A Visit to the New Creation "Museum"

There has been much publicity about the new Creation Museum built by Answers in Genesis in northern Kentucky (greater Cincinnati). My wife and I decided to pay the museum a visit as part of a family vacation. We took the tour on May 29, 2007, the day after the Grand Opening. Despite continuing construction and a few incomplete exhibits, I can only describe the museum as impressive. The phrase from Jurassic Park, "spared no expense", kept coming to mind throughout the tour, and with all the animated dinosaurs, lush vegetation, and tropical sounds, it actually felt like a Jurassic Park!

The museum is exquisitely designed and well choreographed. Visitors are led through a long sequence of exhibits interspersed with videos — some on screens among the exhibits and some in comfortable theaters. The exhibits are ordered by the "7 C's of History: Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross, Consummation" (McKeever 2007) and have considerable diversity. The Dragon Theater, Special Effects Theater, and Stargazers' Planetarium are not part of the exhibit sequence and can be visited for scheduled presentations. The Special Effects Theater features vibrating chairs and splashes of water — during a presentation of Noah's Flood, of course.

The exotic feel of the museum extends well beyond the exhibits and theaters. Noah's Café has the sounds and décor of a jungle and overlooks the lake outside, which has fountains and a variety of interesting bridges. The bookstore features a dragon theme. There are diverse activities and special exhibits for children. Visitors are photographed on their way into the museum and offered computerized prints with dinosaur backgrounds on their way out. The museum is full of helpful staff members wearing safari vests that read "Prepare to Believe". With a touch of humor, exhibits still under construction are labeled with signs that say "This Space is Still Evolving!" Photographs of the museum and its exhibits are available on the Web (AiG 2007; Lynn 2007), but hardly do it justice. The museum is well worth a half-day visit.

What is the message and presentation style of the Creation Museum? This is where things get interesting. First of all, Creation is only one of the "7 C's" presented in the museum. They all get extensive coverage, though Creation Week and Noah's Flood take center stage. The crowning event of the main tour is the Last Adam Theater where the gory details of Jesus's crucifixion are vividly portrayed — all to offset the sin committed in the Garden of Eden by Adam and Eve presented earlier. Visitors are encouraged to discuss this Christian message with trained staff members as they exit the theater. Perhaps a more appropriate name would be the Christian Museum.

Which creationism?
As a close follower of young-earth creationism, I was curious about many subtle aspects of the presentation. Most observers are hardly aware of the striking conflicts among creationists, both in terms of their beliefs and their presentation styles. The Creation Museum is the brainchild of Ken Ham, founder and president of Answers in Genesis USA and author of such books as The Lie: Evolution and The Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved (Ham 1987, 2000). Ham has a radio program called Answers with Ken Ham devoted to mocking evolution and "millions of years" with simplistic logic and innuendo — blaming these beliefs for social ills such as racism, drugs, and pornography. At first I expected the tone of the museum to fully reflect Ham's negative propaganda style.

However, I was pleased to learn that Kurt Wise — a less propaganda-oriented creationist — was hired as a scientific consultant for the museum and played a major role in designing the exhibits. Kurt Wise and I were both graduate students under Stephen Jay Gould, and we have remained friends over the years despite our different perspectives. Richard Dawkins (2001) singled Wise out as "an honest creationist," willing to admit when scientific evidence does not weigh in his favor. Wise despises evolution bashing and avoids most aspects of apologetics. His books (Wise 2002, Wise and Richardson 2004) simply lay out the Christian story and seek to build historical models that incorporate both scriptural and scientific data. Wise shuns the limelight that Ham thrives in. The common thread that links Ham and Wise is an absolute belief in biblical accuracy and authority. For example, both accept the Genesis account of animals' and humans' being created on Day Six of creation week, so both have concluded that dinosaurs and humans co-existed on earth — a conclusion prominently displayed throughout the Creation Museum. But beyond this biblical worldview they have little in common.

Kurt Wise's contribution to the museum is easy to recognize. A major theme of the exhibits is introduced in the Dinosaur Dig Site diorama near the beginning of the tour. Two paleontologists are excavating together as colleagues, and each explains how his "starting point" determines his interpretation of the fossils. One begins with "Human Reason" and believes in long ages of fossil deposition; the other begins with "God's Word" and believes the fossils formed quickly in Noah's Flood. The two perspectives are presented as equals with no test for evaluating them (not yet, at least). One observer commented: "Here I was very surprised. The museum, so far, does not seem as militant as I was expecting. This exhibit does not say that creationism is the correct choice (where, obviously, it must be — this is the Creation Museum), but instead seems to be trying to only allow creationism to be equal to evolution" (Lynn 2007). This respectful contrast continues in a series of exhibits on fossilization and the history of life. For example, a diagram of the "Evolution Tree" shows common ancestry for all living things, whereas the "Creation Orchard" shows diversification within a number of separately-created "kinds". The contrast between the old-earth/evolution and young-earth/creationist viewpoints continues, in various forms, through all the science-oriented exhibits. Creationism is thereby presented as a legitimate alternative science rather than a non-science or anti-science perspective. This represents a simple but powerful harmony for those trying to reconcile Christian doctrine with science.

What likely escapes even the most sympathetic visitors is the modernness of the creationist theories being presented in the museum. Elsewhere I have summarized the latest historical modeling by young-earth creationists (Heaton 2007). The museum presents no history of creationist thinking — only the latest conclusions of prominent young-earth model builders. For example, the old notion of special creation of species is never mentioned anywhere in the museum. Ironically, while creationists tend to disparage Charles Darwin, they have fully accepted the primary conclusion of his Origin of Species: that similar species are related and have a common ancestor. Modern creationists simply put limits on how far evolution can go in a young-earth timeframe. This allows them to accept the undeniable evidence for microevolution while dismissing macroevolution. An entire creationist society (the Baraminology Study Group) has emerged to work out the boundaries between the Genesis "kinds" (baramins), but these creationists and their efforts are not mentioned at the museum (see RNCSE 2006 Jul/Aug; 26 [4] for several articles on "baraminology"). Only a general outline of their perspective is illustrated.

Other modern efforts by creationists exhibited in the museum include Catastrophic Plate Tectonics, the rapid formation of coal, the post-Flood ice age, and the carving of the Grand Canyon by the catastrophic draining of post-Flood lakes. Once again the theorists and the history of their research are not covered, but only a general outline of their conclusions. I was disappointed that the pros and cons of these models are not developed in the museum as they are (to some degree) in the creationist literature (see Wise 2002). I got the impression that the scientific aspects were being downplayed compared to the larger Christian story. However, Wise informed me of delays in several scientific videos that are yet to come on line, so this part of the museum may be expanded. One video currently online includes an interview with creationist Michael Oard discussing his modeling of the post-Flood ice age. The museum fails to acknowledge that Oard is an ardent critic of the Catastrophic Plate Tectonics model, exhibited just a few feet away. Creationism is presented as standardized doctrine worthy of uniform acceptance throughout the museum, while in reality this is hardly so. Creationists hold radically divergent views on basic factual issues, such as which rock layers were deposited by Noah's Flood.

Balanced treatment?
Are the scientific merits of creationism and evolution presented fairly in the museum? This is perhaps the most important but also the most complicated question to answer. Science and its underlying assumptions can be addressed at many levels. At the most basic philosophical level, science makes assumptions that deserve questioning, and supernatural intervention is within the scope of philosophical consideration. But the exhibits of the Creation Museum are not aimed at science's philosophical assumptions but at its empirical successes. The comparative results of "Human Reason" and "God's Word" presented in the museum in no way meet the same scientific standards. Young-earth creation models are a hodge-podge of religious and scientific components judged mainly by scripture. The model presented in the museum includes familiar scientific elements such as microevolution, plate tectonics, and an ice age (not mentioned in the Bible, but not contradicting it), while other equally well-established scientific conclusions such as the Big Bang, the antiquity of the earth, and the close relationship between humans and apes are rejected simply because they cannot be harmonized with a literal reading of Genesis. This is a biblical worldview with a few scientific elements thrown in for show. The creation model presented in the museum represents a reconciliation that holds true to the Bible, but this does not mean that the fit is good or that the conglomeration is scientific. In the primary literature some creationists have willingly admitted the scientific drawbacks of their models (see Heaton 2007; Wise 2002), but the museum presents creationism as a fully developed, unified model that covers all the scientific and scriptural evidence. Untrained visitors will be deceived by this presentation. To be honest the museum needs to admit frankly that creationism is not scientific and that its attempts to incorporate scientific findings are meager at best.

Despite the portrayal of the creationist and evolutionary models as equal scientific alternatives throughout the museum exhibits, there are subtle suggestions that creationism holds a better fit with the data. For example, in an exhibit on coal formation, the "problem" of clay layers within the coal is mentioned, and visitors are told that the young-earth model has a simple explanation for this while the old-earth model does not. The proposed explanation for the clay is not provided, nor is the reported "problem" for the old-earth model. In reality the same explanation, such as a storm with turbid runoff, would be adequate to explain the clay in either model.

Sleight-of-hand tricks of this type are far more egregious in other museum presentations, particularly the major video productions. For an extra fee visitors can watch a show in the Stargazers' Planetarium. This show includes an excellent presentation on the scale of the universe, including many recent astronomical findings, and light-years are used as the unit of measure. The show invites the question of how light could have traveled millions of light-years if the universe is only about 6000 years old. But visitors are assured that there are several simple explanations for how light could have traveled more quickly in the past and that many astronomical features, such as spiral galaxies and near-star Jupiter-like planets, cannot be explained by old-universe theories. In reality young-earth creationists have made no meaningful progress in resolving the starlight problem, and there is little agreement on the matter. One favorite explanation (as deceptive as it is ad hoc) is that God simply created the light en route to earth (Wise 2002: 64–5, 87). Creationists have no explanations of their own for astronomical objects other than "God made them," and creationist astronomy lags far behind creationist biology and geology in its development.

But even these attacks on conventional science pale in comparison with the show being presented in the museum's Special Effects Theater. This show is wildly comical and entertaining. It features a star-struck mannequin named Wendy sitting on stage by a campfire, alone in a desert wilderness, contemplating whether there might be a God. Two young men dressed as angels come flying in to take Wendy on a grand tour of creation and Christian history. These angels portray the voices of "evolution" and "millions of years" as evils sent to confuse people and lead them away from truth. They tell Wendy that radiometric dates are based on "assumptions" and therefore mean nothing. In a truly offensive scene the two angels (sans halos) appear as students in the back of a classroom where the teacher is trying to explain evolution using a slide show. The angels swap their own slides for his and proceed to harass the teacher at every turn. The teacher is portrayed as a dogmatic, bumbling idiot who holds to evolution despite all the evidence against it and cannot offer a coherent explanation to save his life. Incidentally, Answers in Genesis has published and is heavily promoting a new book called Evolution Exposed: Your Evolution Answer Book for the Classroom (Patterson 2006). This book, which is sold in the museum, encourages high school students to interrupt and challenge their teachers if evolution or an ancient earth is taught, and it provides them with copious ammunition. The museum's special effects show appears to be a demonstration of how students are to implement this aggressive, disrespectful behavior.

It is hard to miss the schizophrenia going on at the Creation Museum in terms of its presentation style. Kurt Wise informed me that these materials were created prior to his involvement and that the museum is trying to obtain the video masters in order to edit out the offensive material. But is Ken Ham ready to give up his attacks on evolution? By a stroke of luck we got a partial answer to this question. In our tour of the exhibits — with the most impressive animated dinosaur as a backdrop — we ran into Ken Ham himself giving a filmed interview. As we arrived he was praising Kurt Wise, telling the interviewer that the designer of the exhibits was trained at Harvard University by the eminent evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould. But the thrust of his message was that the museum is honest and balanced in its treatment of the two sides of the creationism/evolution debate and that evolution is treated fairly and respectfully. He emphasized that it is the underlying assumptions that lead a person to one side or the other. His only adversarial comments were that scientists refuse to admit their own assumptions and that several groups had opposed the opening of the museum because they were afraid to have the creation story told. But this was a far cry from the Ken Ham I have heard bashing evolution over the radio. When the interview ended I introduced myself to Ham, and my wife snapped a photo. When I mentioned that I was a friend of Kurt Wise, he seemed pleased and pointed me toward the exhibits on earth history that Wise had designed. Whether Ham will change his tune in a significant way remains to be seen.

During my tour I tried to determine what group or groups of people the museum was designed to influence. I found little that would appeal to the sentiments of non-Christians or to committed scientists. Perhaps more significantly, there is nothing that would appeal to Christians that are already committed to old-age or allegorical interpretations of Genesis. In fact the museum exhibits and videos never admit the existence of popular Christian reconciliations with science, such as theistic evolution, progressive creation, and the day-age theory. Instead the museum contrasts only the extremes of biblical literalism and atheistic science. This appears to be a deliberate device to force visitors to accept one extreme or the other. Since the vast majority of visitors is likely to lean toward creationism, this approach will probably be quite effective. The museum is definitely designed to bolster the faith of conservative Christians and lead them to believe that young-earth creationism is in perfect harmony with the facts of modern science. The museum seems especially designed to dissuade those visitors that think they can believe both in Christianity and an old earth. The evil of "compromise" is explained in a section of the exhibits called Graffiti Alley and Culture in Conflict. In these dark, dingy rooms the evils of society are blamed on the acceptance of worldly view by many Christians. One of the statistics mentioned is that only half of Christian pastors accept "absolutes". To clinch the blame for this compromise, a giant wrecking ball labeled "100 Million Years" is shown demolishing a church. From this gloomy corner of the museum visitors are led through a starry tunnel into a bright theater where the six literal days of creation are read from Genesis, together with vibrant video and sound.

I found it hard to leave the museum because there was so much to see and absorb. But the experience was not over because I had arranged to visit Kurt Wise, whom we met at his new post at Southern Seminary in Louisville, just a hundred miles from the museum. We spent an enjoyable evening with Kurt and his wife discussing the museum and reminiscing about our days at Harvard. When I told Kurt that Ham had lauded his credentials, he wagged his head in disapproval but explained how he hoped he had made a positive impact. He seemed a bit conflicted about the museum and his involvement with it. Kurt's faith is so sound that he feels no need to bolster it by convincing others. He loves science and wants to find a harmony that remains true to his strict belief in scripture. But he is perfectly at ease letting others believe as they see fit. The museum was an opportunity and a frustration for him: an opportunity to put more honesty and respect into creationism, but a frustration because he had to compromise with a propaganda machine that he dislikes. Had it not been for Kurt's stories and explanations the museum experience might have remained a puzzle, but now the museum's schizophrenia makes perfect sense. While I remain merely a curious observer of young-earth creationism, I can only applaud Kurt's efforts and hope his approach wins the day.

NCSE: A Decade in Retrospect

The year 2007 marks the tenth anniversary of the first publication of Reports of the NCSE, or RNCSE. In looking back over the last ten years, it is clear that these have been extraordinarily full years for NCSE as an organization. Our staff has grown from two full-time and two part-time staff members to the current roster of ten full-time and four part-time employees. Our annual budget has grown from $250 000 to about $800 000. In 1997 we had one and a half very overworked "program" people trying to monitor the creationism/ evolution controversy, provide information to the public and the press, and convey information to people at the grassroots trying to cope with local and state creationist challenges to evolution education. Much of the time our activities required triage: with such a small staff, we had to choose which "flare-ups" we could spend time on; we were often frustrated that there were simply not enough hours in the day to provide sufficient assistance to some of our callers.

Because we now have more staff, we have much less anguish over triage. Moreover, as NCSE staff increased, staff has become much more diversified. Scientists still comprise the backbone of NCSE's program staff, but we now also have a philosopher of science, a historian of science, a theologian, and a former classroom teacher - all areas of relevance to our organizational mission. Our program staff is also highly qualified, holding among them five PhDs (two in anthropology, two in biology, and one in theology), and five master's degrees (one each in archaeology, education, geography, library science, and philosophy). Thus we have a wide range of expertise to draw from when requests for information arrive; as has always been the case, our staff makes NCSE the effective organization it is.

Yes, we have grown, but we needed to: the creationism/evolution controversy has become more complicated since 1997. It was during the mid- to late-1990s that "intelligent design" creationism truly hit its stride, although of course NCSE had been monitoring it for the previous decade. In 1996, Michael Behe published Darwin's Black Box, and in 1998, William Dembski published The Design Inference. Most importantly, in 1996, the Discovery Institute announced the opening of its ID-promoting center, the Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (later renamed the Center for Science and Culture). As the Discovery Institute became more active in the late 1990s, NCSE's workload increased. I and other staff published analyses of "intelligent design" arguments, and we began advising on local controversies where school boards or citizens were seeking to have "intelligent design" taught in public schools. At the same time, of course, the traditional young-earth creationists did not go away, but in fact expanded, as Answers in Genesis opened its national headquarters in northern Kentucky and even "Dr Dino" - the notorious Kent Hovind of Pensacola, Florida - expanded his popular creation science ministry.

NCSE participated in all of the large (and a lot of the small) creationism/evolution conflicts of the decade: the 1996–97 struggle in Kentucky to keep Answers in Genesis from building its creation museum next to Big Bone Lick State Park; the so-called Santorum amendment and its fallout; textbook adoptions in Texas in 2003 - the list goes on and on. Some of them, like the struggle in Darby, Montana, to keep "intelligent design" out of the science class, or the Kansas "Evolution Wars I" and "Evolution Wars II", made the national papers; most of the controversies received local coverage at best and were well off the radar of the national press. You never heard of many other controversies we monitored and helped to resolve - because these were solved behind the scenes with little publicity, sometimes not even local newspaper coverage.

Much of NCSE's time in the last decade was spent coping with creationist pressure on state science education standards. The science education standards movement, begun in the early 1990s, has had a revolutionary effect on the science curriculum in the United States. Whereas previously each individual school district was largely in charge of its own science curriculum, now statewide standards shape instruction in all districts. The National Science Education Standards (NSES), produced by the National Academy of Sciences, although only advisory, has had a huge influence on the writing of science standards in the individual states. Because the NSES included evolution, and because in most states the standards were written by education professionals, evolution was included in the standards of almost all the states - at least in the first drafts.

Evolution did not always stay in later drafts, however, because creationists protested its inclusion, and political pressure on education is a fact of life in the US. It is a tribute to NCSE and its allies on the state and local level that creationists rarely succeeded in compromising science standards. Conflicts arose in almost every state, the noisiest ones being Kansas, Ohio, and Alabama. But NCSE members and other citizens also worked to keep creationism out of, and evolution in, the standards in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia - it is hard to remember them all.

The No Child Left Behind Act, the federal education bill signed into law in 2002, requires states to test students at regular intervals, with tests based upon the state's science standards. If evolution is in the standards, it will be on the test; if it is going to be on the tests, it will be taught. After 2002, pressure on standards developers increased even more as creationists lobbied them either to omit evolution or to include some form of creationism. When scientists and others, assisted by NCSE, fought these efforts, the creationists' fallback position was usually to opt for watering down the teaching of evolution by presenting it as something that needed to be "critically examined" - creationist-speak for "criticize". This strategy was apparent in both Kansas and Ohio, and in several other places that did not receive as much national publicity. As long as high-stakes testing is the norm in science education, we can anticipate fights over evolution in states' science education standards.

During the decade, NCSE participated as advisors in the legal challenges to the teaching of evolution, including Freiler v Tangipahoa, LeVake v Independent School District 656, Selman v Cobb County, and Kitzmiller v Dover. It was for the Freiler case, in fact, that NCSE wrote its first amicus curiae brief; we have written (and ghost-written) several more since. But even though our assistance is frequently sought by legal teams defending evolution education, for NCSE legal redress is always the absolutely last recourse and to be avoided if at all possible. Lawsuits are expensive, exhausting, time-consuming, and distracting, and they tend to be very disruptive of small communities. Our first goal is to try to solve problems behind the scenes, when people are more likely to compromise. But sometimes a school board or other decision-maker is simply recalcitrant - the Dover school board comes to mind - and there is no recourse but to sue. Our side has prevailed in all cases, but the courtroom is always the last resort.

NCSE staff is proud to have promoted evolution education by assisting a dozen or more scientific or education associations write statements on the teaching of evolution - and the number of entries in our Voices for Evolution compilation almost doubled in the decade. We also assisted in 1998 and 1999 in the writing of the National Academy of Sciences's Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science and the second edition of Science and Creationism. We also advised on the NOVA Evolution series of television programs, as well as other documentaries produced during the period.

An innovation for us during this decade was NCSE's first member excursion: a trip to the Galápagos Islands in 1998. This was followed by our first Grand Canyon excursion in 1999, led by NCSE's great good friend Wilfred Elders. We have had other Grand Canyon trips in 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, and 2007, using NCSE's own "Gish" - geologist Alan Gishlick, NCSE's first postdoctoral scholar. These adventures have proven to be very popular with members, and we will try to go every year to the Grand Canyon as long as interest exists. (The 2008 trip will be from July 30 to August 6 - mark your calendars!)

NCSE has grown in number of staff, budget, and impact. We take pride that we are sought for the "evolution side" of the argument by a variety of media; we take even more pride that we are the "first stop" for members of the public trying to cope with the creationism/evolution issue on the community or state level. We would not be able to do this without our members, and we hope that you are proud that your support has produced an effective organization that has truly made a difference for the integrity of science education over the last ten years. And NCSE promises to continue to do so for the foreseeable future - with your continuing support.

Review: Darwinism and its Discontents

The purpose of Michael Ruse's newest book is to "defend Darwinism from false (or misguided) friends as well as from real enemies" (p 237). To this end he revisits themes he has addressed at book length in the past, including: (1) providing a historical context for Darwin's theory (1979, 2003); (2) demarcating the appropriate relations between science and religion (2001); and (3) evaluating debates among those who consider themselves to be Darwinians (1979, 2000). There is thus a considerable range of topics in this book, with chapters devoted to whether Darwinian evolution can be considered a "fact", whether there are constraints on the power of natural selection, and whether evolution needs to tread within religious waters, among other topics. Because of this breadth, Darwinism and its Discontents should prove useful to those familiar with any of these controversial topics, whatever their level or area of expertise. It may not be an easy read for novices, however, as Ruse moves too quickly for someone without at least some background in these debates. Still, he provides many references for each of the topics covered, and a substantial bibliography. So readers are guided to whatever background material they may need.

Can we meaningfully speak of the "fact" of evolution? Chapter two addresses this issue by distinguishing different senses of both "fact" and "theory" (for "fact", consider the differences between "My car is green" and "The earth is in orbit around the sun"). Once simple observational descriptions are distinguished from inferences based on reliable evidence, there is no oddity or impropriety in labeling the evolution of organisms and their constituent parts a "fact". "Judged against the kinds of criteria and practices that we normally apply and use when making inferences, the evidence for the fact of evolution is very, very solid" (p 45). Indeed it is.

Ruse reviews a representative sample of direct evidence for both human-directed organic change and examples from nature (dogs and hybrid corn/industrial melanism and resistance to insecticides), to show that there is good support for the fact of substantial organic change, as well as for "selection" (artificial or natural) being causally efficacious in the process. Then he (correctly) argues that the bulk of the evidence for Darwinian evolution is indirect, and based on consilience (explanatory power, especially involving data from a variety of areas or by continuing to seamlessly cover new data). This is a good chapter for use as an antidote against creationist and "intelligent design" advocates who use non-scientific senses of "fact" and "theory" to try to tag Darwinian evolution as "philosophy" or even "religion" (thus on a par with supernaturalism).

Two chapters (five and six) consider one of the hottest areas of controversy within evolutionary biology, namely, is natural selection the only (or at least by far the predominant) cause of evolutionary change? Even non-specialists familiar only with the popular science literature will recognize echoes of this controversy associated with Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins (and their various supporters). To what extent can we assume adaptationism and/or optimality in our construction of evolutionary models? Do self-organizational, developmental, or structural constraints on functional characteristics of organisms shaped by natural selection limit its efficacy, or require additional explanatory models? Embedded within these general questions are issues such as (1) whether human-like intelligence was to be expected from the Darwinian process (or generally, whether "progress" is necessary or ubiquitous in evolutionary history); and (2) whether history and contingency or reverse-engineering and optimality provide better guides for understanding evolutionary processes.

To some extent intuitions here depend on what sort of data are taken as paradigmatic. If one stresses examples of arms races and cases that look very much like products of direct design, adaptationism and the ubiquity of selection may seem paramount. If instead one stresses "panda's thumb" sorts of cases that are relatively clumsy (or due to contingent historical pathways instead of near-optimal solutions to design problems), internal and external constraints may seem to exercise more of a role. Ruse, I think, does a good job of steering between Charybdis and Scylla here, while favoring adaptationism and the use of optimality models, at least methodologically. He explains his preferences while backing away from more extreme claims that seem to deny legitimate evidence for historical and other constraints (which only fuel popular debates that have generated more heat than light).

Many will disagree with the details of his assessment, but, given the present state of controversy, that is to be expected. Ruse certainly doesn't settle these issues here, but he does provide what I think is a reasonable and fair summary. Those not familiar with these issues could do much worse than beginning with these chapters. Those who are more knowledgeable (and/or partisan), will find a well-mannered and thoughtful treatment.

What about creationism and/or "intelligent design"? Here some readers might be a bit disappointed. While Ruse has weighed in on such issues through most of his professional career (see Ruse 1982, 2003, 2005), and has also participated in public debates and testified at trials, he says very little about "the enemy" in this book. To be sure, he shows clearly in chapter three that anyone opposing a basic evolutionary pattern in the fossil record or comparative anatomy or comparative molecular biology is not supported by the evidence from these areas. And in chapter twelve he makes it clear that no version of direct design can now hope to provide or supplement biological explanations (that is, natural theology has no scientific role to play), and takes a brief swipe at the bacterial flagellum totem that has become the icon of the intelligent design movement. On the other hand, this battle is not his major concern.

What he does say about evolution and religion in chapter twelve, however, is important. Characteristically, he distinguishes Darwinian evolution as science from any metaphysical position. Its authority extends to biological processes and structures, and no further. It simply cannot adjudicate issues concerning spirituality and the supernatural (though it can certainly exert its legitimate — and hard-earned — authority anywhere religiosity is extended to biological claims). This, too, is controversial, as anyone who has read Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006; the title says it all) can testify. Still, I find Ruse's position both plausible and important, and well worth considering before weighing in on this issue (see also Ruse 2001, 2003).

Review: Doubting Darwin?

When I first heard that this book was being written, I confess that I was skeptical. We have heard a huge amount in recent years about so-called "intelligent design" (ID) and much that we have heard has been very critical. Why then do we need yet another book on the topic? Now that I have had a chance to read the finished product, I think I was wrong and that my doubts were overstated. This is a splendid discussion of the whole question of ID. It is true that Sahotra Sarkar, a well-known philosopher of science, like most philosophers has little interest in going behind the scenes to dig up the real motives of ID enthusiasts - their religious drives. But, sticking to his task and looking fairly at all of its claims to be science, Sarkar does a great job of rejecting decisively the claims of ID. With a reservation to be noted, this is an excellent primer to the subject.

Sarkar plays things in a very straightforward manner. After an introductory overview, he begins with the thinking of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, taking things up through the discovery of Mendelian genetics. Then we have a discussion of the argument from design - the eye is like a telescope, telescopes have telescope designers, therefore the eye must have had a designer, namely God - and the ways in which Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection roughs up this argument. Rightly, Sarkar has little sympathy for the attempt by leading ID exponent William Dembski to bring this argument back to life.

On then to discussion of contemporary evolutionary biology. Overall, this is very fair and balanced, with a good discussion of the neutral theory of evolution as compared to the more standard Darwinian selectionist theory. I do confess however, that Sarkar's contempt for human sociobiology, very evident here but a leitmotif through the book, started to grate a little. Why keep harping on the point? Of course, his discomfort shows that he is not a blind selectionist, but the point could have been made once and then left.

Now, the biological science given as a foundation, Sarkar starts to rip into the claims of the ID side. First, he goes after William Dembski's invocation of No Free Lunch theorems, supposedly showing that selection cannot be that effective. We learn that Dembski is mistaken mathematically and, even if he were not, the evolutionary situations to which he would apply these theorems are not relevant. Then on to Michael Behe's claims about irreducible complexity. Sarkar is right, although I doubt he will have much effect. Behe has recently published a new book (The Edge of Evolution [New York: Free Press, 2007]; see review, p 38) showing that he is quite indifferent to the many criticisms of his work. If you can't answer them, ignore them!

We move on to information theory and then to the trendy anthropic arguments. These are the arguments that work from the improbability of the laws of nature being as they are, and the necessity for life of the laws of nature being as they are for life to appear, to the existence of a supreme lawmaker or some such body. Strictly speaking, as Sarkar realizes, these are not part of the ID package and are in fact popular among people who detest ID. They are not intended to replace science but rather to supplement theologically or philosophically. But I think Sarkar is right to include them, because at some level they have the aim of ID, namely to resurrect the argument from design. Biologists got the argument out of science in the 19th century. Who would have thought that physicists would be trying to bring it back in the 21st? I agree with Sarkar's arguments - how can one argue about any kinds of probabilities when all one has is a set of one? But I would like to have seen some discussion of Steven Weinberg's claim (which strikes me as plausible) that the world is nothing near as fine-tuned as is claimed by people like my former colleague, the philosopher John Leslie.

So we move on to a discussion of naturalism and a final chapter ending with the wrongness of including ID in biology classrooms. I think readers will appreciate Sarkar's careful discussion of kinds of naturalism and his rejection of the critics like Alvin Plantinga. Of course, although Sarkar can refute Plantinga, one doubts that Sarkar will change Plantinga's mind. This will have to wait until we evolutionists can show people like Plantinga that they can be evolutionists and Christians at the same time. Or rather, not just show them, but convince them. With works like The God Delusion on the best-seller list, I am not holding my breath.

What is my reservation? Although Sarkar writes clearly and gives carefully chosen examples, I still feel that he is too technical for the general reader. This might be a good book for a more advanced philosophy of science class, with a qualified teacher, but it is not for the person picking something up off the shelves of Borders or Barnes and Noble. Sarkar gets into mathematics and he is not always aware of how difficult even fairly straightforward discussions can be. Take for instance the discussion of evolutionary algorithms that is a crucial part of Sarkar's attack on Dembski's use of No Free Lunch theorems. I defy anyone without some background training to understand the definitions that are given or the subsequent discussion.

Or put things this way: William Hamilton's formal discussion of kin selection was complex and mathematical. In The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), Richard Dawkins brilliantly explained all of this in words. I am afraid that Sahotra Sarkar is no Richard Dawkins. But then, no one else is either! Judged on his own terms, Sarkar is right at the top of what he is doing. Get this book and read it.

Review: Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism

Wherever one turns these days – from television interviews, to radio debates, to courtroom dramas, to the limitless bounds of the printed press – the ongoing saga of humankind's grappling with the implications of science for the meaning of faith seems ever-present. In particular, the debate between evolutionists and the latest incarnation of creationists has suffused the consciousness of many Americans and awakened their political sensibilities. When considering the clash of science and religion in modern times, what is perhaps not always consciously internalized and made explicit is the extent to which descriptions in the English language of this battleground are restricted to the Christian encounter with Darwinism, to the exclusion of other faiths. We should not be surprised by this fact, since the current battle over the teaching of evolution is being waged, almost exclusively, by evangelical Christians, and since the English-speaking world is primarily Christian. Historical scholarship, too, has been skewed towards the reception of Darwinism in a Christian context; after all, it was in Anglican England that Darwin's ideas were first formed and disseminated.

How refreshing, then, to encounter a treatment of the challenge of Darwinism to the Jewish faith, in a new collection of essays edited by Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz, following an academic conference on the subject in March 2004 at Arizona State University. Very little has been written about Jewish responses to Darwinism until now, and although the collection of essays is somewhat idiosyncratic and far from comprehensive, it is a hopeful beginning of a welcome expansion and broadening of scholarship on the challenges posed to religious thinking by Darwinian evolution, both past and present.

What is perhaps unique to the cases explored in Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism is the extent to which the encounter of Judaism with evolutionary thought has been molded by the relationship between Jewish and Christian communities on the one hand, and the dynamics operating within the various Jewish factions on the other. The reality of assimilation and the fear that it would be encouraged or broadened by secular scientific thinking has played an important historical role in the reception of Darwinism in Jewish communities; no less so, however, has the internal divide and political dynamic among Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstruction Judaism been reflected in each group's unique attitudes towards the idea of evolution and its moral and practical consequences. From outright rejections of Darwinism espoused by biblical literalists, through attempts of modern-Orthodox scientists to explain how the Bible accords with modern-day interpretations of nature and her ways; from Kabbalah-inspired hermeneutics, to "practical fundamentalism" (see the interesting chapter by Ira Robinson), Jewish responses to Darwinism have reflected the need of the various communities to define themselves both with an eye inward and a glance towards the outer world. The responses have been quite varied and creative; often, they have been surprising. Rabbis AI Kook and JB Soloveitchik, for example, two of the giants of early-to-mid–20th–century Orthodox Judaism in Palestine and in the United States, respectively, both embraced evolutionary thought based on their readings of canonical, normative Jewish texts and exegeses. In contrast, Rabbi Abraham Geiger, a leading 19th–century figure in the ostensibly more progressive and less theologically rigid Reform Movement, rejected Darwinism vehemently.

Jewish responses to evolution have themselves evolved as a function of the internal and external politics of religion and state: The relatively comfortable, assimilated Jews of Victorian England espoused publicly in the Jewish Chronicle in 1875 the view that: "[t]here is only one theology in existence which is not antagonistic to science," gratifyingly (and somewhat conceitedly) setting themselves apart from Christian creationists; one hundred years later, the assimilation-fearful leading American ultra-Orthodox rabbi, Moshe Feinstein, on the other hand, hesitated little in calling his throngs of followers to "tear out those pages from the textbooks" which do not accord with a literal reading of the Bible. Perhaps most striking was the encounter of Jewish nationalism with the fruits of modern science: Rafi Falk shows in his chapter how a number of prominent Zionists conceived of their political enterprise in terms of safeguarding a Jewish race rapidly degenerating in a biologically untenable Diaspora. While it might be somewhat incongruous to read the great Jewish national poet Chaim Nachman Bialik bellowing, "I too, like Hitler, believe in the power of the blood idea," it may perhaps not be all that surprising considering how, as Richard Weikart shows in his chapter, late–19th-century anti-Semites adapted their social Darwinism to argue for racial competition, and, eventually and tragically, racial extermination: Racially-sensitive Zionists simply took the anti-Semites' arguments and turned them on their head; if the Jews were weak and sickly, it was because they lacked a national homeland where they could work the land, outbreed amongst their scattered diasporas, and regain once again their racial strength. What provided justification for Jewish national dreams, such men believed, was the racial unity of all Jews the world over.

With further chapters on the teaching of evolution in modern-Orthodox high schools in the US today, and on various attempts of accommodating evolutionary thought with religious creationist belief, Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism will present the reader used to encountering the debates in an exclusively Christian context with an interesting counterpoint. Both the similarities and unique aspects of Christian and Jewish responses to Darwinism are instructive. It will be a much-welcomed result if this collection not only spurs further research into Jewish encounters with modern science and evolution, but also research into the encounters of other religions and systems of faith with modern science and evolution. As always, Darwinism can teach us much about the natural world; our own reactions to its powerful ideas can teach us no less about ourselves.

Review: Living With Darwin

Creationists take every opportunity to remind audiences that the founders of modern science were devout, Bible-believing Christians. This historical truth is the starting point of a new book aimed at a general readership by the distinguished philosopher of science, Philip Kitcher, on the historical entanglement of science and religious doctrine in relation to Darwinism. Kitcher argues that creationism and "intelligent design" are better understood as dead sciences rather than as pseudosciences. Creationist views, broadly speaking, did play a role in the history of geology and the life sciences but they are no longer part of science. Kitcher devotes a chapter to showing, in accessible language, when and why each of the three major anti-Darwinian positions successively became a dead science: "Genesis creationism", or opposition to the idea of an ancient earth in the name of a literal reading of the biblical creation narrative, around 1830; "novelty creationism", which defended the special creation of species against the evolutionary idea that all living things that have ever existed on our planet belong to a single tree of life, around 1870; and "anti-selectionism", or opposition to natural selection as the principal agent of evolution, around 1930. Genesis creationism, novelty creationism, and anti-selectionism have all been revived in our day by those who oppose Darwinian evolution on religious grounds. Kitcher demonstrates that as science these attempts to resurrect the dead have failed.

Much of the material in these chapters will be familiar to readers of Kitcher's earlier writings on creationism and "intelligent design" (including 1984 and 2001). What is new is a conviction that we must take seriously the religious concerns of those for whom the possibility of such a resurrection offers hope and comfort. The bridge to this new conviction is Kitcher's discussion of the slipperiness of present-day "intelligent design" (ID) advocates who publicly present their position as a religiously neutral commitment to anti-selectionism while signaling to conservative believers that it opens the door to biblical creationism. While Kitcher is as firm as ever in denouncing ID as scientifically bankrupt, he is sympathetic to those scientifically unsophisticated Christians who respond positively to it in the hope that it will protect their cherished values. Whereas Kitcher formerly thought that Darwinism was not a threat to religion, he now recognizes that for very many religious people accepting Darwinism means abandoning their hope for eternal life with a loving God - or, in the biblical phrase that provides the title for his final chapter, trading their birthright for a mess of pottage.

The waste, suffering, and inefficiencies inherent in the Darwinian account of life really do contradict providentialist religion's faith in a benign supernatural Creator. Kitcher, however, rejects a "science versus religion" model in favor of an "Enlightenment case against supernaturalism". In so redrawing the battle lines, he widens science to include all intellectual disciplines that derive from Enlightenment empiricism and rationalism while narrowing religion to its supernaturalist forms. He then briefly discusses selected strands of the Enlightenment case against supernaturalism. Biblical criticism has shown that Scriptural accounts of creation are neither true historical accounts nor originate in extra-human revelation (Friedman 1997); the sociology of religion demonstrates that religion owes its survival not to being true but to serving important social functions (Stark 1997); philosophical and psychological analyses of religious experience identify the motivations and dispositions that induce people to interpret their experiences in religious terms (Proudfoot 1985; Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle 1997); and ethical reflection reveals the dangers of belief without evidence (Kitcher 2004).

Since providentialist religion depends on supernaturalism, the Enlightenment case against it is devastating. And yet, Kitcher denies on two counts that its inevitable terminus is atheism. First, while science is committed to empirical methods, we cannot assert dogmatically that the universe contains nothing beyond what is currently known scientifically. Second, Kitcher holds out the possibility of what he calls "spiritual religion", or religions "that do not require the literal truth of any doctrines about supernatural beings" (p 133). While acknowledging that spiritual religion will be attacked from opposite directions by supernaturalists and secularists (as indeed liberal versions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have been), Kitcher, while remaining himself a secularist, draws on the work of John Dewey (1934) and Elaine Pagels (2003) to assert the possibility of non-supernaturalist religions that would provide their followers with the same emotional benefits as supernaturalist ones do for theirs. Kitcher here aligns himself with an insight shared by modern critical approaches to the study of religion: there is indeed a reality behind the various religions that explains their ubiquity and persistence, but that reality is not the transcendent entity that devotees believe it to be. Emile Durkheim identified this reality as society, Freud as repressed psychical drives, and Kitcher identifies it as emotional comfort in an uncaring universe and, too often, society.

Kitcher's spiritual religion is strongly reminiscent of Auguste Comte's Religion of Humanity. Comte (1798–1857), the founder of Positivism, thought that any society depends for its survival on a consensus about its objects of belief, devotion, and value. Historically, religion provided that consensus but science has rendered religion obsolete as an explanation of the universe and human life. The result is a social crisis whose resolution will require a functional equivalent of religion; that is, some ideological system that will heal the rupture between our cognitive and our emotional life. Comte's Religion of Humanity was to fulfill this function by attaching our emotions to the true source of morality: the "Great Being" that is Humanity itself (Preus 1987). Like Comte, Kitcher argues that religion is both socially necessary and in its traditional forms intellectually obsolete. Will Kitcher's spiritual religion enjoy greater success than Comte's Religion of Humanity? Readers may have their doubts, but the similarity between their analyses paradoxically illuminates the ways that American religious and social history have diverged from those of Western Europe since the early nineteenth century. As Kitcher's final paragraphs discuss, the peculiarly American phenomenon of anti-evolutionism draws on both an intellectual problem of ignorance of the Enlightenment case against supernaturalism (derived from a unique confluence of populism and biblicism [Noll 2002]) on the part of large numbers of Americans and a social problem of civic anomie and lack of the sort of social security provisions taken for granted by citizens of other affluent countries.

In suggesting that only cooperation among secular (education, social reform) and religious (spiritual religion) forces can terminate the cycle of controversy over Darwinism, this thought-provoking and highly recommended book directs our attention to an often-neglected aspect of the controversy - the spiritual and religious cost of "living with Darwin".

Review: The Creationist Debate

It is a curious war story.

Where other authors might see in the centuries from Galileo to Phillip Johnson a war between religion and science, McCalla carefully recounts the real battle: the struggle between reactionary religion and a belief that seeks understanding.

The first volleys were thrown in the Renaissance and the Reformation. McCalla identifies the challenge of Galileo's day as not simply the telescope, but the shift in consciousness away from seeing nature and the Bible as realms of symbol toward the Reformation's "plain sense" view of Scripture and the world. This is McCalla's thesis in a nutshell: Mechanical-mindedness about nature, when coupled with historical-mindedness about the Bible, necessitates a new view of both God and Nature.

Despite the hankering to unlock nature's mechanics, creationists have not been able to give up their addiction to "purposiveness". John Ray saw purposes in the wind and male nipples. It was jarring to move away from such purposiveness to a world view dominated by extinction, imperfection, and lack of providential planning. Major steps were taken when Hooke and Steno unlocked the fossils: "Mother Nature had become a woman with a past," McCalla writes. It would be a while before the earth's deep time would be comprehended. In the meantime, Thomas Burnet constructed a fiery engine for the earth's geology within the confines of a biblical chronology. Christian historical consciousness worked overtime on the biblical clock, even as global explorers encountered civilizations with calendars far more ancient than the Bible's.

The historical bug bit hard in the Age of Exploration as Erasmus, Valla, Cappel, Simon, La Peyrère, and a host of others began to look at the Bible as any other document, one marred by textual corruptions and betraying an ancient mentality. Removing Moses from the pantheon of biblical authors brought a new consciousness about the foundations of Christianity itself. As the Bible became a local map of the Jewish landscape, its usefulness for navigating history's broad waters was diminished forever. With Matthew Tindal, Thomas Paine, and the rise of Deism in the 18th century, it would not take much to treat the Bible as just one more fanciful collection of ancient anecdotes. As deep time came into view with the unwrapping of the primary and secondary rocks, biblical frames were put to further tests. Then, as Cuvier sequenced the animal strata, the biblical picture was undone completely. Entire worlds long forgotten were discovered in the Book of Nature that gleaned neither a jot nor a tittle in sacred scripture. The Bible had no frame for this new historical horizon. The cosmic shakeup wrenched hearts like Tennyson's (McCalla gives us ample extracts) and stirred John Ruskin to exclaim, "If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses."

Charles Darwin, of course, was a creature of his time, searching for design and worrying about the Bible's frame. He was also a creature of his time in following a new tributary, letting science and not the Bible dictate what he discovered. Neither male nipples,the misery of the world, nor the basis of human morality was designed by God, as far as Darwin could tell.

The conservative Christian reaction to all this was predictable, if not instructive. They were bothered by the science but perhaps more so by the moral wilderness created by evolutionary secularism. Liberal Christians, for their part, went so far as to re-invent the Fall of Man and the concept of the eternal soul, weathering the theological storm for a time. But by the end of the 19th century, as even the human mind was seen by many to be a product of evolution, theology of the liberal sort could not constrain science's profound shift in human historical consciousness.

The 20th century became one long century of conservative Christian "special pleading". To be sure, fundamentalists were not entirely literalistic about Genesis 1, at least at the start. Key figures like Bernard Ramm insisted that while Darwin's mechanism was wrong, still the Bible and a kind of evolution could be blended. Yet louder voices like those of Billy Sunday, Dwight Moody, William Bell Riley, and Gresham Machen prevailed against any belief in evolution. The Scopes trial was one skirmish on this anti-evolutionary revivalist battlefield. For a time, conservative Christians continued to accept an old fossil earth alongside their anti-evolutionism, but the plain reading of Genesis 1 encouraged Whit-comb and Morris in the 1960s to champion literalism with a vengeance. The rise of "intelligent design" has reinforced this anti-Darwinian tendency, as in the name of microbiology and information theory, its proponents seek to revive Paley's design view while clashing swords with secular scientists and liberal religionists.

McCalla's is a well-told tale. Invariably, however, even in such a comprehensive book there will be chapters left to tell. As biblical "higher criticism" developed in the 19th century, archaeological adventurers discovered Assyrian and Babylonian creation myths that paralleled the Bible, underscoring the mythic character of Genesis. Liberal Christians have found something powerful in religion's mythic side and this story deserves telling. Also, given the press coverage of William Ryan and Walter Pitman's book Noah's Flood, I am surprised that McCalla overlooks more recent attempts to put Genesis on a secularized historical basis. The Bible's legends may have compelling historical origins worth considering. Lastly, the world of modern Christian evolutionists goes untouched, omitting discussion of such figures as Teilhard de Chardin, John Polkinghorne, John Haught, Arthur Peacocke, and Kenneth Miller. There are religionists who remain committed to combining Darwin and religious belief in a non-rejectionist fashion. Their story deserves to be heard alongside "intelligent design" reactionism.

These are really minor criticisms. McCalla's book is well worth adding to your collection. No one has brought all the key players under one roof and done so this crisply.

Review: The Edge of Evolution

The same mistakes in the same [pseudo]gene in the same positions of both human and chimp DNA. If a common ancestor first sustained the mutational mistakes and subsequently gave rise to those two modern species, that would very readily account for why both species have them now. It’s hard to imagine how there could be stronger evidence for common ancestry of chimps and humans.

One could be forgiven for assuming this to be a quote from a prominent evolutionary biologist. Rather, they are the words of "intelligent design" (ID) advocate Michael J Behe in his new book The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (p 71–2). Oddly enough, Behe regards the notion of common ancestry as "trivial" - a characterization that will ruffle more than a few feathers among his creationist followers. The real issue, he argues, is the role of the designer in the evolutionary process.

This embrace of evolution is a divergence from Behe’s 1996 book, Darwin’s Black Box (New York: Free Press), in which he presented a molecular-age version of the argument from design, most eloquently championed by 18th-century theologian William Paley, which states that conscious design can be inferred from the complexity of living things. Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University, recast this theological argument in terms of the molecular complexity of living cells. In doing so, he brought to the ID movement a veneer of scientific respectability. Behe argued in Darwin’s Black Box that a biological structure or biochemical pathway that would fail to function if any one of its parts were removed could be thought of as "irreducibly complex". Such complexity, he asserted, could not possibly have evolved, as suggested by Darwin, through numerous stepwise improvements of a simpler system, because the structure or pathway would not function until fully assembled. "Irreducible complexity" of biological systems was denounced universally by the scientific community as an intellectually bankrupt notion because of the great plasticity of the evolutionary process. Components of a complex structure or pathway that are today essential to its function were not necessarily always essential. Components, when initially recruited, may have been merely helpful to the function of a simpler version. Evolution refines function of a complex system both by adding new components and by remodeling existing parts along the way. So it is illogical to look at the final product, with its many well-matched interacting components, and assert that, because removal of a part would destroy function, it must have been created as a complete unit.

Nevertheless, Darwin’s Black Box was well received by many creationists who believed naively that Behe had posed a serious scientific challenge to evolutionary theory. The book made him such a prominent figure within the ID movement that he served as an expert witness for the defense in the recent case against the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board, which made the fateful decision to incorporate ID into its high school science curriculum. In his landmark verdict for the plaintiffs, Judge John E Jones III ruled that "ID is a religious and not a scientific proposition" and that "it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom."

What is perhaps most remarkable about The Edge of Evolution is how much Behe now concedes to the evidence that supports Darwinian evolution. He not only accepts that life has existed on earth for billions of years, but that it has evolved over time. He now agrees with the Darwinian notion that all life on the planet "descended with modification from one stage to another." He even acknowledges that natural selection is the obvious mechanism by which adaptive gene variants spread through a population. It is difficult to imagine his core audience being receptive to this revised position. But at this point, Behe is stuck between the need to establish a semblance of scientific credibility and the desire to forward his distinctly unscientific creationist ideas.

Behe’s new thesis is that there are limits to what Darwinian evolution can accomplish. Evolutionary theory holds that genetic variation within populations is caused by random changes in the DNA, called mutations, which arise each generation. It is this variation that natural selection uses to reshape a population one step at a time. However, Behe believes that random mutation, coupled with natural selection, is not a sufficiently powerful engine to drive the evolution of complex subcellular structures and molecular machines. Most of the really important mutations, he insists, must have been directed by an intelligent agent.

His case for a designer who engineers mutations rests in this book on two arguments drawn largely from the evolutionary battle between humans and the single-celled parasite that causes malaria. To understand these arguments, it is necessary to know something about the interaction between the two species. The parasite lives within the red blood cells of infected people and uses hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen to our tissues, as its food source. A variety of human mutations that affect red blood cells have spread through malarious regions of the world because they confer some degree of resistance to infection by the often-lethal parasite, one of the species of Plasmodium. The best known of these is the sickle-cell mutation, which arose within a hemoglobin-encoding gene of an individual in Africa. The sickle hemoglobin mutation, when present in only one copy, prevents the parasite from establishing an infection. But when both copies of the hemoglobin gene carry the sickle mutation, the result is the devastating disorder known as sickle cell disease.

Behe first argues that sickle hemoglobin, as well as most of the other genetic alterations that have arisen in humans in the battle against malaria, are fundamentally destructive mutations. That is, they typically break or damage existing genes, rather than construct some new, protective system. By contrast, the author is most interested in how complex molecular machines came into existence. He insists that because humans have not evolved any complex structures to combat malaria, random mutation is not capable of such constructive adaptation. But evolutionary theory does not predict how a population will adapt to a selective pressure - only that it will, or that failure to do so will result in extinction. That we have not evolved complex defenses against malaria is no argument that it cannot happen, or that such complexity has not evolved through natural mechanisms in response to other selective pressures across vast geologic time spans.

The author’s second argument is one of large numbers. He correctly asserts that in cases where at least two mutations are required before any benefit arises, evolution is impaired. This is because, in the absence of an adaptive advantage conferred by the first mutation, natural selection cannot work to spread it through the population. In such a case, for evolution to proceed, both mutations would have to arise simultaneously - an exceedingly rare event. The example he provides is the evolution of drug resistance in malaria. Resistance to chloroquine, a widely used antimalarial drug, has evolved independently only a handful of times around the world because, according to Behe, resistance requires two specific mutations in the parasite’s protein, which have to arise together to confer any adaptive advantage. The parasite, he argues, has been able to solve this problem only because of the vast numbers of these organisms and their short generation time. In animal populations, such as vertebrates, with many fewer numbers and much longer generation times, an adaptive change that requires at least two simultaneous mutations would be so improbable as to be evolutionarily insignificant. Here, he claims to have found the "edge of evolution," jumping to the conclusion that "No mutation that is of the same complexity as chloroquine resistance in malaria arose by Darwinian evolution in the line leading to humans in the past ten million years" (p 61, emphasis in original) Throughout the remainder of the book, Behe uses the evolution of chloroquine resistance as a theoretical boundary beyond which random mutation coupled with natural selection cannot extend.

Behe’s thesis of evolutionary limits hangs on the assumption that important evolutionary steps require multiple simultaneous mutations without the benefit of cumulative selection. However, there is no evidence to support this claim. His error is evident even in his example of chloroquine resistance, which, by his logic, should not have involved evolutionary intermediates. But the scientific data say otherwise. The existence of natural isolates of malarial strains that possess one or the other of the supposedly critical mutations suggests not only that evolution of chloroquine resistance is a stepwise process, as has been argued by others, but that there are multiple mutational paths to resistance.

He applies the same unfounded assumption to assert that the evolution of new protein-to-protein interactions, a critical step in the assembly of complex cellular machines, is not possible without the assistance of a designer. His reasoning is that five or six simultaneous mutations would be required to generate a new interaction site, and the likelihood of a protein’s acquiring so many random mutations at once is vanishingly small. This number is based on the requirements for tight associations that antibodies form with their targets - interactions that involve five or six protein parts called amino acids. However, Behe ignores volumes of experimental evidence that many classes of proteins can interact with other proteins through the recognition of fewer than five amino acids. For example, enzymes that add sugars to other proteins (often important to their function) typically recognize as few as two amino acids. Although such enzymes normally interact only transiently with their target proteins, weak interactions can evolve gradually into stable associations through the sequential accumulation of mutations if the association confers an adaptive advantage. Behe’s logical error here is identical to the one he committed in asserting that many biochemical pathways are irreducibly complex. He looks at the final product, incorrectly assumes that each part always existed as it does today, and cannot imagine how stepwise evolution could have generated such an integrated system.

Behe is likely aware of at least some of the existing evidence that new protein-to-protein interactions have evolved. One must look no further than one of his acknowledged examples of evolutionary prowess. Under the heading of "What Darwinism Can Do," he describes the stepwise evolution of an antifreeze protein from a digestive enzyme in Antarctic fish. This was an important evolutionary adaptation that allowed fish that possess this protein to survive in frigid Antarctic waters. However, he omits an interesting detail from his description - the antifreeze protein has sugars added to it (by an enzyme), whereas the protein from which it evolved does not. Therefore, a new protein-to-protein interaction must also have evolved to allow modification of the antifreeze protein. In fact, this beautiful example of evolution involves the construction of significant complexity.

The author next uses his unsupported claim that groups of simultaneous mutations are required for the evolution of complex cellular structures in a weakly argued attempt to define a demarcation between intelligently designed features and those that arise through Darwinian evolution. Behe allows that random mutation and selection are capable of driving the evolution of closely related species and perhaps even account for the divergence between humans and chimpanzees. But he asserts that design extends from the early construction of cellular machinery all the way into the animal kingdom at least through the separation of vertebrate classes - mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. This is because these classes possess unique cell types, the appearance of which he assumes to be beyond the "edge of evolution." With only his flawed logic to support his claims, Behe’s perceived "edge" reflects nothing more than the limits of his own conceptual horizon.

The final chapter is devoted to a philosophical discussion of the designer’s identity and motivations. Although Behe describes himself as a "pretty conventional Roman Catholic," he dissembles here in quoting philosopher Nick Bostrom, "The ‘agent’ doing the designing need not be a theistic God." Considering Behe’s testimonial concession at the Dover trial that "the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God," this position seems disingenuous and intended to distance his ideas from their religious foundations. As for the goal of the designer, Behe claims that it was none other than the emergence of intelligent life. Here, he makes the classic creationist error of assuming the primacy of humans among all living things, a distinctly religious notion. Behe offers no evidence or arguments to support this presumed goal, yet remarkably clings to his insistence that ID is a scientific proposition.

In the end, the most irritating aspect of this book is Behe’s selective use of the ever-expanding base of scientific knowledge as a soapbox from which to shout his embrace of perpetual ignorance. The better our understanding of the intricate details of complex biological systems, the stronger is his belief that they must have been designed and that science will never unravel how they came to be. This is a trend for him. As Eric Rothschild, chief counsel for the plaintiffs at the Dover trial, observed of Behe’s claim that the immune system is irreducibly complex, "Thankfully, there are scientists who do search for answers to the question of the origin of the immune system … Their efforts help us combat and cure serious medical conditions. By contrast, Professor Behe and the entire "intelligent design" movement are doing nothing to advance scientific or medical knowledge and are telling future generations of scientists, don’t bother." Scientists have never listened to him. But with so many concessions to evolution mixed with his new message of God-as-mutagen, will anyone?

Print Edition Contents: 27 (1-2)

News

4. Updates
   News from California, Florida, Nebraska, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, Europe, Russia, and the United Kingdom
9. Obituaries
   Jerry Falwell, NCSE Supporter F Clark Howell, origin-of-life researcher Stanley Miller, and Texas textbook critic Norma Gabler

NCSE News

11. News from the Membership
    Glenn Branch
    What our members are doing to support evolution and oppose pseudoscience wherever the need arises.

Special 10th Anniversary Pages

16. The Evolution of RNCSE
    Andrew J Petto
    Since our new format premiered in 1997, we have grown and adapted.
19. NCSE: A Decade in Retrospect
    Eugenie C Scott
    The changes in RNCSE reflect both changes at NCSE and in the battle against anti-evolutionism.

Members' Pages

27. Visit Your Local Natural History Museum
    To see places around the country that feature real science, drop in on one of these, or visit on-line.
28. Books: "Intelligent Design" on Trial
    Books about “intelligent design” and its failure to gain legal or scientific acceptance.
30. NCSE On the Road
    Check the calendar here for NCSE speakers

Features

21. A Visit to the New Creation "Museum"
    Timothy H Heaton
    It’s slick, it’s fun, but it glosses over both science and conflicting creationist views.
25. Intelligent Design 101
    James Curtsinger
    A satirical view of what a lesson on “intelligent design” might sound like.
31. Evolution in Schools: Where's Canada?
    Jason R Wiles
    Though anti-evolutionism is not as prevalent north of the border, Canadian schools are feeling the pressure to downplay evolution.

Book Reviews

34. Flock of Dodos: The Evolution–Intelligent Design Circus directed by Randy Olson
    Reviewed by Steven Pinker
35. Living With Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith by Philip Kitcher
    Reviewed by Arthur McCalla
36. Evolution for Everyone by David Sloan Wilson
    Reviewed by J José Bonner
38. The Edge of Evolution by Michael Behe
    Reviewed by David E Levin
40. Monkey Girl: Evolution, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul by Edward Humes
    Reviewed by Warren Eshbach
41. Doubting Darwin? Creationist Designs on Evolution by Sahotra Sarkar
    Reviewed by Michael Ruse
42. The Creationist Debate: The Encounter Between the Bible and the Historical Mind by Arthur McCalla
    Reviewed by J David Pleins
43. The Challenge of Creation: Judaism's Encounter with Science, Cosmology, and Evolution by Natan Slifkin
    Reviewed by Shai Cherry
45. Not By Chance! by Lee M Spetner
    Reviewed by Zev Stern
47. Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism edited by Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz
    Reviewed by Oren Harman
48. The Evolution Dialogues by Catherine Baker
    Reviewed by Phina Borgeson
49. Evolution and Christian Faith by Joan Roughgarden
    Reviewed by Charles F Austerberry
50. Darwinism and its Discontents by Michael Ruse
    Reviewed by Doren A Recker
52. Thank God for Evolution! by Michael Dowd
    Reviewed by Clay Farris Naff
53. By Design or By Chance? by Denyse O'Leary
    Reviewed by Phina Borgeson
54. Original Selfishness by Daryl P Domning
    Reviewed by Patricia A Williams

Has Natural Selection Been Refuted? The Arguments of William Dembski

"Intelligent design" (ID) is the assertion that there is evidence that major features of life have been brought about, not by natural selection, but by the action of a designer. This involves negative arguments that natural selection could not possibly bring about those features. And the proponents of ID also claim positive arguments.

Critics of ID commonly argue that it is not science. For its positive predictions of the behavior of a designer they have a good point. But not for its negative criticisms of the effectiveness of natural selection, which are scientific arguments that must be taken seriously and evaluated. Look at Figure 1, which shows a cartoon design from T-shirts sold by an ID website, Access Research Network, which also sells ID paraphernalia (I am grateful to them for kind permission to reproduce it).

(click here for image)
Figure 1. A summary of the major arguments of "intelligent design", as they appear to its advocates, from Access Research Network's website http://www.arn.org. Merchandise with the cartoon is available from http://www.cafepress.com/accessresearch. Copyright Chuck Assay, 2006; all rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

As the bulwark of Darwinism defending the hapless establishment is overcome, note the main lines of attack. In addition to recycled creationist themes such as the Cambrian Explosion and cosmological arguments about the fine-tuning of the universe, the ladder is Michael Behe's argument about molecular machines (Behe 1996). The other main attack, the battering ram, is the "information content of DNA" which is destroying the barrier of "random mutation".

The "irreducible complexity of molecular machines" arguments of Michael Behe have received most of the publicity; William Dembski's more theoretical arguments involving information theory have been harder for people to understand. There have been a number of extensive critiques of Dembski's arguments published or posted on the web (Wilkins and Elsberry 2001; Godfrey-Smith 2001; Rosenhouse 2002; Schneider 2001, 2002; Shallit 2002; Tellgren 2002; Wein 2002; Elsberry and Shallit 2003; Edis 2004; Shallit and Elsberry 2004; Perakh 2004a, 2004b; Tellgren 2005; Häggström 2007). They have pointed out many problems. These range from the most serious to nit-picking quibbles.

In this article, I want to concentrate on the main arguments that Dembski has used. With a few exceptions, many of the points I will make have already been raised in these critiques of Dembski — this is primarily an attempt to make them more accessible.

Digital codes
Stephen Meyer, who heads the Discovery Institute's program on ID, describes Dembski's work in this way:

We know that information — whether, say, in hieroglyphics or radio signals — always arises from an intelligent source. .... So the discovery of digital information in DNA provides strong grounds for inferring that intelligence played a causal role in its origin. (Meyer 2006)

What is this mysterious "digital information"? Has a message from a Designer been discovered? When DNA sequences are read, can they be converted into English sentences such as: "Copyright 4004 bce by the intelligent designer; all rights reserved"? Or can they be converted into numbers, with one stretch of DNA turning out to contain the first 10 000 digits of π? Of course not. If anything like this had happened, it would have been big news indeed. You would have heard by now. No, the mysterious digital information turns out to be nothing more than the usual genetic information that codes for the features of life, information that makes the organism well-adapted. The "digital information" is just the presence of sequences that code for RNA and proteins — sequences that lead to high fitness.

Now we already knew that they were there. Most biologists would be surprised to hear that their presence is, in itself, a strong argument for ID — biologists would regard them as the outcome of natural selection. To see them as evidence of ID, one would need an argument that showed that they could only have arisen by purposeful action (ID), and not by selection. Dembski's argument claims to establish this.

Specified Complexity
How does his argument work? Dembski (1998, 2002, 2004) first sets forth an Explanatory Filter to detect design. To make a longish story short, it concludes in favor of design whenever it finds Specified Complexity. He requires that the information in question be complex, so that the probability of that DNA sequence's occurring by chance would be less than 1 in 10¹⁵⁰. Dembski chooses this value to avoid any possibility that the sequence would arise even once in the history of the universe. If this complexity were the only issue, his argument could instantly be dismissed: any random sequence of 250 bases would be about as improbable as this. Similarly, any random five-card hand in a card game has a chance of only one in 2 598 960 and this rare an event occurs every time we deal, so that the rarity is not a cause for concern.

This is where the "specified" part comes in. Dembski requires that the information also satisfy a requirement that makes it meaningful. He illustrates this with a variety of analogies having different kinds of meaning. In effect, he is saying that the relevant quantity is the probability that a random sequence of DNA is as meaningful as the one observed.

Figure 2. Two 101x100 pixel images, each with 3511 black pixels and the rest white. Both have equal information content. Which one has specified complexity, as judged by its resemblance to an image of a flower?

The image on the left of figure 2 shows an example. It is a 101-by-100–pixel image. If our specification were, say, that the image be very much like a flower, the image on the left would be in contention (not surprisingly, as it started as a digital photograph of a zinnia). Of all the possible arrangements of 10 100 black-and-white pixels, it is among the tiny fraction for which the images are much like a flower. There are 2¹⁰¹⁰⁰ possible such images of this size, which is about 10³⁰⁴⁰, a vast number. We do not know how many of these would look as like, or more like, a flower than this, but suppose that it is not greater than 10¹⁰⁰. That means that, if we choose an image randomly from all possibilities, the probability that an image would look this much (or more) like a flower is less than 10¹⁰⁰/10³⁰⁴⁰, which is 10^-2940.

The image on the right would not be in contention in any contest for images that looked like a flower. Like the left image, it has 3511 black pixels, but they seem to be arranged randomly. Both images have the same information content (10 100 bits), but the image on the left looks like a flower. It not only has information, it has information that is specified by being in a flower-like arrangement. This is a useful distinction, which Dembski attributes to Leslie Orgel. I cannot resist adding that a related concept, "adaptive information", appears in one of my own papers, perhaps the one least frequently cited (Felsenstein 1978).

Sequences in the genome that code for proteins and RNAs, and associated regulatory sequences, have specified information. Although Dembski (2002: 148) mentions a number of possible different criteria, the one that will concern us here is fitness. Sequences contain information that makes the organism well adapted if it has high fitness, and the specified information will be judged by the fraction p of all possible sequences that would have equal or higher fitness.

(Dembski also defines specified information in another way — using concepts from algorithmic information theory and saying that information is specified if it can be described simply. A perfect sphere would then be more strongly specified than an actual organism. But this has nothing to do with fitness or with explaining adaptation. I will concentrate here on explaining adaptation.)

Specified complexity does one thing — when it is observed, we can be sure that purely random processes such as mutation are highly unlikely to have produced that pattern, even once in the age of the universe. But can natural selection produce this specified complexity? Dembski argues that it cannot — that he can show that these strongly nonrandom patterns cannot be designed by natural selection.

To support that argument, Dembski makes two main arguments. The first involves a Law of Conservation of Information — he argues that it prevents the process of natural selection from increasing the amount of adaptive information in the genome. The second uses the No Free Lunch theorem to argue that search by an evolutionary algorithm cannot find well-adapted genotypes. Let us consider these in turn.

Conservation of Information
For his concept of the Law of Conservation of Information, Dembski points to a law stated by the late Peter Medawar. In its clearest form it states that a deterministic and invertible process cannot alter the amount of information in a sequence. If we have a function that turns one DNA sequence X into another one Y, and if this function is invertible, then there is also a reverse function that can recover the original sequence X from the sequence Y. Any information that was present in the original sequence cannot have been lost, as we can get the original sequence back.

This is fairly obviously true. For example, if we take the picture of the flower above, and scramble the order of its pixels, we destroy its resemblance to a flower. But if we did so using, say, a computer random number generator (a pseudorandom number generator) to make a permutation of the pixels, we could record the permutation we used, and use it at any time to unscramble the picture. The original information is conserved, because it has been hidden by the scrambling, but not really lost.

Does this mean that such a process cannot increase or decrease the amount of information in the genome? Yes, if we simply mean information, but no, if we mean specified information. Here I am disagreeing with Dembski on a critical point. In his reformulation of Medawar's theorem "the complex specified information in an isolated system of natural causes does not increase" (Dembski 2002: 169). Note that he is discussing not simply information, but specified information. Now look again at the pixelated flower. I said that the second figure had the same number of black pixels, distributed randomly. The reason I knew this is that the second picture is simply the first picture with its pixels scrambled. I generated the permutation using a pseudorandom random number generator and can easily tell you how to generate it yourself, so that you can do the scrambling yourself and get exactly the same result, and you can also make the tables needed to unscramble the picture. So no information was lost.

But the amount of specification certainly was lost. The second picture would be instantly rejected from any "like a flower" contest. When we use the permutation to unscramble the picture, we create a large amount of specification by rearranging the random pixels into a flowerlike form. We blatantly violate Dembski's version of Medawar's theorem.

Dembski's proof
Why am I saying this, when Dembski does sketch a proof of his Law of Conservation of Specified Complexity? How can he have proven the impossible? He does this by changing the specification. If the original permutation, from the first picture to the second, is called F, we can call the reverse permutation, the one that converts the second picture back into the first, G. Dembski's argument points out that the first picture has the specification "like a flower". The second picture has an equivalent specification: "when permuted by G, like a flower". For every picture that is more like a flower than the first picture, there is one that we would get when applying the permutation F to it. That permuted picture will of course satisfy the second specification to the same extent in that, when permuted back by G, it too is more like a flower. So both pictures have specifications that are equally strong, and that is the essence of Dembski's proof. Dembski's proof has been strongly criticized by Elsberry and Shallit (2003; Shallit and Elsberry 2004), who pointed out that it violates a condition that the specification has to be produced from "background information", and thus has to be independent of the transformations F and G. The specification of G is not. But even if their criticism of Dembski's proof were dismissed, and Dembski's proof accepted as correct, in any case Dembski's proof is completely irrelevant. We want to explain how DNA sequences come to contain information that makes the organism highly fit (by coding for adaptations). The specification that should interest us is this one: "codes for an organism that is highly fit". Dembski is applying his proof by arguing that it shows that no random or deterministic function can increase the specified information in a genome. The permutations I have been using as examples are deterministic functions, and his theorem would apply to them. If a genome codes for a highly fit organism, so that it satisfies the specification, when it is permuted it does not satisfy it. The scrambled genome is dreadfully bad at coding for a highly fit organism. And when we use the unscrambling permutation G on it, we create the specification of the information, for this original specification which uses fitness.

The flaw in Dembski's argument is that, to test the power of natural selection to put specified information into the genome, we must evaluate the same specification ("codes for an organism that is highly fit") on it before and after. If you could show that the scrambled picture and the unscrambled picture do equally well in satisfying that same specification, you would go far to prove that natural selection cannot put adaptive information into the genome. Our flower example shows that there is a big difference in whether the original specification is satisfied before and after the permutation. Scrambling the sequence of a gene may not destroy its information content, if we have used a known permutation that can later be undone. But the scrambling certainly will destroy the functioning, and thus the fitness, of the gene. Likewise, unscrambling it can dramatically increase the fitness of the gene. Thus Dembski's argument, in its original form, can be seen to be irrelevant. And when put into a meaningful form by requiring that the specification we evaluate is the same one before and after, the example presented here shows his argument to be wrong.

Generating specified information
Evolution does not happen by deterministic or random change in a single DNA sequence, but in a population of individuals, with natural selection choosing among them. The frequencies of different alleles change. Considering natural selection in a population, we can clearly see that a law of conservation of specified information, or even a law of conservation of information, does not apply there.

If we have a population of DNA sequences, we can imagine a case with four alleles of equal frequency. At a particular position in the DNA, one allele has A, one has C, one has G, and one has T. There is complete uncertainty about the sequence at this position. Now suppose that C has 10% higher fitness than A, G, or T (which have equal fitnesses). The usual equations of population genetics will predict the rise of the frequency of the C allele. After 84 generations, 99.9001% of the copies of the gene will have the C allele.

This is an increase of information: the fourfold uncertainty about the allele has been replaced by near-certainty. It is also specified information — the population has more and more individuals of high fitness, so that the distribution of alleles in the population moves further and further into the upper tail of the original distribution of fitnesses.

The Law of Conservation of Information has not considered this case. Even though the equations of change of gene frequencies are deterministic and invertible, when the gene frequencies are taken into account there is no law of conservation of information. The amount of information changes as the gene frequencies change (it can go either up or down, depending on the case). The specified information as reflected by the fitness does obey a law — in this simple case fitness constantly increases, as a result of the action of natural selection. So the only law we have is one that does predict the creation of specified information by natural selection. One might object that we have not actually created specified complexity because the increase in information has been only 2 bits, rather than the 500 bits (150 decimal digits) which is Dembski's minimum requirement for specified complexity. But what we have done is to describe the action of the mechanism that creates specified information — if this acts repeatedly at many places in the gene, specified complexity would arise. Thus one of the two main arguments used by Dembski can be seen to be wrong, when we consider a population.

No Free Lunch?
The second pillar of Dembski's argument is his use of the No Free Lunch theorem. This gave his 2002 book its title, and Dembski (2002: xix) declares the chapter on this to be "the climax of the book". The theorem was invented by computer scientists (Wolpert and Macready 1997) who were concerned with the effectiveness of search algorithms. It is worth giving a simple explanation of their theorem in the context of a simple model of natural selection. Imagine a space of DNA sequences that has to be searched. Suppose that the sequences are each 1000 bases long. There are 4 x 4 x 4 x … x 4 = 4¹⁰⁰⁰ possible sequences, which in alphabetic order would go from AAAA...A to TTTT...T. Now imagine that our organism is haploid, so that there is only one copy of the gene per individual, and suppose that each of these sequences has a fitness. A very tiny fraction of the sequences is functional, and almost all of the rest have fitness zero.

Suppose that we want to find an organism of high fitness, and we want to do so by looking at 10 000 different DNA sequences. The best we can do, of course, is to take the highest one we find among these. Now note that 4¹⁰⁰⁰ is about 10⁶⁰², a number far greater than the number of elementary particles in the universe. It is not unreasonable to guess that the fraction of DNA sequences that has a nonzero fitness is tiny — let's be very generous and say 1 in 10²⁰.

One way we could search would be at random. Pick one of the DNA sequences, then pick another completely at random, then another completely at random, and continue on until 10 000 different ones have been examined. As we are picking at random, each pick has essentially one chance in 10²⁰ of finding a sequence with nonzero fitness. It should immediately be apparent that we have almost no chance of finding any sequence with nonzero fitness. In fact we have less than one chance in 10¹⁶. So a completely random search is a really terrible way to increase fitness — it will overwhelmingly often find only sequences that cannot survive. In effect, it is looking for a needle in a haystack, and failing.

Of course, evolution does not do a completely random search. A reasonable population genetic model involves mutation, natural selection, recombination and genetic drift in a population of sequences. But we can make a crude caricature of it by having only one sequence, and making, at each step, a single mutational change in it. If the change improves the fitness, the new sequence is accepted. Suppose that we continue to do this until 10 000 different sequences have been examined. We will end with the best of those 10 000.

Will this do better? In the real world, it will if we start from a slightly good sequence. Each mutation carries us to a sequence that differs by only one letter. These tend to be sequences that are somewhat lower, or sometimes somewhat higher, in fitness. On average they are lower, but the chance that one reaches a sequence that is better is not zero. So there is some chance of improving the fitness, quite possibly more than once. A fairly good way to find sequences with nonzero fitnesses is to search in the neighborhood of a sequence of nonzero fitness.

The No Free Lunch (NFL) theorem states that if we consider the list of all possible sequences, each with a fitness written next to it and if we average over all the ways that those fitnesses could be assigned to the sequences, then no search method is better than any other. We are averaging over all the orders in which we could write the fitnesses down next to the list of sequences. Almost all of these orders are just like random associations of fitnesses with genotypes. That means that search by genetic mutation could not do any better than a hopelessly bad method such as complete random choice of sequences. The NFL theorem considers all the different ways fitness could be associated with genotype. The vast number of those are like random scramblings. For those assignments of fitnesses to genotypes, when we mutate a sequence by even one base, the fitness of the new sequence is the same as it would be if it were drawn at random from among all other possible sequences.

This randomization destroys all hope of finding a better fitness by mutating. Each single-base mutation is then just as bad as changing all of the bases simultaneously. It is as if we were on the side of a mountain and took one step. In the real world, this would carry us a bit up or a bit down (though sometimes over a cliff). In the No Free Lunch world, it would carry us to the altitude of a random spot on the globe, and that would most often plunge us far downward. In sequence space the prospects are even more gloomy than on the globe, as all but an extremely tiny fraction of sequences have fitness zero, and thus they have no prospects.

The NFL theorem is correct, but it is not relevant to the real world of evolution of genomes. This point has been overlooked in some responses to Dembski's use of the theorem. For example, H Allen Orr in The New Yorker (Orr 2005) and David Wolpert in a review of Dembski's book (Wolpert 2003) both argue against Dembski by pointing out phenomena such as coevolution that are not covered by the NFL theorem. In effect, they are conceding that for simple sequence evolution, the NFL theorem rules out adaptation by natural selection. In arguing this way, they are far too pessimistic about the capabilities of simple sequence evolution. They have overlooked the NFL theorem's unrealistic assumptions about the random way that fitnesses are associated with genotypes, which in effect assumes mutations to have disastrously bad fitness.

Mutations
In the real world, mutations do not act like this. Yes, they are much more likely to reduce fitness than to increase it, but many of them are not lethal. I probably carry one — I have a strong aversion to lettuce, which to me has a bitter mineral taste. This is probably a genetic variation in one of my odorant receptor genes. It makes salad bars problematic, and at sandwich counters I spend a lot of time scraping the lettuce off. But it has not killed me — yet. The great body of empirical information about the effects of mutation in many organisms makes it clear that a great many mutations are not instantly lethal. They do on average make things worse, but they do not plunge us instantly back into the primordial organic soup.

In Dembski's NFL argument a single base change would have the same effect, on average, as changing all the bases in the gene simultaneously. A single amino acid substitution in a protein would have the same effect as replacing the whole protein by a random string of amino acids. This would make the protein totally inactive. That changes of a single base or a single amino acid do not have this sort of effect is strong evidence that mutations are much more likely to find another almost-functional sequence nearby. The real fitness landscape is not a scrambled "needle-in-a-haystack" landscape in which a sequence of moderately good fitness is surrounded only by sequences whose fitness is zero. In the real world, genotypes near a moderately good one often have moderately good fitnesses.

Empirical evidence
Note that if Dembski's arguments were valid, they would make adaptation by natural selection of any organism, in any phenotype, essentially impossible. For that would require adaptive information to be encoded into the genome by natural selection. According to Dembski's argument we would not need to worry: bacteria infecting a patient could not evolve antibiotic resistance. Human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) would not become resistant to drugs. Insects would not evolve resistance to insecticides. Dembski's designer would be busy indeed: he would need to design every last adaptation, leaving out only a few that might be purely accidental.

Dembski himself seems unable to draw this self-evident conclusion from his own argument. He acknowledges that "the development of antibiotic resistance by pathogens via the Darwinian mechanism is experimentally verified and rightly of great concern to the medical field" (Dembski 2002: 38). But by saying that he undercuts his own argument — if correct, his argument would actually prove that the adaptive information in the bacterial genome could not be created by natural selection, except by the pure accident of mutation and genetic drift, unaided by natural selection.

His argument will also be news to animal and plant breeders. They use simple forms of artificial selection such as breeding from the individuals that have the best phenotypes. These forms of selection are like natural selection in that they do not use detailed information about individual genes — they do not require a particular detailed design. Dembski's argument implies that the breeders' efforts are in vain. They cannot create changes of phenotype by artificial selection, as this should be as ineffective as natural selection. Artificial selection provided Darwin with such powerful examples that he opened his book with an entire chapter on "Variation Under Domestication" in which he discussed case after case of changes due to artificial selection, but Dembski does not discuss artificial selection at all, mentioning it only once, in passing (in Dembski [2004] it is on page 311).

Smuggling?
Dembski (2002, sections 4.9 and 4.10) is not unaware of arguments that smoother fitness surfaces than the needle-in-a-haystack ones would allow natural selection to be effective. For example, Richard Dawkins (1996) has a computer program to demonstrate the effectiveness of selection, which evolves a meaningless jumble of 28 letters into the phrase "Methinks it is like a weasel" by repeatedly mutating letters randomly and then accepting those offspring sequences that most closely match the target phrase. Each match improves the fitness, so that mutations that make the phrase closer are readily available. Dembski argues, however, that the information in the resulting phrase is not created by the natural selection — it is already there, in the target phrase. He calls this the "displacement problem" (2002, section 4.7).

But invariably we find that when specified complexity seems to be generated for free, it has in fact been front-loaded, smuggled in, or hidden from view. (Dembski 2002: 204)

Computer demonstrations of the power of natural selection to bring about adaptation do often have detailed targets that natural selection is to approach. It is easier to write the programs that way. In real life, the objective is higher fitness, and achieving that means having the organism's phenotype interact well with real physics, real chemistry, and real biology.

In these more real cases, the environment does not provide the genome with exact targets. Consider a population of deer being preyed upon by a population of wolves. We have little doubt that mutations among the deer will cause changes in the lengths of their limbs, the strength of their muscles, the speed of reaction of their nervous system, the acuity of their vision. Some of these will enable the deer to escape the wolves better, and those ones will tend to spread in the population. The result is a change in the design of the deer. But this information is not "smuggled in" by the wolves. They simply chase the deer — they do not evaluate their match to detailed pre-existing design specifications.

There have been computer simulations that mimicked this process. The most fascinating is that of Karl Sims (1994a, 1994b, 1994c), whose simulation evolves virtual creatures that swim or hop in intriguing and somewhat unpredictable ways. The creatures are composed of connected blocks that can move relative to each other, and they are selected only for effective movement without screening for any details of the design. All that is required is genotypes, phenotypes, some interaction between the phenotypes and an environment, and natural selection on one property — speed. There is no "smuggling". A similar simulation inspired by Sims's is Jon Klein's (2002) breve program, available for download.

Evolvability
Dembski makes another argument about the shape of the fitness function itself. If it is smooth enough to allow evolution to succeed, he argues that this is the result of more smuggling:

But this means that the problem of finding a given target has been displaced to the new problem of finding the information j capable of locating that target. ... To say that an evolutionary algorithm has generated specified complexity within the original phase space is therefore really to say that it has borrowed specified complexity from a higher-order phase space ... it follows that the evolutionary algorithm has not generated specified complexity at all but merely shifted it around. (Dembski 2002: 203)

He is arguing that the fitness surface itself must have been specially chosen out of a vast array of possibilities, and that this means that one started with the specified complexity already present. He is saying that the smoothness of real fitness functions is not typical — that without a large input of specified information one would be dealing instead with needle-in-a-haystack fitness functions where natural selection could not succeed.

Now, it is possible to have natural selection alter the fitness function. There is a small literature on the "evolution of evolvability". Altenberg (1995) showed a computer simulation where natural selection causes the extent of interaction among genes to become less, so that the genotypes tend to become ones that have a smoother fitness function.

But even this may not be necessary. Different genes often act in ways separated in space and time, and that reduces the chance of their interacting. A mutant affecting one's eye pigment typically does not interact with a mutant at a different gene affecting the bones in one's toe. That isolation does not require any special explanation. But in a world that has a needle-in-a-haystack fitness function everything interacts strongly with everything else.

In effect, that world has everything encrypted. If you get a password or a lock combination partially correct, you do not partly access the computer account or partly open the safe. The computer or the safe does not react to each change by saying "hotter" or "colder". Each digit or letter interacts with each other, and nothing happens until all of them are correct. But this encryption is not typical of the world around us. Password systems and combination locks must be carefully designed to be secure — and this design effort can fail.

The world we live in is not encrypted. Most parts of it interact very little with other parts. When my family leaves home for a vacation, we have to make many arrangements at home concerning doors, windows, lights, toilets, faucets, thermostats, garbage, notifying neighbors, stopping delivery of newspapers, and so on. If we lived in Dembski's encrypted universe, this would be impossible. Every time we changed the thermostat setting, the windows would come unlocked and the faucets would run. Every time we closed a window, the newspaper delivery would resume, or a neighbor would forget that we were leaving. (It's worse than that, in fact. The house would be totally destroyed.) But, as we live in the real universe, we can cheerfully set family members to carrying out these different tasks without their worrying about each other's actions. The different parts of the house scarcely interact.

Of course a house is a designed object, but it is not particularly hard to have its parts be almost independent. When architects train, they do not have to spend much of their time ensuring that the doors, when closed, will not cause the faucets to run.

We live in a universe whose physics might be special, or might be designed — I wouldn't know about that. But Dembski's argument is not about other possible universes — it is about whether natural selection can work to create the adaptations that we see in the forms of life we observe here, in our own universe, on our own planet. And if our universe seems predisposed to smooth fitness functions, that is a big problem for Dembski's argument.

Bibliographic note: Dembski's critics
Of the major arguments here, two are, I believe, my own. One is the argument that Dembski's Law of Conservation of Complex Specified Information could not succeed in proving that information cannot be generated by natural selection, because his Law requires us to change the specification to keep the amount of specified information the same. The other is the argument that changes of gene frequency by natural selection can increase specified information. The other major arguments will be found in some of the papers I cited. In particular, the argument that the No Free Lunch theorem does not establish that natural selection cannot do better than pure random search was also made by Wein 2002, Rosenhouse 2002, Perakh 2004b, Shallit and Elsberry 2004, Tellgren 2005, and Häggström 2007.

In conclusion
Dembski argues that there are theorems that prevent natural selection from explaining the adaptations that we see. His arguments do not work. There can be no theorem saying that adaptive information is conserved and cannot be increased by natural selection. Gene frequency changes caused by natural selection can be shown to generate specified information. The No Free Lunch theorem is mathematically correct, but it is inapplicable to real biology. Specified information, including complex specified information, can be generated by natural selection without needing to be "smuggled in". When we see adaptation, we are not looking at positive evidence of billions and trillions of interventions by a designer. Dembski has not refuted natural selection as an explanation for adaptation.

Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Joan Rudd, Erik Tellgren, Jeffrey Shallit, Tom Schneider, Mark Perakh, Monty Slatkin, Lee Altenberg, Carl Bergstrom, and Michael Lynch for helpful comments. Dennis Wagner at Access Research Network kindly gave permission for use of the wonderful cartoon "The Visigoths are Coming". Work on this paper was supported in part by NIH grant GM071639.

Renewed Concern About Creationism at Grand Canyon National Park

Toward the end of 2006, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility — "a national non-profit alliance of local, state and federal scientists, law enforcement officers, land managers and other professionals dedicated to upholding environmental laws and values" — charged the National Park Service with stalling on a promised review of a creationist book sold at the bookstores at Grand Canyon National Park. Although the park's bookstores are operated by a separate non-profit organization, the Grand Canyon Association, the National Park Service is responsible for approving the items that are sold there. In August 2003, the NPS approved the sale of Grand Canyon: A Different View, edited by Tom Vail and published by Master Books, the publishing arm of the Institute for Creation Research. A Different View expounds a young-earth creationist view of the geology of the canyon, and proclaims, "all contributions have been peer-reviewed to ensure a consistent and biblical perspective." In his review of the book (RNCSE 2004 Jan/Feb; 24 [1]: 33-6), the geologist Wilfred Elders described it as "'Exhibit A' of a new, slick strategy by biblical literalists to proselytize using a beautifully illustrated, multi-authored book about a spectacular and world-famous geological feature," adding, "Allowing the sale of this book within the National Park was unfortunate. In the minds of some buyers, this could imply NPS approval of young-earth creationists and their religious proselytizing."

After the sale of A Different View was approved, the superintendent of the park appealed to the NPS headquarters for "a review of the book in terms of its appropriateness," and the Chief of the Park Service's Geologic Resources Division recommended its removal, saying that it "does not use accurate, professional and scholarly knowledge; is not based on science but a specific religious doctrine; does not further the public's understanding of the Grand Canyon's existence; [and] does not further the mission of the National Park Service." Meanwhile, the sale of the book became a matter of public controversy (see RNCSE 2004 Jan/Feb; 24 [1]: 4-5). Elders's review appeared in Eos (the weekly newsletter of the American Geophysical Union); the presidents of the American Paleontological Society, the American Geophysical Union, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, the Association of American State Geologists, the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology, the American Geological Institute, and the Geological Society of America signed a joint letter to the NPS, urging that A Different View be removed "from shelves where buyers are given the impression that the book is about earth science and its content endorsed by the National Park Service" (see RNCSE 2004 Jan/Feb; 24 [1]: 19); and stories about the controversy appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. A spokesperson for the NPS repeatedly assured the press and Congress that the promised review would be forthcoming.

In its December 28, 2006, press release, however, PEER charged, "Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park." Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER, commented, "As one park geologist said, this is equivalent of Yellowstone National Park selling a book entitled Geysers of Old Faithful: Nostrils of Satan." In a December 28, 2006, letter, PEER urged the new director of NPS, Mary Bomar, to remove the book from sale at the park's bookstores and museums as well as to "[p]rovide training to the interpretive staff at Grand Canyon NP regarding how to answer questions from the public concerning the geologic age of the Canyon and related matters; and ... [a]pprove an updated version of the long-stalled pamphlet 'National Park Service Geologic Interpretive Programs: Distinguishing Science from Religion' for distribution to agency interpretive staff." It ought to be noted that PEER was not accusing the NPS of forbidding its interpretive staff to present the scientific facts about the canyon's age and geology. Unfortunately, careless wording in its press release suggested otherwise, and PEER's credibility suffered as a result, obscuring PEER's important charge that the NPS is not providing its staff with the resources it needs to present the scientific facts about the canyon's age of geology effectively, especially when faced with park visitors who have questions about, or even embrace, views that reject those facts on religious grounds.

Prompted by PEER's press release, the controversy over the sale of A Different View began to attract attention again in the media, with the Arizona Daily Sun (2007 Jan 4) offering a report in which a spokesperson for the NPS was quoted as saying, "We do not use the creationist text in our teaching, nor do we endorse its content. However, it is not our place to censor alternate beliefs." The Sacramento Bee (2007 Jan 4) suggested, in a forceful and cogent editorial entitled "Don't use parks to promote creationism," "A new year and a new National Park Service director mark an opportunity for change. Here's an easy one. Settle the 3-year-old controversy about a creationist account of the Grand Canyon." The editorial argued that "Mary Bomar, the new National Park Service director, should send a message that programs and materials in national parks present the best scientific evidence and don't endorse any particular religious beliefs," and concluded by urging Bomar to do so quickly:

Remove the book from sale from within the park; its proper place is for sale in private bookstores outside the public park. Equally important, finish the long-delayed pamphlet ... and distribute it to park rangers. The nation's public parks are not the place to promote religious theories about the formation and development of Earth.

A spokesperson for the NPS, David Barna, told The New York Times (2007 Jan 5) that there was no formal review of whether the bookstores ought to discontinue selling A Different View in part because of differences among the NPS's specialists. According to the Times, "When officials got together to discuss the book, the geologists and natural resource specialists would say, 'Get this book out of here,' Mr. Barna said. 'But the education and interpretation people would say: 'Wait a minute. If your science is so sound, the fact that there are differences of opinion should not scare you away.'" In a written statement, the Times reported, Barna "notes that Park Service management policies require reliance on 'the best scientific evidence available' and, as a result, rangers tell visitors that "the Colorado River basin has developed in the past 40 million years." But the Times also reported, "the guidelines also say that material available from concessionaires in national parks should adhere to the standards used to evaluate Park Service materials." PEER's executive director Jeff Ruch was quoted as contending that selling the book promoted fundamentalist Christian views: "This is government establishment of religion in a fairly fundamental way, if you pardon the pun."

Ronald Bailey, the science columnist for Reason, heard NCSE's executive director Eugenie C Scott speak about the controversy at the James Randi Educational Foundation's event The Amazing Meeting V, and promptly went to Grand Canyon National Park to see A Different View for himself. He reports, "As I was buying it, I asked the clerk what she thought about it. 'We're not allowed to say anything about it,' she said covering her mouth with her hand in the 'Speak No Evil' monkey fashion. 'Oh come on,' I cajoled, but the clerk refused any further comment. Later I went in search of it at the other south rim Park Service bookstore at Desert View. In this much smaller bookstore, Vail's slender Flood geology volume was mixed in among the other photo books. Again, I asked this clerk what she thought, and she smiled and replied, 'All I will say is that it's got some really beautiful photographs'" (2007 Jan 26; available on-line at http://reason.com/news/show/118334.html). Acknowledging that the NPS-overseen bookstores carry books that present and discuss the creation myths of Native Americans, Bailey nevertheless drew the crucial distinction: "unlike books on native creation myths, Vail insists that he is making scientific claims about how rock layers are laid down, fossils formed and the canyon carved."

Review: 40 Days and 40 Nights

One of the most interesting aspects of the "intelligent design" battle that waged in the now famous community of Dover, Pennsylvania, was watching the national media at work. For when journalists descend on a small town, the local press tends to view the impending deluge of coverage cautiously and with trepidation.

In covering stories over the years that have drawn wide media attention, my fellow journalists and I have witnessed the routine. Prominent reporter flies into town, spends a few hours observing us as if we are rare and exotic zoo animals. Reporter jumps back on plane, tapping away on laptop a collection of anecdotes, using smug shorthand that all too often passes for insight. With sweeping generalizations, everyone in the town becomes the same. We locals have collected our favorites of such stereotypical assertions. The one I most enjoy is from a 2001 Time story about York, a town only a few miles from Dover. The writer referred to the city as "a hard-knock river town" — even though the closest river, the Susquehanna, is twelve miles away.

So when the national and international spotlight shone on Dover, those of us reporters who had been covering the story from the beginning were wary. In the end, we need not have been. For the most part, I found the national coverage to be thankfully free of such broad-brush stereotypes that plague this kind of parachute journalism.

Perhaps the best evidence of this is the trio of recently released books about the trial. Edward Humes, the author of Monkey Girl (New York: Ecco, 2007), and Gordy Slack, who penned The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), have written competent accounts. The third book, 40 Days and 40 Nights, was written by Matthew Chapman, the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. The title is a reference to the trial's span of time, as well as ... well, you already know ... the number of days God had it rain on the world to cause the Noachian Flood.

Readers of RNCSE know well the details of the first, and likely only, constitutional challenge of "intelligent design". The Dover Area School Board, in the fall of 2004, required that 9th-grade biology students hear a four-paragraph statement that said evolution "was just a theory" and that "intelligent design" is "an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view." Students were also referred to the pro-"intelligent design" textbook, published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, Of Pandas and People. Eleven parents, who viewed the statement as an assault on the First Amendment's prohibition of governmental advocacy of religion, sued the district.

The resulting six-week trial was a gripping interplay of fascinating scientific testimony, intelligent design exposed as fraud, and moving accounts by parents, teachers and yes, reporters, who described the divisiveness that the school board's actions inflicted on the community.

Judge John E Jones III, in a thoughtful and precise 139-page opinion, not only chided the "breathtaking inanity" of the school board members who lied under oath, but ruled that "intelligent design" was a religiously based concept and was not science.

As I covered the trial, I had taken the view of an insider looking out and wondered how we are perceived. Chapman, as a native Briton, is the consummate outsider looking in, wondering who we are and what motivates us.

Kevin Padian, president of NCSE's board of directors and one of the trial's expert witnesses, wrote in his review in Nature (2007; 448: 253-4) of the Dover books, "Is the American tradition one of philosophical and political idealists, or of persecuted pilgrims who then turn around and ostracize anyone who doesn't agree with them?"

It is a great question and Chapman explores it quite effectively. In a chapter recounting the trial testimony of Georgetown University theologian John Haught, Chapman writes of the joining of forces between conservative Protestants and Catholics. "Fundamentalists of all kinds have taken the idea of God and whittled it down into an ecumenical baseball bat which all can use to crack the heads of those they fear or hate. In the war against materialism, all allies are welcome" (p 117).

Perhaps the national media was so drawn to the story because what took place in Dover seems to serve as a reflection of what is playing out in Washington DC and across the country. Chapman frequently references this parallel. As he writes about Dover's school board president Alan Bonsell, "He reminded me of President Bush in some ways. His faith seemed to have given him a confidence unwarranted by the facts" (p 25).

Chapman genuinely seems to want to understand the issues that played out in Dover and that led to the "intelligent design" showdown. At the beginning, he makes it clear that he develops a real affection for the characters that have made this story both so endearing and so compelling. He also seems to grasp, as evidenced in his account, that to take one person out of the story no doubt would have changed the story remarkably. In Chapman's mind, everyone seems to have played a significant part, even Matthew McElvenny, the trial's technology specialist, who delivered the graphics and exhibits each day onto a courtroom screen with nonplussed precision. Chapman calls McElvenny "the Wizard of Oz".

In his interviews, Chapman manages to uncover enticing tidbits of information. In his most delightful chapter, "Marilyn Monroe is alive and well," he writes about Angie Yingling, one of the school board members who, at first, supported the ID policy. The interview careens about like a roller coaster, and Chapman just holds on tight and enjoys the ride.

Chapman can also deliver an amusing turn of phrase and apt descriptions of the players. His summation of Nick Matzke, one of the plaintiffs' NCSE advisors, is dead-on and funny — although his description of plaintiffs' attorney Eric Rothschild, in comparing him to a defense attorney with nine children, as "the more sperm-conservative Jew" is a bit … hmm, how to describe … icky?

Still, Chapman's strength is that he grasps that perhaps the truth is more complicated and messy than the either/or proposition that Padian suggests — that the American tradition is neither solely one of persecuted and self-righteous pilgrims, nor one of tolerant idealists. For within every small town, there are both.

Review: Encyclopedia of Evolution

It is not often that one reads an encyclopedia from cover to cover, but this task was more enjoyable than onerous. I benefited from reading articles on Eugenics, Evolutionary Ethics, Evolutionary Medicine, The Evolution of Intelligence, The Evolution of Language Ability and many other topics. There is much to commend this book, not the least of which is its dedication to Emma Darwin, Charles's devoted wife and caregiver. There are 215 entries, including biographical sketches of 47 scientists from Louis Agassiz to Sewall Wright that capture the essence of a person's contribution to evolutionary science. Each topic begins with its definition followed by details. Many entries, such as Flores Island People, Galápagos Islands, and Macroevolution are treated in up to three pages, while Lysenkoism, Red Queen Hypothesis, and Uniformitarianism are covered on a single page. Major topics such as Charles Darwin, Continental Drift, and Natural Selection are given five or six pages, and the Scientific Method merits seven pages and includes appropriate comments on the Bush Administration's abuse of science. There is a "Further Reading" section for each entry. Many articles are illustrated with helpful black and white drawings or photographs. There are cross-references in each entry. For example, the Donald Johanson sketch leads the reader to Australopithecines, Hominin, Bipedalism, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Homo Habilis. Other subjects can be located via the index. There is no entry for memes, but the index directs the reader to the Richard Dawkins account where memes are explained. The geological periods are treated in a uniform style that includes dates, climate, continents, marine life, terrestrial plants and animals, and extinctions.

The encyclopedia was written by a very well-read botanist who announces his Christianity in the introduction, but does not allow faith to overrule science. His position is elaborated in one of five boxed essays entitled "Can An Evolutionary Scientist Be Religious?" He says "yes," but he never details how to reconcile the two, nor discusses why he thinks it would be necessary. The other essays include "How Much Do Genes Control Human Behavior?", "What Are the 'Ghosts of Evolution'?", "Why Do Humans Die?", and "Are Humans Alone in the Universe?'. The three-page Scopes Trial entry has a fascinating one-page box comparing the actual trial with the 1960 film, Inherit the Wind.

The Charles Darwin biographical sketch hits all the important highlights. The writing is at times thoughtful ("Charles Darwin was to put his inherited wealth to better use than perhaps anyone ever has") and occasionally simplistic ("He was attracted to Emma Wedgwood, who also happened to be his cousin, and she liked him as well, and they were married"). I have a few quibbles as with the statement that Fitzroy chose Darwin for the Beagle voyage because of the shape of his nose. Actually, Fitzroy the phrenologist nearly rejected Darwin, but Darwin convinced him that "my nose had spoken falsely" (Barlow 1958: 72). The suggestion is planted that the death of Annie, Darwin's eldest daughter, might have been due to inbreeding, but she actually succumbed to tuberculosis (consumption) (Keynes 2001: 219).

There is a presumable typo on p 32 where Australopithecus afarensis is substituted for A africanus, which could lead to confusion. No phylogenetic diagrams are given in the discussions of Australopithecus or Homo and some of the more recent books are not cited (Zimmer 2005). As an ichthyologist I am underwhelmed by the Evolution of Fishes article. It does not say much about the group of vertebrates that has more members than all other vertebrate classes combined. Rice stated that tetrapods evolved from crossopterygians rather than lungfishes as generally thought today, and he does not cite any major ichthyological texts. Some accounts read like the synthesis that comes from consulting a few sources, but that is to be expected in a single-author work of this scope for the general public. Rice puts an astonishing amount of important information at one's fingertips.

In the Alfred Russel Wallace section, Rice confused Borneo and Sulawesi (Celebes) and garbled the mammalian examples. Wallace's Line passes between Bali and Lombock and Borneo and Sulawesi (Berra 2001). To the west of the line (Bali and Borneo) is the Oriental biogeographical realm and to the east (Lombock and Sulawesi) is the Australian realm. Sulawesi has at least one species of marsupial; Borneo has none (Flannery 1995). Five species of native felids occur on Borneo (but not tigers) while no native cats occur on Sulawesi (Sunquist and Sunquist 2002).

The appendix is a masterful 14-page, chapter-by-chapter summary of the sixth edition of Origin of Species.

There is relatively little overlap between accounts of the same subject in Milner's Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990) and the current volume. Reading both accounts of Robert Chambers, for example, will provide more information and insight than reading only one. Many topics treated in one of the encyclopedias are not mentioned in the other, so even if Milner's book is in your library, you still need Rice's encyclopedia. Pagel's (2002) Encyclopedia of Evolution is a two-volume, multi-authored work of 1205 pages, which, naturally, can incorporate more details.

Rice's coverage is broad, interesting, relevant, and informative. If you want examples of Convergent Evolution or a primer on Cladistics, Coevolution, or Creationism, this is a good place to begin. Reading this book would be excellent preparation for graduate school general exams. It can serve as a ready reference for science journalists, teachers, school board members, and the intelligent layperson. I wholeheartedly recommend this book, and at $24.95, the paperback version is good value.

Review: Origins of Life

The standing of evolutionary biology is independent of the origin of life. This has been true from the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859. In that work, Darwin allotted less than a page toward the end of 670 pages of text to the question. The last two sentences of the sixth edition read:

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

And in an 1871 letter to the botanist Joseph Hooker, Darwin wrote:

It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine [sic] compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.

Darwin added, "It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter."

However, faced with mounting evidence in support of evolutionary biology coming from scientific fields from genetics to paleontology, the origin of life has become an obsession with creationists who assert that science's failure to create life de novo is "proof" of supernatural creation. The first book-length argument of this sort was published in 1984. Written by Charles B Thaxton, Walter L Bradley and Roger L Olsen, The Mystery of Life's Origin argued that there is a scientific "crisis" in origin-of-life research, the Miller-Urey experiment was actually a failure, the early earth was oxidized and thus incapable of supporting amino acid synthesis, scientists are "dogmatic materialists" and manipulate their experiments to produce their desired results, and the second law of thermodynamics requires that order cannot appear spontaneously. There is even the introduction of a language model of DNA coupled to an "information entropy" argument.

Bradley and Thaxton reprised their information argument in 1994 for a book edited by Biola University philosophy professor JP Moreland entitled The Creation Hypothesis. Prominently displayed on the cover of the book are the names of Hugh Ross and the young William Dembski. In their chapter, "Information and the Origin of Life" (p 173-210), Bradley and Thaxton introduce the notion that "design detection" was similar to archaeology, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) particularly as depicted in Carl Sagan's fiction, and forensic investigations. They also apply Leslie Orgel's 1973 concept of "specified complexity" to life and rephrase it as a sort of measure of information. In short, Bradley and Thaxton's short chapter on the origin of life set the agenda for William Dembski's whole career. Similarly, The Mystery of Life's Origin is a cornerstone of Rana and Ross's book.

One of the goals of Origins of Life: Biblical and Evolutionary Models Face Off, according to the introduction, is to update The Mystery of Life's Origin. Fazale Rana has a chemistry PhD from Ohio State, and Hugh Ross has his PhD from the University of Toronto in astronomy. Together, they are leaders of Reasons to Believe (RTB), an old-earth creationist organization founded by Ross. Their strong arguments regarding the age of the earth are welcome antidotes to young-earth dogmas promoted by such outfits as Answers in Genesis. Rana and Ross are most certainly creationists, however, asserting that the biblical God actively intervenes in biology to "... create each and every new species of life on Earth"; in particular, "God supernaturally and miraculously created Adam from the 'dust of the earth' ..." (http://www.reasons.org/about/8_myths_about_rtb.shtml). (See Numbers 1993 and Scott 2005 for a discussion of the various flavors of American creationism.)

The errors begin immediately. There are errors of fact, logic, and scholarship. There is a standard dose of quote mining mixed in as well. The creationists' current favorite scientists to quote-mine on the origin of life are Robert Shapiro (a creationist's favorite since his 1986 book), Peter Ward (paydirt from the 2000 book Rare Earth co-written with Donald Brownlee), and Hubert Yockey (possibly the mother lode, with half a dozen citations). Origins of Life also offers ample cheap innuendo that scientists lack integrity, are "desperate," and "... are keeping quiet ..." about the so-called research failures Rana and Ross claim to expose. All this before the end of chapter 1.

More importantly, the "RTB Model" predictions offered by Rana and Ross are not and cannot be differentiated from the predictions of modern origin-of-life research when they are testable at all. The creationist face of the subtitle's "face off" is a hollow mask. The proffered predictions from this "biblical model" appear on pages 43-4:

1. Life appeared early in Earth's history while the planet was still in its primordial state.
2. Life originated in and persisted through the hostile conditions of early Earth.
3. Life originated abruptly.
4. Earth's first life displays complexity.
5. Life is complex in its minimal form.
6. Life's chemistry displays hallmark characteristics of design.
7. First life was qualitatively different from life that came into existence on creation days three, five, and six.
8. A purpose can be postulated for life's early appearance on Earth.

Predictions 1-3 are identical with those of origin-of-life research. From geochemistry, it is known that the chemical signatures of life are present in the earth's oldest sedimentary rock (Rosing 1999, which is actually cited by Rana and Ross). A decade earlier than Rana and Ross, and well before Rosing's confirmation, Antonio Lazcano and Stanley Miller predicted that life appeared in as little as 10 million years following the establishment of favorable conditions (Lazcano and Miller 1994, 1996). Part of the second RTB prediction is trivial — life today began at some point and then persisted. The rest — the notion that the early earth was particularly hostile to life — is absurd. Modern life is found from alkaline to acidic conditions, from below freezing to near boiling temperatures, from harsh sunlight to total darkness, from alpine lakes and hyper-salty lagoons to the driest sands, in solid rock miles beneath the surface, and in forms dependent on molecular oxygen and in others destroyed by it.

The term "specified complexity" was coined by Leslie Orgel in his 1973 book The Origins of Life: Molecules and Natural Selection. He wanted to draw the distinction between life and the non-living organization of crystals, which lack complexity, and non-living complex organic aggregates such as tars, which lack organization (that is, specificity). Given the importance that Rana and Ross give this notion of complexity in their model predictions 4 and 5, and their frequent call on "complex organization" and "function", I am unable to understand why they failed to explore its meaning. Equally puzzling is why they failed to mention that this was a central part of our scientific exploration of life for over 30 years. Predictions 4 and 5 can be dismissed.

Prediction 6, presenting the chemical "hallmark characteristics of design," would be an astounding breakthrough, and something that "intelligent design" creationists have all failed to provide in spite of a decade of promises. Alas, Rana and Ross also demur, apologizing that such a difficult topic is beyond the scope of their book, and promising a future book that will present "a comprehensive case for biochemical design" (page 43).

Their last two "predictions" are no such thing. They are at most scriptural interpretations or theological directives and leave no room for independent confirmation of any kind. Rana and Ross provide no means to differentiate their creationism from mainstream science, and try to usurp long-established scientific results for their "biblical model".

Lacking any valid predictions from the RTB model, there was little reason for me to persevere with the book, so I attribute my continued reading to masochism. The situation was not improved when I reached the "predictions" Rana and Ross claimed are the logical scientific consequences of origin-of-life research. These are listed below from pages 58-60:

1. Chemical pathways produced life's building blocks.
2. Chemical pathways yielded complex biomolecules.
3. The chemical pathways that yielded life's building blocks and complex molecular constituents operated in early Earth's conditions.
4. Sufficiently placid chemical and physical conditions existed on early Earth for long periods of time.
5. Geochemical evidence for a prebiotic soup exists in Earth's earliest rocks.
6. Life appeared gradually on Earth over a long period of time.
7. The origin of life occurred only once on Earth.
8. Earth's first life was simple.
9. Life in its most minimal form is demonstrably simple.

The first "prediction" is amply demonstrated experimentally and by direct observations from geochemistry and astrochemistry. The second claim seems innocuous; after all, complex biochemicals are produced everyday by chemical pathways. However, Rana and Ross augment the second claim by explaining that it means that DNA, RNA, proteins, membranes, and cell walls "condensed" from the prebiotic environment. This does considerable violence to actual origin-of-life research and theory, which offer specific hypotheses about how such biomolecules formed and outlines cumulative sequences, rather than proposing life simply "condenses".

The third claim, that a rich chemistry existed under early earth conditions, is harmless enough until Rana and Ross piggyback the false assertions of their fourth prediction: The claims that modern origin-of-life researchers imagine a "placid" early environment for "long periods of time" and that such an environment would be favorable for the origin of life are unfounded. Nor are they necessary corollaries to the proposed third prediction.

The fifth proposed consequence for a natural origin of life, that some original remnant of the prebiotic environment must exist, is neither necessary nor cogent. However, such an evidentiary demand can be satisfied in two obvious ways. First, there are multiple examples of amino acids, sugars, and even vesicle-forming lipids from products extracted from meteors, and detected in space by spectroscopy. These are the least altered fragments of our ancient solar system. As it turns out, Rana and Ross cite a small part of this literature, only to dismiss it. Second, isotopic studies provide some indications that even under the horribly destructive dynamics of the earth, some vestige could still exist (Pavlov and others 2001).

Their sixth proposed "scientific prediction" is simply untrue, as is their seventh. It is in fact an area of considerable research and discussion whether there were multiple origins of life, and whether this can ever be untangled. Work by Carl Woese (especially 1998, 2002) argues strongly that multiple origins will never be disentangled. It is with a respect bordering on awe that I contemplate how Charles Darwin allowed for this in the last page of his Origin of Species, writing that life was originally breathed "... into a few forms or into one."

Rana and Ross's claim that science predicts first life to be "simple" is incoherent because they have never defined complexity. The scientific conception of life has always entailed complexity, and Rana and Ross's argument cannot be evaluated without some anchor to make it meaningful. According to the scientific literature, the earliest life was simple compared with later life, and complex compared to most chemistry. Efforts are under way to find, as well as to theoretically predict, the minimal complexity of a living organism, and these results will also inform origin-of-life research.

One of the frustrations reviewing a book one finds fault with is suppressing the desire to mention all its errors, or worse attempting to correct them. Regarding Rana and Ross, this would require a longer work than their original. Failing that, a modest goal is to ask if they have met the goals they set forth in the introduction to their book. First, they wished to update the creationist classic The Mystery of Life's Origin. Second, they wished to set out their model of the origin of life. A striking departure from most creationist approaches is that Rana and Ross promise explicit predictions for a "face off" with mainstream scientific theory.

So how did Rana and Ross fare in their efforts to update The Mystery of Life's Origin? They have failed. They have many references more recent than 1984, but no new ideas. Many references they do give are incorrect, incomplete, or misinterpreted. Every old objection raised by Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen is recycled by Rana and Ross — from the idea that the second law of thermodynamics prohibits life to the claim that there is no explanation for chiral biomolecules, there is nothing new.

The origin-of-life model offered by Rana and Ross fails on two grounds. First, their biblical model slips in considerable scientific material without acknowledgment, and they then failed to present any evidence for those parts that are original. Second, they have offered a caricature of origin-of-life research in their so-called "naturalistic predictions." The greatest difference of course is that science never appeals to divine intervention to do the heavy lifting.

Do we know how life originated on earth? No. Is every one of the innumerable chemical and geological events that led to the origin of life preserved? No. Is this "proof" of a supernatural origin of life? No. Nevertheless, the origin of life will be the last refuge for "God of the gaps" arguments in decades to come.

Print Edition Contents: 27 (3-4)

News

4. The ICR Moves to Dallas
   In a recent issue of Acts & Facts, Henry Morris III explains the rationale and the impact of the move.
4. Workshop on Teaching Evolution at the University of Colorado
   Sarah Wise and Matt Young
   A description of the program with advice to others interested in educational outreach on evolution.
6. Updates
   News from Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Texas, Canada, and Turkey.

NCSE NEWS

10. Comings and Goings
    Glenn Branch
    Changes in the home office as new staff arrive and others move on.
11. News from the Membership
    What our members are doing to support evolution and oppose pseudoscience wherever the need arises.
54. NCSE Thanks You for Your Generous Support
    We are grateful for the continuing support of our members and other contributors.

SPECIAL Grand Canyon Section

15. NCSE 2007 Grand Canyon Raft Trip: “The Best Ever”
    Eugenie C Scott
    If you missed it, think about joining NCSE in 2008.
15. Renewed Concern About Creationism at Grand Canyon National Park
    Glenn Branch
    Park employees and the scientific community are concerned, but there is little movement in reviewing creationist books or providing guidance to interpreters on evolution and geology.
17. Dry Rot, Not Arson: National Park Service and Science
    Wesley R Elsberry
    NPS policy is contradictory on the inclusion of creationist perspectives in book sales and interpretive materials. It appears that the Service is not following its own guidelines for presentation of accurate scientific information.

MEMBERS’ PAGES

27. Join Scott and Gish on a Creation/Evolution Tour of the Grand Canyon!
    Make your plans now for the 2008 “Two Models” tour.
28. Books: Flooded by Information
    Books about geology, earth history, and the Grand Canyon.
30. NCSE On the Road
    Check the calendar here for NCSE speakers.

ARTICLES

20. Has Natural Selection Been Refuted? The Arguments of William Dembski
    Joe Felsenstein
    A close look at William Dembski's assertions about complexity, biological change, and evidence of design.
31. Recurrence of the Same? “Intelligent Design” and the Biology Classroom
    Jason Borenstein
    Evaluating the claims of “intelligent design” proponents over the value of including ID in the biology curriculum.

FEATURES

35. The Design Revolution? How William Dembski is Dodging Questions About “Intelligent Design”
    Mark Perakh
    Critics have posed numerous questions about Dembski’s models and use of mathematical and scientific concepts. But he seldom engages these critiques ... even when he does respond.
38. Responding to ID in a Freshman College Class
    Jack Keyes and Nancy Broshot
    A constructivist approach to engaging students in the nature of scientific inquiry and challenges to evolutionary science.

BOOK REVIEWS

40. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C Dennett
    Reviewed by John C Greene
43. The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything by Gordy Slack
    Reviewed by Randy Olson
44. 40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania by Matthew Chapman Reviewed by Lauri Lebo
45. Origins of Life: Biblical and Evolution Models Face Off by Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross
    Reviewed by Gary S Hurd
48. Encyclopedia of Evolution by Stanley A Rice
    Reviewed by Tim M Berra
49. An Introduction to Biological Evolution by Kenneth V Kardong
    Reviewed by Werner G Heim
50. Fritz Müller: A Naturalist in Brazil by David A West
    Reviewed by Aubrey Manning
51. The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth’s Antiquity by Jack Repcheck
    Reviewed by William Parkinson
52. Darwin in the Genome: Molecular Strategies in Biological Evolution by Lynn Helena Caporale
    Reviewed by Finn Pond

A Victory over "Intelligent Design" in Oklahoma

I first heard that William Dembski was going to visit the University of Oklahoma quite by accident from one of my technical writing students. I was astonished. People still pay the honoraria of "intelligent design" (ID) advocates even after Kitzmiller v Dover? Apparently, they do, and after two phone calls I found out who was doing the paying: Trinity Baptist Church. On a "Note from the Elders" on its website, I read that they viewed the expense as a "gospel investment" — part of their attempt "to penetrate the university campus with the gospel," especially the science departments. "In case you are wondering, these departments and their teachings are not friends of Christianity."

I quickly contacted every faculty member in our zoology and botany/microbiology departments with news of Dembski's upcoming visit on September 17, 2007. Several of these faculty members — many of them affiliated with the group Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education — worked with me to put together a game plan.

We wrote an advertisement which was to appear in the OU student paper on the day of Dembski's arrival. In this ad, we listed several points showing, first, that evolution is not inherently atheistic, and second, that ID is not a scientific enterprise. Since we put the ad through several drafts to maximize its effectiveness, and since we had to turn in the ad two business days before it was to run, we only had about 48 hours to collect donations to cover the expense of the ad and signatures to appear beneath it. We had expected to get enough money for a half-page ad, along with perhaps a hundred signatures. Instead, we collected 180 signatures and ample money for the ad to cover a full page.

On the morning of Dembski's appearance, our ad was augmented by a guest column on the opinion page by OU biologist Douglas Mock, author of The Evolution of Sibling Rivalry and More than Kin and Less than Kind. Mock's column argued against ID, while a pro-ID counterpoint column was written by a journalism major.

Dembski's presentation
Dembski's talk was held in an auditorium in our student union. Students posted at the building's entrances were passing out copies of mathematician Jeffrey Shallit's expert report in the Kitzmiller v Dover trial. In this brief document, Shallit takes Dembski to task for using flawed and nonsensical methodology which has not been utilized by real scientists and mathematicians. Outside the door of the auditorium, the local Christian bookstore had a table of books for sale by various ID advocates, including several titles by Dembski himself. A pamphlet recycling old ID arguments was also provided.

As the last of the auditorium's 407 seats were filled, an announcer told us that Dembski's talk would last for about an hour, after which there would be an open question-and-answer session. Two microphones had been set up for this purpose. On the screen was Dembski's first slide — a quotation from our full-page advertisement about how ID proponents "refrain from publishing their results in peer-reviewed math and science journals."

Dembski began by saying that no one had ever taken out a full-page ad against him before, and spent the first five or ten minutes of his presentation trying to refute our point about ID's lack of peer-reviewed publications. As though this helped his refutation, he posted a list of eight such peer-reviewed publications — most of which had nothing to do with ID methodology. The remainder of Dembski's presentation had all the usual examples and analogies (the bacterial flagellum, Mount Rushmore, the motorcycle engine), as well as stills and clips from films like This is Spinal Tap and Dumb and Dumber.

Having taught college-level writing classes for several years, and having been a trainer in the corporate world before that, I can tell when a speaker has carefully honed a presentation to razor sharpness and when a speaker is coasting along based on past acquaintance with the material. As far as I could tell, Dembski was phoning in his presentation. This became particularly apparent when Dembski reached the one-hour mark that should have ended his presentation. He began to skip some slides and to skim others. Finally, having gone over on time by fifteen minutes, he skipped virtually all of his last dozen slides to get to his conclusion.

After this, the question-and-answer period started. As lackluster, rushed, and incomplete as the presentation itself was, the question-and-answer period went even more poorly for Dembski. I was first in line to question, and I began by pointing out that there were several tenured science faculty in the room who had, by themselves, exceeded the peer-reviewed publication output for the entire ID movement. A zoology professor pointed out that Dembski had provided no positive evidence for ID and that his analogies for the complexity of living systems were very shabby ones. Then, in the highlight of the evening, a microbiologist on our faculty pointed out numerous errors and distortions in Dembski's treatment of the bacterial flagellum. In all, some 25 or 30 questioners grilled Dembski over the course of more than two hours, most of them undergraduates and grad students. Only two of the questioners were supportive of ID.

I had expected Dembski's talk to get a warm reception, and for many people to be fooled into thinking that ID was a worthwhile scientific enterprise. Instead, the the room had almost a carnival atmosphere. Dembski was heckled repeatedly for evading questions and responded to this heckling with further evasion. The audience laughed and applauded often and at length when a questioner put Dembksi on the spot. As one of our professors with the Oklahoma Biological Survey later told me, "No one could have come away thinking that it was anything but a complete disaster for Dembski."

The lasting impression
This disaster continued even after Dembski finally went home. In the week after his presentation, the OU student paper published one opinion letter by me, another by a zoology professor, and a guest column by the same microbiology professor who took Dembksi to task for his misrepresentation of the bacterial flagellum (see below). During this same period, not a single column or letter to the editor in support of ID appeared in the school paper.

All in all, our preparations were successful, and Dembski's visit to the University of Oklahoma did the "intelligent design" movement more harm than good. There is no doubt in my mind that if all presentations by ID proponents went as poorly as Dembski's did and if evolution supporters can organized and coordinate their efforts, then the support for the "intelligent design" movement would simply evaporate.

[See the September 2007 entries on the blogs ERV (http://endogenousretrovirus.blogspot.com/) and Ontogeny (http://mattdowling.blogspot.com/), as well as the blogs linked on the September 22, 2007, entry of The Panda's Thumb. The Trinity Baptist Church website hosts a copy of a pamphlet entitled "Design versus Dogma: A Brief Introduction to Intelligent Design", which was distributed before Dembski's talk.]

The Answers in Genesis Schism

Jim Lippard reported in RNCSE at the end of 2006 on a split within the Answers in Genesis ministry that pitted the officials running the affiliate in the US against their counterparts in Australia, where the ministry began (Lippard 2006). Although Lippard reported several efforts between the two factions to negotiate a solution to various issues that divided them, it appears that those efforts have fallen apart yet again.

Creation Ministries International (CMI) — the name of the breakaway group in Australia — published an update on its website in early January 2008 (http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/5563/). The page — entitled "CMI-AIG: What's the dispute all about?" — details the history of the schism and CMI's complaints against AIG.

However, the most remarkable feature of this update is an index with links to documents on the web that lay out various details of the conflict, outcomes of various investigations and legal actions, and CMI's version of the current state of the dispute.

In contrast to the prominence that CMI has given to the dispute, it is difficult to find any mention of the disagreement on the Answers in Genesis web page. Searching for "CMI" and "Creation Ministries International" at http://www.answersingenesis.org returned no results. However, it is possible to get an overview of AiG's position on the conflict by reading through its History page (http://www.answersingenesis.org/about/history). This page lacks most of the details about the schism, saying only that there were no differences in doctrinal or scientific positions and that most of the disagreement was over management and operations. It is interesting that the AiG website lists the acronym "CMI" in its history page, but nowhere gives the full name of the Australian organization.

It is clear that this conflict will not be resolved soon, but it seems from the content of the web pages that CMI may be more affected by the split than is AiG. Except for the new details, the current state of the relationship between these two creationist organizations does not seem to have changed significantly over the past year.

References
Lippard J. 2006. Trouble in paradise: Answers in Genesis splinters. RNCSE 26 (6): 4-7.

The History of Life as a Walk in the Park

A recurring theme for science educators is how to make the vastness of the history and diversity of life "real" for students. In their classrooms, they devise clock models, modified calendars, and even use 1000-sheet rolls of toilet tissue to emphasize the deep history of life on earth and the variety (and success) of the many forms of life that have appeared during that time.


A park visitor stops to consider Station 6: Reptiles Become Dominant, 270 mya, as viewed from Station 5: Plants and Amphibians Come onto Land, 400 mya.In the fall of 2007, artist J Nicholas Schweitzer set up an installation in a public park in Madison, Wisconsin. The installation consisted of fifteen signposts depicting significant events in the history of life with illustrations of life forms that emerged and flourished in association with certain "milestones" — for example, the emergence of the first plants and animals onto land or the first appearance of primates. In addition, the stations are spaced in such a way so that the distance between them is in proportion to the amount of time that passed between the milestones. So, for example, the distance representing the one billion years from the formation of the earth to the first record of unicellular life is about half as long as the distance between the first unicellular life and the diversification of multicellular organisms almost two billion years later in the late Precambrian.


Rendition of Station 5: Plants and Amphibians Come onto Land, 400 mya, by a student at Van Hise Elementary School, Madison, WI. For those familiar with the exhibit "A Walk Through Time" created in the 1990s at Hewlett Packard by Sidney Liebes and his colleagues (Liebes and others 1998), Schweitzer's installation recalls the value in adding the "kinesthetic" dimension to the learning experience. It is almost as though having to travel in space and take time to reach the next milestone in the history of life imparts a deeper appreciation for the length of time between events.

Although the "Walk Through Time" exhibit was about twice as long — extending for about a mile — it consisted largely of displays to view and read. Schweitzer's exhibit added two significant dimensions to the approach that Liebes and colleagues pioneered. First, each station contains both a cover page created by the artist and several illustrations composed by students at Van Hise Elementary and Velma Hamilton Middle Schools in Madison. The children's renditions show their engagement in the materials and their creative responses to the idea of the evolution of life. Perhaps the most interesting are the drawings at the last station of the installation where children speculate artistically to create their answers to the question: "What's next?"


View of the last 400 million years of the installation showing containers for sidewalk chalk for inspired viewers to use.A second added dimension is an invitation for those experiencing the exhibit to stop and draw their own impressions on the sidewalk next to the exhibit. Schweitzer provided a container with several large sticks of sidewalk chalk for this purpose. During the several visits that I made to the exhibit, there were always fresh drawings — and it may be serendipity that the chalk used to make the drawings was itself made from the preserved remains of organisms featured in some of the installations' stations. One of these visitors' drawings can be seen on the cover of this issue.

Exhibits of this type are temporary, so there will soon be no trace of the installation. But the work of the children who were a part of the exhibit and the drawings on the sidewalk alongside the installation both clearly show how successfully this artist connected the idea of evolution and the deep history of life on earth with several audiences. This exhibit certainly makes it clear that innovative, creative ways of helping children (and the general public) engage and understand evolution are valuable — even without a giant carnivorous dinosaur or a fossil hominin to excite and amaze. Schweitzer's exhibit, by contrast, was almost contemplative in tone, inviting the viewer to stop and commune for a while with ancient life forms that lived in a world we can only imagine.

[For readers not able to view Schweitzer's exhibit in person, there are photos of the exhibit available on-line here. There are two virtual tours of the original "Walk Through Time", which lack the kinesthetic dimension of walking the history of life, but show the main graphics and text and give some of the history of the Walk. Visit http://conexions.org/wtt/walk_menu/3700.html or http://www.globalcommunity.org/wtt/walk_online.shtml to take the virtual Walk.]

The History of Life as a Walk in the Park—Online Supplement

The following photographs are a supplement to Andrew J Petto's "The History of Life as a Walk in the Park", RNCSE 27 (5-6).

The Rise and Fall of the Vitter Earmark

"Sen David Vitter, R–La., earmarked $100 000 in a spending bill for a Louisiana Christian group that has challenged the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the public school system and to which he has political ties," reported the New Orleans Times-Picayune (2007 Sep 22). Buried in the Senate Appropriations Committee's version of the appropriations bill for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education was a provision allocating funds to the Louisiana Family Forum (LFF) of Baton Rouge "to develop a plan to promote better science education."

In a written statement, Vitter explained, "This program helps supplement and support educators and school systems that would like to offer all of the explanations in the study of controversial science topics such as global warming and the life sciences." The Times-Picayune added, "The money in the earmark will pay for a report suggesting 'improvements' in science education in Louisiana, the development and distribution of educational materials and an evaluation of the effectiveness of the Ouachita Parish School Board's 2006 policy that opened the door to biblically inspired teachings in science classes."

Adopted in 2006 with the backing of the LFF, the Ouachita Parish School Board's policy permits teachers to help students to understand "the scientific strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories pertinent to the course being taught;" "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming and human cloning" are the only topics specifically mentioned. A local paper editorially described it as "a policy that is so clear that one School Board member voted affirmatively while adding, 'but I don't know what I'm voting on'" (Monroe News-Star, 2006 Dec 3; see RNCSE 2006 Nov/Dec; 26 [6]: 8–11).

Although the Ouachita policy reflects the stealth creationist campaign of "teach the controversy," the LFF is not always so coy. The Times-Picayune reported: "Until recently, its Web site contained a 'battle plan to combat evolution,' which called the theory a 'dangerous' concept that 'has no place in the classroom.' The document was removed after a reporter's inquiry." (That document was written by Kent Hovind, the flamboyant young-earth creationist who is currently serving a ten-year sentence in federal prison for tax evasion and obstruction of justice; see RNCSE 2006 Jul/Aug; 26 [4]: 12–3.) The LFF also distributes "addenda" for science textbooks that promote various creationist claims, including the "irreducible complexity" of the bacterial flagellum and flood geology.

Writing in the New Orleans Times-Picayune (2007 Sep 26), columnist James Gill took Vitter to task for his proposal. The Louisiana Family Forum, Gill observed, "has said the theory of evolution 'has no place in the classroom' and has blamed Charles Darwin for Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot." "The Web site," he added, "leaves no doubt that they would ban evolutionary theory altogether if they could; there is no incentive to give equal billing to what they see as heresy."

Concerned about Vitter's earmark, a coalition of more than thirty religious, civil rights, education, science, and advocacy organizations, spearheaded by Americans United for Separation of Church and State and including NCSE, sent a letter to every member of the Senate, calling on them to oppose the Vitter earmark. The letter (see sidebar, p 10–1) argued, "Not only would granting federal funding for the LFF's program be unconstitutional, it also would be bad policy that would infringe upon students' religious freedom and undermine their education in the important discipline of science."

People for the American Way (PFAW) sent its own letter opposing the earmark. In a press release dated October 17, 2007, PFAW's Director of Public Policy Tanya Clay House described the earmark as "completely inappropriate," adding, "Sending taxpayer money to a religious group whose mission is to force creationism into public schools as science is a blatant attack on the separation of church and state. Claiming that the money will be spent on improving science education adds insult to injury."

Additionally, NCSE e-mailed its members and friends in Iowa, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Mississippi to urge them to lobby Senators Tom Harkin, Arlen Specter, Robert Byrd, and Thad Cochran to remove the Vitter earmark. (Due to their positions on the Appropriations Committee and its Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, these senators were in a position to wield the greatest influence on the final form of the bill.)

The protests were apparently heeded, for Vitter withdrew the earmark on the Senate floor on October 17, 2007, even while insisting that the money was not aimed at promoting creationism and describing the concerns as "hysterics." According to the Congressional Record, Vitter said:

The project, which would develop a plan to promote better science-based education in Ouachita Parish by the Louisiana Family Forum, has raised concerns among some that its intention was to mandate and push creationism within the public schools. That is clearly not and never was the intent of the project, nor would it have been its effect. However, to avoid more hysterics, I would like to move the $100 000 recommended for this project by the subcommittee when the bill goes to conference committee to another Louisiana priority project funded in this bill.

Senators Tom Harkin (D–Iowa) and Arlen Specter (R–Pennsylvania), the floor managers of the appropriations bill, accepted Vitter's proposal and agreed to move the funds to a different project in Louisiana when the bill is in its conference committee.

Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, applauding the removal of the earmark in a press release dated October 18, 2007, commented, "If [Senator] Vitter's aim was to improve science education in Louisiana, I have to wonder why he did not direct these funds to a scientific group or a museum." He added, "Boosting science education is an odd task for a religious group."

"Senator Vitter's defense of the earmark is obviously disingenuous, given the Louisiana Family Forum's record of fighting tooth and nail against evolution education," commented NCSE's executive director Eugenie C Scott. "But I'm glad to see that, with the removal of his earmark, public funds are not going to be misused to miseducate the children of Louisiana about the science of evolution."

Not all fears were allayed, however. The Baton Rouge Advocate reported (2007 Oct 20) that Vitter wanted to redirect the funds of the earmark to science and computer labs in Ouachita Parish schools, which prompted Barbara Forrest — a native of Louisiana and a member of NCSE's Board of Directors — to worry, "The money is just being moved around ... All the signs indicate that it could be used for its initial purpose." Representatives of People for the American Way and the ACLU echoed her concern.

In a subsequent letter to the Advocate (2007 Oct 25), Forrest contended that the redirection of the funds to Ouachita Parish was suspicious, given the LFF's support of the stealth creationist policy there. Quoting LFF Director Gene Mills's statement that the LFF "wasn't disappointed with the funding change and encouraged Vitter to redirect it," she remarked, "Given LFF's alliance with the Ouachita Parish School Board, we should take him at his word," and warned, "The LFF will make sure this battle doesn't go away."

But Forrest's concerns were overtaken by events. Shorn of the Vitter earmark, the appropriations bill passed the Senate, proceeded through a conference committee, and was ultimately vetoed, on November 13, 2007, by President Bush.

Review: God and Evolution: A Reader

Mary Kathleen Cunningham's reader God and Evolution provides an up-to-date collection of key excerpts from the most important representatives of various positions and viewpoints on this subject. Each section begins with an introduction that helps guide the reader to important similarities and differences between the selections, filling in useful background knowledge that makes the readings themselves more accessible.

The first part, on methodology, is focused primarily on method in theology, with a consideration of how language and method in theology relate to language and method in science. This section would have benefited from the inclusion of a discussion of what science is, and how it works, written by a philosopher of science or a biologist who was not specifically concerned to make a comparison with religion. Nevertheless, what is included is extremely helpful. The excerpt from the nineteenth-century Protestant theologian Charles Hodge illustrates that, when Christian fundamentalism first developed, it did not regard a young earth as one of the fundamentals that gave the movement its name. The other excerpts in this section are by Sallie McFague, Mary Midgley, and Ian Barbour, and reflect a more mainstream approach to religious language and theology.

Part two presents evolutionary theory, with excerpts from Darwin's Origin of Species as well as works by Francisco Ayala and Michael Ruse. The latter are appropriate choices, since these individuals illustrate that a Christian can be a prominent evolutionary biologist, and that an atheist philosopher of science can see no inherent incompatibility of evolution and Christianity. Both Ayala and Ruse distinguish between the fact of evolution, the path of evolutionary development down the ages, and the mechanisms that drive evolution. The distinctions are important ones that are often overlooked when people discuss evolution in theological contexts.

The third part, entitled simply "Creationism", is rather more problematic. It consists of only two readings. The first is simply the first two chapters of Genesis. It was a good choice to use the New Revised Standard Version translation, which neither presupposes that the creation described was a creation out of nothing (the Hebrew in Genesis 1:1 is ambiguous on this point), nor tries to cover up elements of a pre-scientific worldview such as the dome of the sky. Yet it would have been appropriate to provide an example of scholarly treatment of these chapters, showing that the order of the days has more to do with parallelism than chronology, that there in fact seem to be two creation stories in these chapters, and so on. Without such analysis of the Bible itself, it is that much harder to get young-earth creationists over the hurdles that keep them from accepting evolution. It might also have been useful to include here something written by a young-earth creationist author. Nothing is more effective in persuading students of the bankruptcy of the young-earth creationist approach than allowing them to read what they themselves have to say, coupled with insightful scientific and theological analysis of their arguments by people like Kenneth R Miller. Nevertheless, the second reading in this section, a historical overview of young-earth creationism by Ronald Numbers, is very helpful.

Part four deals with "intelligent design", beginning with William Paley's famous argument. The chapter by Michael Behe makes the case for "intelligent design" as well as it possibly can be made, with the result that Miller's response in the chapter that follows becomes all the more effective, showing how much of the evidence Behe says would disprove his claims actually exists.

Part five presents proponents and critics of forms of metaphysical naturalism based on evolution. The excerpts from Richard Dawkins and Daniel C Dennett are excellent examples of their views and of their delightful writing style. Mary Midgley's short piece points out that Darwin himself denied that natural selection is an all-encompassing explanation in biological change over time, much less in economics and other areas. Another (very short) excerpt from Ruse rounds off this section.

Part six is entitled "Evolutionary Theism" and presents a diverse group of theologians united in their acceptance of evolution and their openness to incorporating the relevant scientific data into their theological reflections. Howard Van Till points out a number of ironies that typify both extremes in many discussions of this subject. Arthur Peacocke's piece nicely complicates the oversimplified view that many have of the relationship between Darwin's theory and faith, pointing out that initially there were many in the religious community who embraced evolution, just as many in the scientific community were exceedingly skeptical. Jürgen Moltmann's contribution is an example of the wonderfully creative and exciting theological thinking that he has offered on the subject of creation. The section's final piece by Elizabeth Johnson complements the others, discussing concepts such as that of the soul and incorporating a number of important quotations by a variety of theologians and scientists.

I am puzzled by the editor's decision to place an excerpt by John Haught in the seventh part, "Reformulations of Tradition". Haught represents a Roman Catholic theological outlook very much in line with those offered in part six — indeed, Haught draws heavily on Moltmann's ideas in places, and is, like Peacocke, a panentheist. The other pieces in this section — by Sallie McFague, Ruth Page, and Gordon Kaufman — sit more comfortably under the rubric of "revisionists". McFague explores the idea of the universe as God's body, combining a number of already-existing models in innovative and creative ways. Page suggests that it is more appropriate to speak of God being with everything than in everything in what may perhaps be the least helpful excerpt in the collection, since Page seems to conflate the idea of everything existing in God (panentheism) with the idea that God is in everything. Finally, Kaufman suggests that it is more appropriate to think of God as creativity rather than creator in the context of our current state of scientific knowledge.

On the whole, God and Evolution is a useful reader, although some examples of non-Western perspectives might have made the diversity of the book richer still. Quibbles about what was and was not included aside, for most American readers with some background in or contact with conservative Christianity of an anti-evolutionary sort, this book will provide helpful information that will enable readers to understand what is at stake and navigate the current debates over God and evolution in a more well-informed manner.

Review: The Voyage of the Beetle

Its title easily recognizable as a play on that of Darwin's own volume, Anne Weaver's The Voyage of the Beetle is a fanciful account of the historic circumnavigation from the perspective of Rosie, another passenger on the Beagle who happens to be a rose chafer beetle (Cetonia aurata).

Those acquainted with books on evolution for young readers will probably, and fondly, recall The Sandwalk Adventures (2003), Jay Hosler's delightful graphic novel in which Darwin is similarly associated with a storytelling arthropod. And while the subject matter and the intended age level may overlap, there are marked differences between these two works. For example, in Sandwalk, Mara, a young follicle mite and resident of Darwin's left eyebrow, is unfailingly respectful to Darwin, calling him "sir" while she wrestles with his insistence that he is not, as she has always believed, an all-powerful god called "Flycatcher", an allusion to his moniker among the Beagle's crew. Mara listens raptly as Darwin explains his theory of natural selection and debunks misconceptions about evolution such as, for example, that individuals (rather than populations) evolve — a misconception retained in Weaver's definition of adaptation in Beetle's glossary, which suggests, erroneously, that adaptation in animals is achieved "by learning".

Rosie contrasts starkly with Hosler's reverent Mara. She has been a constant, though independent, companion of Darwin since the young naturalist discovered her under a rock, and she rather familiarly calls him Charles — which she prefers over his "silly nickname of Gas." Fortunately, Rosie followed a most unbeetlelike whim in her decision to forsake a comfortable life among England's rosebuds to join Darwin in his travels. Otherwise he might never have discovered his solution — descent with modification via natural selection — to "the mystery of mysteries", the origin of new species.

Darwin is already pondering questions about the diversity of life as the story begins, sometime before the Beagle's embarkation. Even at this point, Rosie hints that she was aware of the workings of evolution, since "beetles have been around for more than 200 million years" and thus "have an ancient and unique vantage point when it comes to the mysteries of nature." However, describing Charles as resistant to suggestions or advice, Rosie decides to guide him toward a solution, challenging the reader to figure it out before Darwin.

Recounting the five-year voyage, Rosie colorfully describes several members of the ship's crew and a few particulars of life at sea, which, to say the least, was uncomfortable for Darwin. Although she portrays him as "a restless and irritable cabin mate," Rosie sympathizes with Darwin over the cramped conditions and his seasickness. She also commends him for faithfully recording and sketching countless and amazing species of microscopic creatures collected via plankton nets, and admires his enthusiasm for such discoveries. At this point, however, our coleopteran narrator turns to well-intended subterfuge, covertly scribbling clues into Darwin's notebook in hopes that she can lead him toward the answer to "the mystery of mysteries".

Rosie's clues are drawn from their encounters with the organisms and environments of South America, the Galápagos, and a few stops in the southern Pacific. They essentially comprise the basic tenets of Darwin's theory (variation exists among individuals of a species; some individuals have traits which give them advantages in the struggle for life; those that survive pass on their traits to offspring) as well as observations about geologic change, comparisons between extinct and extant organisms, and the inference that the diversity of living things has changed over time.

After their return to England, Rosie explains, she "continued to accompany Charles on long walks" where she listened and waited for him to figure out what all the clues meant, and she lists them again for the reader to ponder. A solution is offered in the final chapter which condenses Darwin's theory and a few supporting concepts in a scant three pages.

Although Darwin is often portrayed in Beetle as fussy, clumsy, and at times obstinate, he is more often described as insatiably curious, brilliant, and congenial. In the afterword, Weaver explains, "the comical incidents included in this book were chosen to show that Darwin was open to new experiences and able to laugh at himself." Indeed, the book does paint Darwin as likeable, as do the wonderful illustrations by George Lawrence, which refreshingly portray a youthful and spry Darwin with locks of "fly-away red hair" rather than the wizened old sage of Down.

Sundry references to Darwin's training in theology (curiously defined in the glossary as being specific to Christianity) and associations with missionaries on his travels are no doubt intended, and may well help, to make him and the book more palatable to potentially wary Christians. Rosie describes Darwin as a loving husband and father as well as having a deep and caring respect for others. Noting his vehement opposition to slavery, she explains that he had been "much grieved by the misery" of the slaves and that such cruelty was "a mystery that even Charles could not fathom."

Such efforts to depict Darwin as the genius and grand human figure that he was, and such efforts to acquaint young readers with evolution and natural selection, will always get my nod of approval, even if a number of errors detracted from my enjoyment. (For example, spiders are included among Rosie's "insect companions"; a tsunami is called a "tidal wave"; Darwin is described as the Beagle's naturalist — a legend that Stephen Jay Gould [1977] was fond of dispelling.) And Beetle is such an attractive book that it is sure to catch the attention of youngsters. I'd like to see Beetle in the hands of children of the appropriate age, especially if they have knowledgeable parents and teachers nearby to shore up the details, catch misconceptions, and answer the questions that are sure to arise. As Weaver aptly states, "one mystery leads to another."

Review: Dinosaurs

There is no shortage of dinosaur books for children, and this is reflected by Tom Holtz’s admonition on the inside flap that “the world doesn’t need another A-to-Z list of dinosaurs.” Typically, dinosaur books are organized by name, vague groupings of creatures, or by time period, rather than any evolutionary or biological theme. Many of these volumes have passable to excellent art, but are light on scientific content, and more informative books are generally inappropriate for children. What, then, does this new book offer over other popular dinosaur books?

The major strength of Dinosaurs is that Holtz has done an excellent job explaining dinosaur science as a process; that is, how paleontologists understand the biology of dinosaurs through inferences from the fossil record. There are four basic sections of the book: basic principles of dinosaur science; the relationships and major groups of dinosaurs; the evolution of Mesozoic faunas through time; and dinosaur paleobiology; and each is infused with explanations of how science is done. Complex topics are clearly explained in a way that both children and adults will understand. Particularly impressive is that Holtz spends an entire chapter explaining the principles of cladistics, the method by which scientists reconstruct the evolutionary relationships of organisms. Although cladistics is fundamental to modern organismal biology, few popular books (and perhaps no children’s books) tackle the subject in any detail, and Holtz should be applauded for taking the plunge. This explanation is also practical for the reader, because Holtz often refers to cladistics in other sections of the book when explaining the relationships of dinosaurs and how scientists make conclusions about dinosaur paleobiology.

Another advantage of this book over others is the inclusion of sidebars written by a variety of dinosaur experts. These short articles cover topics that are not directly discussed in the main text, including dinosaur growth, diseases, and feeding. Not only do these sidebars broaden the topics discussed in the book, but also they introduce a diversity of opinions and information that wouldn’t be possible with a single author. The quality of these contributions varies (some are more informative than others), but they are superb overall and put the book on a level above most other children’s dinosaur books.

Dinosaurs may not be the first book that I’d reach for to teach children about evolution, but it does an excellent job integrating the principles of evolution and natural selection into the discussion of dinosaur topics. Evolution is used to explain how we know the relationships of dinosaurs, provide hypotheses about dinosaur behavior, and explain why different growth strategies might be beneficial. Holtz’s introductory chapter on evolution is short, but it effectively communicates the basic principles of natural selection and concepts like the evolutionary tree of life.

This is one of the best popular dinosaur books I’ve read. Although focused for children, it will also be informative for students and adults. The book is packed with up-to-date and clearly explained information, and the author maintains a website for future updates (http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/dinoappendix/). Given the information content, clear explanations, full-color semi-glossy printing, and hardback binding, this book is an excellent value at the list price of $34.99.

Print Edition Contents: 27 (5-6)

NewS

4. Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial
   Glenn Branch
   Most (but not all) PBS stations air a two-hour documentary on Kitzmiller v Dover and the aftermath.
7. A Victory over “Intelligent Design” in Oklahoma
   Daniel Dickson-LaPrade
   William Dembski came to Oklahoma, but the audience was not impressed.
8. “Intelligent Design” Reflects Human Ignorance
   Phillip E Klebba
   Things often seem “irreducibly complex” when we do not know the answers — yet!
9. The Rise and Fall of the Vitter Earmark
   Glenn Branch
   A Louisiana senator attempts to use “earmarking” to provide financial support for creationism.
12. The History of Life as a Walk in the Park
    Andrew J Petto
    A Wisconsin artist teams up with school children to promote evolution through the arts.
13. Creationism in the Russian Educational Landscape
    Inga Levit, Uwe Hoßfeld, Lennart Olsson
    A student sues her school district for “alternatives”; various factions promote creationism in the schools.
17. Political Science: Presidential Candidates’ Views
    Andrew J Petto
    The journal Science reports about positions on science and technology issues in the presidential campaign.
18. The Answers in Genesis Schism: No Resolution in Sight
    Andrew J Petto
    CMI fires a new volley in the ongoing dispute.
20. Updates
    News from California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Europe, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

NCSE NEWS

26. News from the Membership
    What our members are doing to support evolution and oppose pseudoscience wherever the need arises.

MEMBERS’ PAGES

27. How to Talk to the TV Media
    Martha Heil
    Most Americans get their news from TV — a medium suited to very short stories.
28. Books: Teaching and Learning About Evolution Books for young and old, neophytes and old hands.
30. NCSE On the Road
    Check the calendar here for NCSE speakers.

FEATURES

35. Polls Apart on Human Origins
    George Bishop
    You may have suspected that the answers to those creation/evolution polls are skewed by the way that pollsters phrase their questions. George Bishop documents the effects.
42. In Praise of the Bravery of Biology Teachers
    Frans de Waal
    When asked by Time magazine to name a person of the year, de Waal cited biology teachers who resist public pressure to water down evolution in the curriculum.
43. Gravity: It’s Only a Theory
    Ellery Schempp
    What would happen if every scientific theory were subject to textbook disclaimers?

BOOK REVIEWS

45. Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are by Frans de Waal
    Reviewed by Anne D Holden
46. Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science by Moti Ben-Ari
    Reviewed by Michael Zimmerman
47. Intelligent Design and Fundamentalist Opposition to Evolution by Angus M Gunn
    Reviewed by Charles A Israel
48. Evolution versus Intelligent Design: Why All the Fuss? by Peter Cook
    Reviewed by Matt Young
48. Mammals Who Morph: The Universe Tells Our Evolution Story, Book Three by Jennifer Morgan
    Reviewed by Lisa M Blank
50. A Jealous God: Science’s Crusade Against Religion by Pamela Winnick
    Reviewed by Jeffrey Shallit
51. Dinosaurs: The Most Complete Up-to-Date Encyclopedia for Dinosaur Lovers of All Ages by Thomas R Holtz Jr
    Reviewed by Randall B Irmis
52. The Voyage of the Beetle: A Journey Around the World with Charles Darwin and the Search for the Solution to the Mystery of Mysteries, as Narrated by Rosie, an Articulate Beetle by Anne H Weaver
    Reviewed by Jason R Wiles
53. God and Evolution: A Reader edited by Mary Kathleen Cunningham
    Reviewed by James F McGrath

55. Instructions for Contributors
    Would you like to write for RNCSE? Here’s how.