Unintelligible Design

There is a long, narrow room in the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History that I stumbled on one day several years ago when I was visiting with my wife and two sons. On the museum's floor plan, the room is simply labeled "Bones." And that's just what it is, a roomful of bones. On both sides of the room are glass cases from floor to ceiling with complete skeletons of a wide range of modern vertebrates arranged taxonomically.

Not many people were in the room at any one time, and the ones who stumbled on it, many of them looking for a nearby special exhibit, did not, for the most part, linger. A young woman and a young man whom I took to be students sat on the floor with sketch pads skillfully rendering the skeletons of two animals. My two young sons quickly grew fidgety, and my wife took them to another exhibit. I told her I'd catch up with them. I spent nearly an hour moving along the displays, transfixed by the skeletons and the relationships they revealed.

Later, I said to my wife that I did not understand how anyone who visited that exhibit could doubt the reality of evolution. The skeletons screamed "descent with modification from a common ancestor."

The clash between scientists who understand evolution as the organizing principle of modern biology and people--most, but not all, nonscientists--who reject evolution and insist on a divine origin of life as it exists today on Earth has been a long-running theme in my career as a science journalist. For someone who writes for a newsmagazine covering the chemical enterprise, it is, I suppose, an unlikely theme, but it has been there, on and off, for 25 years.

One of my first major stories for C&EN in 1981 was covering the two-week trial in federal district court in Little Rock, Ark., in which a number of plaintiffs challenged the legality of a state law that mandated that "creationism" be taught in any science class in which evolution was taught. Creationism holds that scientific evidence supports the literal accuracy of the creation story of Genesis. In a forcefully worded opinion, Judge William R. Overton ruled that the Arkansas law was unconstitutional. It seemed to me at the time that Overton's opinion settled the matter.

It didn't, of course, any more than did the 1968 Supreme Court ruling that overturned an Arkansas law that prohibited the teaching of evolution in public school. Opponents of evolution are still trying to have creationism taught alongside evolution. Advocates of "intelligent design"--the successor to creationism designed to avoid its constitutional problems--argue for their ideas to be taught alongside evolution. Intelligent design does not insist on the literal truth of Genesis, but maintains that the complexity of living organisms proves that they could not have come into existence through random variations guided by natural selection. Instead, its proponents argue that such complexity proves that living organisms are the product of intelligent design.

In states ranging from Georgia to Pennsylvania to Kansas, opponents of evolution are pushing school boards to mandate the teaching of intelligent design alongside evolution in science classes or placing stickers in biology textbooks denigrating evolution as an unproven theory. Lawsuits by concerned parents and/or teachers continue to rebuff these efforts, but it is debilitating to have to continue to fight this battle.

This does not seem like it should be hard. Although polls consistently show that a solid majority of Americans do not accept the reality of evolution, I want to think that, if I could get every schoolkid in the U.S. into that room in the Museum of Natural History along with a good biology teacher, the debate would be over. (I know, I'm dreaming.) I also know that some chemists don't think this is our battle. In the increasingly multidisciplinary world of modern science, however, where a lot of chemists are working on biological questions, evolution is one of our organizing principles, too. We have much to do.

Thanks for reading.