering out in the wings was this Kulturkampf worldview. How much of that would be on display would depend on how much the curtains got ruffled.

In February 2005 KSBE chairman Steve Abrams, who had rubberstamped Willis’ 1999 standards, proposed that the Board hold special hearings “focused on the areas of disagreement outlined by the majority and minority positions of the Science Writing Committee,” chaired by a special subcommittee consisting of himself and two other creationist board members, Connie Morris and Kathy Martin, and lawyer Edward Sisson on hand to interrogate any pro-evolution witnesses that might turn up. Over a dozen witnesses would be called to defend the standards—but, curiously enough, none of the people who had actually drafted the standards would be set to testify.

Meanwhile, the Kansas State Department of Education had shown some concern over Calvert’s highhandedness. After the entire scientific community declined to participate in the KSBE hearings (including Richard Dawkins), KSDE invited Topeka civil rights lawyer Pedro Irigonegaray to participate in the Board’s hearings on behalf of mainstream science education. Irigonegaray was outraged to learn that the KSBE had earmarked $40,000 to pay for the travel expenses of witnesses: “At a time when our children’s education is at stake because we don’t even have a budget, our board was going to spend $40,000 to conduct a debate without a purpose,” Ortega (2005).

Irigonegaray (2005) argued that the Kansas State Board of Education had given the ID advocates “special opportunities to present their proposals,” granted “lawyer John Calvert unjustified access and influence over KSBE decisions,” and “ignored the recommendations of the science writing committee Majority in favor of advancing the Minority proposals.” The stage was now set for an interesting show, with the full hearing transcripts documented at Talk.Origins Archive (2005a-l), which one can juxtapose with the two hour highlights DVD New Liberty Video issued a few years later, optimistically titled Teaching Origins Objectively (2007), which objectivity they demonstrated in vivo by editing out any moments that didn’t buttress ID positions.

At the hearings, Calvert and Harris deployed all the by now congealed ID talking points, that the Minority Report did not “mandate the teaching of Intelligent Design,” and that in any case ID and “teaching the arguments against evolution” were not code words for creationism. As for what criteria would be used to decide what evidence might be brought forth in this laudable pedagogical effort, none of the ID advocates set out by example how evidential relevance would be vetted (such as the troubling YEC technicalities that had derailed the 1999 standards) once the dreaded “naturalism” was dislodged as an operational paradigm.

This was no abstract issue. On the one hand, some supporters of the Kansas efforts were happy to see “alternatives” to evolution like ID to be included without ever thinking about exactly what that might be, as Jason Rosenhouse (2005a) noted of George Diepenbrock (2005). But out in the hinterlands, creationists like Chuck Missler (2005c) were still viewing Kansas II in the same YEC big picture cosmological frame as the 1999 standards. “The good news is that there is a rising awareness that Evolution is bad science,” by which Missler meant the effort “to explain the origins of the universe using Darwin’s theories.” So while Missler’s background links included two nicked secondarily from the Discovery Institute website—Gibson (2005) from Fox News and Wilgoren (2005a) in the New York Times—his “Evolution Study Resources” still consisted only of ICR, AiG, and Kent Hovind’s Creation Science Evangelism.

The steepness of the slippery slope down which the grassroots mushed together ID and creationism with ease (while other supporters looked the other way and tried not to hear the often-audible thud as they eventually hit the ground) was not on the agenda at Kansas II. Indeed, instances when witnesses veered off topic and stumbled close to the demarcation cliff were promptly reined in, such as this exchange triggered by a question from Chairman Abrams:

ABRAMS: Doctor Harris, what is the purpose of science?

HARRIS: The purpose of science? I think science is to understand the natural world.

ABRAMS: I heard you agree a few minutes ago that it was a quest of knowledge?

HARRIS: It is that as well. That’s kind of the way we get there, but the goal, I think, is to understand how the world works.

ABRAMS: Is science a search for truth?

HARRIS: Yes, regarding the natural world.

ABRAMS: Is there a difference between evolution that we can observe and evolution that we cannot see?

HARRIS: Sure, yeah. Evolution you cannot see, you don’t know is actually—again, there’s that slippery term, but we’re talking about—hypotheses about how life forms came to be if that’s what you mean by evolution and we weren’t there to see how it happened, we don’t know how it happened. We have to leave it at that.

ABRAMS: That’s commonly called microevolution, macro evolution by some?

And with that, Harris was steered back to the safe antievolutionary turf of placing a barrier between the uncontroversial observable “microevolutionary” changes and the objectionable extrapolation to broader “macro” levels. As we’ll be exploring in the chapters to come, such distinctions make no sense at all in the light of current evidence, but Harris was in even deeper trouble here as he stepped close to a precipice the Kansas antievolutionary tag team was not about to address.

Left aside was the implication of that “science is to understand the natural world” thing—not the supernatural, or transcendent verities, but the physical world where you can weigh and measure and investigate with some degree of repeatability and reliability. But in a world of incomplete evidence, how do you know when you can draw the line and say stop here, naturalistic investigation, and proceed no farther! Implicit in the design argument is the presumption that at some stage scientific discovery can lay out those boundaries, across which their natural inferences cannot transgress. Both Behe’s “irreducible complexity” and Dembski’s “specified complexity” arguments rest on exactly that foundation, as we’ll see in later chapters, but neither Harris nor any of the other witnesses at Kansas II were keen on explaining why they drew the line in the sand where they did, and not just a bit farther out to include the YEC geology and cosmology arguments that likewise depend on placing limits on natural explanations and had, after all, been incorporated into the Kansas standards in 1999 under Abrams’ own watch.

This serious methodological question of demarcation was never addressed because it fell far from the core of their concerns, as seen not only in Harris’ testimony set out in Talk.Origins Archive (2005a) but cutting an equally wide swath as witnesses James Barham, Roger DeHart, Angus Menuge, John Millam, Warren Nord, and Jonathan Wells variously fretted over “materialism” in science, highlighted at length by critic Lenny Flank (2006a) in his online coverage of the affair at Creation Science Debunked (one among many ephemeral sites on this issue that has not survived the ebb and flow of Internet hosting).

Front and center in Kansas II were the Kulturkampf themes of philosophy and worldview, and at his first stint at bat Irigonegaray challenged Harris as to why he kept “bringing up atheism, materialism, naturalism, and humanism” when the standards the Minority Report was out to revise had made no mention of them. Harris spun a bit too tightly when he replied that the problem was that they did not mention these things, but ought to have since some scientists and philosophers took those positions and the regular standards had incorporated them on the sly—begging the question of whether these concepts belonged not to the practical working of science or secular education, but with the narrow obsessions of Kulturkampf antievolutionists like Harris.

For board member Kathy Martin, Intelligent Design was part of a broader “Christian agenda” for a nation she conceived of as not only Christian but fundamentally conservative just like her, and whose theology ought to be incorporated into public schools, from morality “in every class” to prayers, Ortega (2005). Similarly, Connie Morris urged her constituents to pray in support of their efforts on the board to oppose the “anti-god contempt and arrogance” represented by that “age-old fairytale” of evolution, Kirwin (2006, 692). Greg Lassey likewise showed how far removed their motives were from technical science issues when he claimed keeping the antievolution position out of the standards worked against families by “discrediting parents who reject materialism and the ethics and morals it fosters,” Fox News (2007a).

Nor were Harris, Martin, Morris and Lassey atypical in this regard. For some years Hank Hanegraaff’s Bible Answer Man had been popularizing the ID case in exactly this Kulturkampf manner. An August 2001 installment had him burbling how Intelligent Design promised “massive movement” in a “giant paradigm shift,” and recommended every Christian should have Dembski (1999a) on their “must reading” list, a work titled Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology. As guest, Dembski was asked what the “huge” effects would be of the Intelligent Design revolution: his first and only reply was that it would affect ethics (so much for the reformation of microbiology or vertebrate paleontology).

Having evidently forgot that ethics is not (and cannot be) a property of anything that ID has claimed to have empirically detected (from the “irreducible complexity” of bacterial flagella to the “specified complexity” of DNA), Dembski illustrated his moralizing tunnel vision with the “promiscuous lifestyles in Hollywood” (evidently forgetting the many errant Christian evangelists caught in affairs during this period). This condition he in turn attributed to a “sovereignty of the self” that Hanegraaff agreed had pervaded psychology, business and economics because of naturalistic Darwinism, a philosophy that Dembski assured Hanegraaff’s listeners was “overwhelmingly pessimistic about human possibilities.”

Asked a similar question eight years later, Dembski was still not thinking in terms of technical science understanding, but how “It’s going to change the national conversation” in a culture “so infused with materialistic and atheistic ideology,” Devon Williams (2007).

Beyond the moralizing tone of ID philosophy, there was also a severe conceptual vagueness when it came to what evolution involved, as Harris showed when asked for a succinct definition of that “slippery term” (as he put it in his exchange with Abrams). You may recall I managed it in three words in section 1.4 above: natural common descent. But anything so forensically straightforward could not evade Harris’ teleological misgivings as Irigonegaray continued to press him, until Harris had whittled all the back and forth of living history on Earth down to “all of life is here by chance” which in turn translated as a rejection of God. But few would comparably contend that because Bryce Canyon in Utah or the Grand Canyon in Arizona came about by natural geological development (“by chance” if you wanted to be excessively reductionist) that this would similarly grease the skids for ruling out the existence of all deities as a philosophical position. For Harris, though, teleology and process are inseparable, welded so tight that Kansas’ workaday science standards were never going to be allowed to slip between them.

All of which was not an unexpected tack for both sides to take, but in one of the more sublime moments in the history of battling creationism, Irigonegaray made a point of quizzing Calvert & Harris’ primary scientific ID witnesses on three issues: did they believe in the common descent of life, the descent of human beings, and how old did they think the Earth was?

Pretty straightforward questions, one would think—a way to put on the record where the witnesses were coming from, scientifically and philosophically. At the very least, making it harder for a YEC creationist to hide behind the rhetorical camouflage of ID. By the end of things, hearing subcommittee member Connie Morris would characterize Irigonegaray’s approach as “abusive,” Talk.Origins Archive (2005k). She would express no comparable concern over some of their own witnesses’ answers to those questions.

Only two witnesses left without their responses recorded: University of North Carolina philosophy professor Warren Nord (who was not asked about the chronology issue by Irigonegaray but revealed a Kulturkampf scope almost as broad when he averred that America’s religious believers suffered oppression comparable to woman and blacks and recommended religious perspectives be included across the school curriculum, including in economics and maybe even mathematics classes) and Italian geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti (whose accent was apparently so impenetrable that no transcript could even be made). Although not describing himself as a creationist, Sermonti (1993) nonetheless did a good impression of one in Creation magazine repeating common creationist mischaracterizations of human evolution evidence, and creationists like Weigand (1992) have welcomed him into the club without caveats. Attracted to a mystic slant on science akin to Rupert Sheldrake (more on him in due course), by 2005 the Discovery Institute was fielding Sermoniti’s eccentric antievolutionary oeuvres (from basic errors on the fossil record of insects to the claim that fossil hominids were some form of degenerate humans), which Bottaro (2005) characterized as “mostly superficial, and often downright misleading, practically overwhelming the reader with an avalanche of factoids, pseudo-claims, and anecdotes.”

Of those with translatable testimony at Kansas II, all but three rejected the full common descent stuff, and especially so for human beings. Michael Behe and historian of science James Barham were ok with universal common descent, while Steve Meyer and Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol hedged with only a “limited common descent” that might include people. Meyer also told Fox News that “the idea that evolution is nothing more than the idea that things change or that things have a common ancestor is false,” Gibson (2005).

Regardless of their positions, though, there was a marked frailty of curiosity when it came to thinking about how we did come to be here, and when, with witness after witness indicating they really didn’t think much about that. As for the third question, as Wilgoren (2005a) noted in the New York Times, and which article the Discovery Institute felt comfortable to repost at their website, “most agreed on 4.5 billion years.” That would include Harris himself, along with ID stalwarts like Behe, Meyer, Charles Thaxton and Jonathan Wells, to lesser-known witnesses like Akyol and Barham, molecular biologist Russell Carlson, nutritional biochemist Robert DiSilvestro, theoretical chemist John Millam, oceanographer Edward Peltzer and physician Ralph Seelke.

Incidentally, the number of molecular biologists, biochemists and chemists in this cavalcade of Darwinian skepticism (joining William Morrow in Edwards v. Aguillard, Denton, Behe and William Harris) brought to mind an observation by John Wilkins (2001) concerning how the genetic definition of evolution as ultimately just changes in allele frequency could accompany a dissatisfaction with evolutionary explanations at the macro level: “Geneticists have observed in small scale a general resistance of the molecular components of the genome to change from the ‘norm’ or ‘wild type’. For this reason, if any biologist were to be anti-evolutionist, it would typically be one who works at the molecular level, such as a molecular geneticist or biochemist.”

But microevolutionary biological expertise would presumably give no hint about their opinion on the age of the Earth—that would suggest an entirely different set of philosophical presumptions, and Wilgoren did not follow up regarding the quarter of the witnesses who were less forthcoming on the “age of the Earth” question. Philosopher Angus Menuge was vaguest, Talk.Origins Archive (2005h), declaring he had no opinion whatsoever about the age of the planet on which he resided, a surprising (if not alarming) black void in his cognitive Map of Time given his professed interest in understanding the history of science.

Plant geneticist John Sanford (“primary inventor of the GeneGun technology”) assured Calvert that, “one can, in fact, use the methodology of science to study things without a materialistic or a naturalistic philosophy behind it,” Talk.Origins Archive (2005d). Although Calvert’s questioning took pains to highlight how Sanford used to be an evolutionist before departing atheism for Christianity twenty years before, there was no delving into what manner of non-evolutionary conclusions Sanford had come to since, now liberated from all that naturalistic deadweight. Not an easy thing to pin down, as it happened, evidenced when Irigonegaray’s Q&A provoked a labored round of chronological badminton:

IRIGONEGARAY: First of all, do you have a personal opinion as to what the age of the world is?

SANFORD: I do have a personal opinion.

IRIGONEGARAY: And what is that personal opinion specifically as to the age? And I’m interested only in the age, not an explanation.

SANFORD: I believe that I was wrong in my previous belief that it’s 4.5 billion years old and that it’s much younger.

IRIGONEGARAY: How old is the earth, in your opinion?

SANFORD: I cannot intelligently say how old it is except it’s much younger than I think widely believed.

IRIGONEGARAY: Give me your best estimate.

SANFORD: Less than 100,000 years old.

IRIGONEGARAY: Less than 10,000?

SANFORD: Conceivably.

IRIGONEGARAY: Conceivably less than 10,000?

SANFORD: Yes.

IRIGONEGARAY: Conceivably less than 5,000?

SANFORD: No.

IRIGONEGARAY: So it’s somewhere between 5 and 10,000 years of age?

SANFORD: Between 5 and 100,000. But I would like to—.

IRIGONEGARAY: No, I’m asking the questions.

SANFORD: Okay. You ask the questions.

IRIGONEGARAY: Do you accept the general principle of common descent, that all of life is biologically related back to the beginning of life? Yes or no?

SANFORD: No.

IRIGONEGARAY: Do you accept that human beings are related by common descent to prehominid ancestors?

SANFORD: No.

IRIGONEGARAY: If the answer is no, as you have indicated—.

SANFORD: Uh-huh.

IRIGONEGARAY: —what is your explanation for how human—the human species came into existence?

SANFORD: My explanation, humbly offered, is that we were created by a special creation, by God.

IRIGONEGARAY: And when did that occur?

SANFORD: Relatively recent by—by—in terms of conventional wisdom. Very—very recently by conventional wisdom.

IRIGONEGARAY: Well, according to your opinion, when did that occur?

SANFORD: I’m not going to speculate on—on—.

IRIGONEGARAY: No, I’m not asking you to speculate.

SANFORD: Well, you’re—.

IRIGONEGARAY: Based—please listen to my question.

SANFORD: What is my—.

IRIGONEGARAY: Based on your opinion, when did that occur?

SANFORD: It happened recently. And it’s not just my opinion, it’s based upon—.

IRIGONEGARAY: Sir—.

SANFORD: —analysis—.

IRIGONEGARAY: I’m not asking about recently. Do you have a date.

SANFORD: I do not have a date.

IRIGONEGARAY: Do you have an estimate of the date?

SANFORD: I do not.

IRIGONEGARAY: Less than 5,000 years ago?

SANFORD: You know, I’m not going to—you can play that game.

IRIGONEGARAY: I’m not—.

SANFORD: But I—I’m saying I don’t know exactly how old it is.

IRIGONEGARAY: All right. That’s fine.

SANFORD: But I do—I’m willing to tell you that I think it’s considerably younger than—much younger than people are generally told.

And thus did a visible non-intersection occur between the spread of Deep Time and humanity’s observable tracks on it (several million years as you slip back into tool-making hominids, which would be many multiples of the age of the Earth by Sanford’s dead reckoning) and the considerably smaller tortucan-shrouded landscape of the co-developer of the GeneGun.

High school biology teacher Bryan Leonard visited from Ohio, where he had been similarly active in trying to revise their science standards to incorporate ID criticism of evolution, including purported problems with the fossil record, Talk.Origins Archive (2005e). As for the age of the earth, Irigonegaray lobbed an even less responsive shuttlecock with someone who clearly had quite confined expectations of what part he was obliged to play while onstage at the Abrams KSBE kabuki theater:

IRIGONEGARAY: All right. I have a few questions that I want to ask you for the record. First, what is your opinion as to what the age of the world is?

LEONARD: I really don’t have an opinion.

IRIGONEGARAY: You have no opinion as to what the age of the world is?

LEONARD: Four to four point five billion years is what I teach my students.

IRIGONEGARAY: I’m asking what is your opinion as to what the age of the world is?

LEONARD: Um, I was asked to come out here to talk about my experiences as a high school biology teacher.

IRIGONEGARAY: I’m asking you, sir—.

LEONARD: I was not under the impression that I was asked to come out here—.

IRIGONEGARAY: I’m asking you—.

LEONARD: —talking about—.

IRIGONEGARAY: —sir, what is your personal opinion as to what the age of the world is?

LEONARD: Four—four to four point five billion years is what I teach my students, sir.

IRIGONEGARAY: That’s not my question. My question is, what is your personal opinion as to what the age of the world is?

LEONARD: Again, I was under the impression to come out here and talk about my professional experience—.

IRIGONEGARAY: Is there a difference?

LEONARD: —more of—.

IRIGONEGARAY: Is there a difference between your personal opinion and what you teach students the age of the world is?

LEONARD: Four to four point five billion years is what I teach my students, sir.

IRIGONEGARAY: Is—my question is, is there a difference between your personal opinion and what you teach your students?

LEONARD: Again, you are putting a spin on the question is—you know, now I’ll spin my answer, sir, to say that my opinion is irrelevant. Four to four point five billion years is what I teach my students.

Irigonegaray then moved on, having failed to extract this precious datum from the Official Intelligent Design Secrets Act envelope, but certainly illustrating the level of devotion Leonard had in practice to the honest and open discussion of science topics unfettered by preconceptions like naturalism. Try teaching that controversy in Leonard’s class.

Another Ohio import was University of Akron cardiovascular physiology researcher Dan Ely, who had worked with Leonard on revising Ohio’s state standards, Talk.Origins Archive (2005e). Ely repeated similar claims about the inadequacy of molecular estimations of animal phylogeny as Jonathan Wells had earlier, but regarding Irigonegaray’s questions Ely found it even harder to veer off script than Leonard:

IRIGONEGARAY: Welcome to Kansas. I have a few questions for the record for you. First, I have a group of yes or no questions that I would like for you to answer, please. What is your opinion as to the age of the earth?

ELY: In light of time I would say most of the evidence that I see, I read and I understand points to an old age of the earth.

IRIGONEGARAY: And how old is that age?

ELY: I don’t know. I just know what I read with regards to data. It looks like it’s four billion years.

IRIGONEGARAY: And is that your personal opinion?

ELY: No. My personal opinion is I really don’t know. I’m struggling.

IRIGONEGARAY: You’re struggling with what the age of the earth is?

ELY: Yeah. Yeah. I’m not sure. There’s a lot of ways to measure the age. Meteorites is one way. There’s a lot of elements used. There’s a lot of assumptions can be used and those assumptions can be challenged so I don’t really know.

IRIGONEGARAY: What is the range that you are instructing?

ELY: I think the range we heard today, somewhere between 5,000 and four billion.

IRIGONEGARAY: You—you—you believe the earth may be as young as 5,000 years old. Is that correct?

ELY: Well, we’re learning that there’s such a thing as junc—.

IRIGONEGARAY: Sir, answer—.

ELY: —really has a function.

IRIGONEGARAY: Just please answer my question, sir.

ELY: We’re learning a lot about micro—.

IRIGONEGARAY: Sir? Mr. Abrams, please instruct the witness to answer the question.

ABRAMS: I think—.

IRIGONEGARAY: The question was—and winking at him is not going to do you any good. Answer my question. Do you believe the earth may be as young as 5,000 years old?

ELY: It could be.

One may judge which is more troubling: a 21st century biology professor at a university unable to decide between 5000 and 4,000,000,000—or one who is so confused on the point that when asked about it can only fall back on a rote invocation of “junc” (likely the transcriptionist’s typo for junk) DNA and “micro” evolution, biological topics having no relevance whatsoever in determining how old a planet is.

When Ely returned to his efforts to do for Ohio what he advocated for Kansas, Ohio State Board of Education member Martha Wise drew on Ely’s Kansas II testimony to accuse him of creationist sympathies. This didn’t set well with Casey Luskin (2006b) at Evolution News & Views:

When advocating that the Board repeal the Critical Analysis of Evolution Lesson Plan, Board Member Martha K. Wise repeatedly emphasized the claim that authors of the Critical Analysis of Evolution Lesson Plan were creationists. Wise alleged that during the Kansas hearings, Dan Ely testified that he was “struggling with the age of the earth” and stated “He [Ely] thinks the earth is only Five-thousand years old. That’s not just ID. That’s young earth creationism.”

Ely’s testimony fully rebutted Wise’s misrepresentation of Ely’s viewpoint. Ely said that in Kansas, many of the witnesses were asked about their views on the age of the earth. “My answer was’ We heard today anywhere from five-thousand years to five million years or five billion years,” and everybody laughed. “And most of the evidence looks like it’s very old.” Ely called Martha Wise’s alleged explanation of Ely’s views on the age of the earth “totally erroneous.”

Incidentally, Wise openly identified herself as a creationist, stating “Remember, I’m a creationist myself. I believe in God and I believe that God created the heavens and the earth.” Yet Wise felt it important to state that Dan Ely is a “known creationist” who she even alleged is a young earth creationist. Because she believes that Ely is a creationist and helped author the critical analysis of evolution lesson plan, she listed this as the third reason that the lesson plan must be rejected. Thus according to Wise, it is permissible for creationists to advocate against critical analysis of evolution without promoting religion. But when creationists do advocate for critical analysis of evolution, they are necessarily pushing their religious views. This is despite the fact that non-creationists, such as Dr. Rick Sternberg in South Carolina, have advocated for teaching students about scientific challenges to evolution. The implication according to Wise is that creationists have fewer political rights than do non-creationists.

Similarly, Board Member Hovis stated that he wanted to see more religion in the lives of teenagers. Hovis was one of the strongest opponents of the critical analysis lesson plan. This raises the question of whether a double standard would prevent pro-critical analysis of evolution Board members from making such statements.

While a religious person may well recommend more belief for teenagers, it is by no means inconsistent for them also to be leery of injecting that religious enthusiasm into science classes, a distinction evidently lost on Luskin. And while a charitable interpretation of Ely’s part in all this might be that Ely had some difficulty recalling what Ely thought or said, Luskin’s spin was more evasive given Ely’s testimony quoted above concerning his “struggling” with the age of the Earth. Invoking Sternberg for some further credibility by association depends in turn on whether Sternberg’s treatment of the data was any better, but that still doesn’t let Luskin off the hook when it comes to gauging Ely’s expertise.

Around the time Luskin was burnishing Ely’s profile, several of Ely’s fellow faculty members (evolutionary ecologists Stephen Weeks and Peter Niewiarowski, and paleontologist Lisa Park) took issue with Ely’s claimed proficiency concerning genetic evidence in a letter to the Kansas School Board, Hayes (2006a-b). In their view, Ely’s technical work had no bearing on evolutionary taxonomy and “it is abundantly clear that Dr. Ely has a poor understanding of evolutionary biology.”