Chapter I

The critics of evolution in Ohio and Georgia did not close up shop after their 2002 mini-triumphs. They continued to press for revisions in the science standards to further nudge them in the desired direction, and Intelligent Design proponents like Paul Nesselroade (2004) at The Wedge Update continued to play off this activity to advance their own non-advancing niche. There was a body of teachers ready to accommodate this: 31% of Ohio teachers planned to give some coverage to ID or creationism in their classes according to Bilica & Skoog (2004), though how much of that represented a shift in opinion due to the ID campaign was unclear, given that such numbers were fairly typical nationally for creationism-friendly teachers. In any event, a new lesson plan building on the SEAO foundation ended up as a full official proposal for Ohio, Ohio Department of Education (2004), a discretely worded exhortation “to critically analyze five different aspects of evolutionary theory” (homology, the fossil record, antibiotic resistance, peppered moths and endosymbiosis) that avoided even the term Intelligent Design to keep things ever so scientific—except for the fact that the recommended print resources represented the ID position and the website resources waded into YEC, Ohio Citizens for Science (2004a-c).

The standard set a benchmark for students to “Evaluate the reliability and credibility of sources,” Ohio Department of Education (2004, 319-320), with an explicit disclaimer that the OBE offered no “endorsement” for any of the content lurking in the listed resources. But the structure of the lessons pressed a thumb down on the scale to give undo weight to one side as they offered “Brief Challenging Sample” responses, Ohio Department of Education (2004, 326-328).

It was noted that “some scientists” disputed homology, for instance, and that a “growing number of scientists now question that Archaeopteryx and other transitional fossils really are transitional forms.” But who those “some” were remained unidentified. One could surmise they had Denton (1985) and Wells (2000a) in mind, as these were the only authors on their bibliography who could be fairly characterized as having that opinion—but that’s a far cry from a “growing number” of scientists who would have needed to have defined what transitional forms would have looked like and reevaluated the full body of evidence accordingly. Those two happened to be non-paleontologists who scrupulously avoided doing that essential taxonomic task, and so were only declaring their own personal incredulity.

To explain why the “some” didn’t know what they were talking about would involve diving into technical literature and reprising the history of scientific development on a scale that might not be within the comfort zone of a lot of students or teachers at the 10th grade level, as readers may well see when I get around to those topics in the chapters to come. But recall section 1.3 above on just Punctuated Equilibrium—that is the level of investigative detail that has to be engaged when it comes to properly evaluating “the reliability and credibility of sources” in this area. To ask students or teachers to have to recapitulate the study of decades in a high school science context is to threaten to burden then with (to borrow from Dawkins) “a gratuitous waste of precious time.”

Nor is this issue unique to science. Exactly the same problems arise if instruction has to justify fundamental issues of history or health education—especially if the standards are skewed to give a leg up to interest groups that couldn’t earn their way onto the field the normal way (from ancient astronaut believers to vaccination skeptics), but are brought into the education game by political allies who specially rewrite the rules to include them and will raise a fuss should anybody challenge their credibility. In a most fundamental way, the evolution education issue is just the tip of a very contentious iceberg whose dangerous exposed edges may be found ready to sink domestic tranquility all over the culture.

While the design camp did not demonstrate by example how open they were to really evaluating “the reliability and credibility” of who was citing what beyond the ID curtain, Ohio Citizens for Science (2004a-c) and Baillieul et al. (2004a-c) were not so circumspect. The content owed a lot to Wells’ Icons of Evolution and Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, both sources sufficiently flawed factually to question their prominence as yet more “gratuitous waste of precious time.” But it didn’t take a lot of time before geologist Thomas Baillieul found basic methodological problems when he checked on the remaining listed books and articles:

Many of the cited references are not readily available to teachers or students. For example, Principles of Numerical Taxonomy by Sokal and Sneath is over 40 years old and out-of-print. Being a college-level text on the advanced statistical treatment of taxonomic data, it is also far beyond the level of 10^th Grade Biology. Also, having been written in 1963, it contains essentially no information on the burgeoning field of genetic homology. Several of the references are incorrectly or incompletely cited, making a search for the original article more difficult. This indicated also that the author of the lesson plan never actually read the articles in question, but simply copied the citations (with their encumbent errors) from another source. I used my AAAS membership to access the on-line archives of Science, and EBSCOHost through the Columbus Library System (as recommended in the lesson) to find other journal articles. In spite of these resources, I still needed to call upon university colleagues to find copies of the older Natural History and Biological Journal of the Linnean Society articles. If I had difficulty in locating references with a reasonably diligent search, then it is unfair to think that a 10th Grade Biology teacher in rural Ohio will have better success. Baillieul (2004a).

Things were no better regarding the website resources being recommended for the new Ohio standards. Some of the technical links were satisfactory, but because they were aimed at college level shoptalk would have been largely unintelligible unless you were more grounded in the subject than 10th grade students were likely to be. It’s the reason why junior high school students aren’t trundled off to college right then and there—there are basics of terminology and technique you have to get acclimated to first.

Of far greater concern were the easily readable ones, such as Access Research Network or the website operated by Richard Milton offered among resources for the “Homology” section ((Milton brings an especially big wince for me, as the exploration of Milton’s amazing range of dumb statements in the chapters to come earn him the accolade of “Poster Child for Scholarly Incompetence”). Or the explicitly Christian apologetics of Apologetics Press and Answers in Genesis cropping up apropos “Antibiotic resistance.” AiG, ICR and ARN appeared concerning “Peppered Moths” (a case of observed natural adaptation that will be covered fully next chapter as an especially fine illustration of the inadequacies of antievolutionary secondary apologetics) and AiG bobbed up again under the “Spontaneous generation + evolution” topic. In the “Fossil record” department, the fine American Geological Institute website rubbed shoulders with the creationist Christian Answers—though nothing apart from supreme Kulturkampf straw-grasping could have explained the inclusion of the freerepublic.com discussion site (“A Conservative News Forum”) having no imaginable relevance for serious paleontology research (or any other science topic) at any level.

If the idea was to suggest problems with evolutionary theory, one particularly odd instance of a specific technical Internet reference was a link to McFadden (1999) on the endosymbiotic origin of chloroplasts in plant cells. Perfectly fine work, as it happened, which Baillieul regarded as rather too technical for a high school science class—and which would only have reminded any student reader of how biologists were working out the natural origins of complex plant cellular systems without the slightest deference to design theory.

The 2004 Ohio recommendations represented yet another example of the parasitical citation addiction that occupies so much of antievolutionary science evidence “scholarship,” a methodological mess that illustrated yet again the pitfalls of what happens when motivated creationists get their hands on science pedagogy:

A major element of this controversial lesson plan is for 10^th Grade Biology students, with minimal guidance, to seek out sources of information and “evidence” to one of the two sides proposed for each aspect of evolutionary theory. The cited references for each of the aspects have been shown to be either: out of date for discussion of current topics in evolutionary biology; out-of-print; inaccurate in their content; not pertinent to the stated topic; containing material at too high a level of complexity for introductory high school student use; or not readily available to students and teachers. Given the limited choice of options available to find reference material, most students will seek to obtain their “evidence” from the Internet. Baillieul (2004b).

And this was the farrago that William Dembski (2006c, 84) glibly characterized as “the decision by the Ohio board of education to permit weaknesses and criticisms of evolutionary theory to be taught” (without any discussion of any of the details, of course) and pegged this as one of three “recent notable ‘scores’ for the ID movement” (the other two being a PBS showing of the ID video Unlocking the Mystery of Life and the publication of Gonzalez & Richards’ anthropic argument book, The Privileged Planet). With that one had at least a clearer heuristic as to what Dembski considered notable.

Alas, Dembski’s hurrah was a tad premature, for although Cochran and Owens-Fink continued to press for an ID slant in the standards, the “critically analyze” buzzword was ultimately removed, Branch (2006a-b). This turn of events prompted Chicago pastor Mark Begin (2006) to decry this embrace of the “junk science” represented by “dogmatic evolution” for World magazine, while Rudoren (2006) quoted the DI’s John West fulminating that “It’s an outrageous slap in the face to the citizens of Ohio.”

By then the standards debate had become a campaign issue, Tara C. Smith (2006a). Scientists weren’t too happy after Owens-Fink dismissed the National Academy of Sciences as “a group of so-called scientists.” Though this wasn’t so hyperbolically offensive as creationist Robert Bowie Johnson (2012) characterizing the National Academy of Sciences as “a hierarchy of morons,” it still didn’t bode well as a local social icebreaker, and Cornelia Dean (2006) noted many of the Ohio scientists who Owens-Fink had been ignoring over the years came out to endorse her opponent. More than just scientists appeared to have been moved to action, though: apparently unphased by their public face-slapping, West’s “citizens of Ohio” voted Owens-Fink out of office by a wide margin that November, MacNeill (2006).