NEWS

4. Penn Kicks Off Year of Evolution
   A year-long exhibit in Philadelphia engages the resources of many science and education organizations for a bicentennial celebration of the meaning of Darwin's work for modern biology.
4. Harun Yahya's Legal Troubles
   Taner Edis
   Like Al Capone with the IRS, this icon of Islamic creationism is in prison on charges unrelated to the activity that makes him famous.
5. Updates
   News from Florida, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina,Texas, Germany, and Turkey.

NCSE NEWS

10. News from the Membership
    What our members are doing to support evolution and oppose pseudoscience wherever the need arises.
30. NCSE Thanks You
    Our members, friends, and supporters are generous with their money, as well as with their time and talents. A special thank you for those who gave a little extra.

MEMBERS' PAGES

15. A North American Field Guide: Identifying Anti-evolutionistii stealthus
    Cheryl Shepherd-Adams
    How can we spot a candidate or public official who is trying to keep his or her anti-evolutionism "under the radar"? Cheryl Shepherd-Adams allowed us to reprint these hints from her blog.
16. Books: Mass Extinction is Forever
    Life has not always been easy on planet earth. Read about major setbacks in the history of life.
18. NCSE On the Road
    Check the calendar here for NCSE speakers.

ARTICLES

12. Creationism Slips Into a Peer-Reviewed Journal
    Steven L Salzberg
    When a review article in Proteomics was previewed on-line, a number of readers noticed something peculiar.There were a number of creationist re-interpretations of data as well as what appeared to be extensive plagiarism.

FEATURES

19. Good, Bad, and Lots of Indifferent: The State of State K–12 Science Education Standards
    Lawrence S Lerner
    A number of state science education standards underwent revisions in the last few years. Some did better, some did worse, and some belong in a category all their own.

BOOK REVIEWS

23. Teaching About Scientific Origins: Taking Account of Creationism edited by Leslie S Jones and Michael Reiss
    Reviewed by Kimberly Bilica
25. Creation and Evolution: A Conference with Pope Benedict XVI in Castel Gandolfo compiled by Stephan Otto Horn and Siegfried Wiedenhofer
    Reviewed by Daryl P Domning
27. The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life by David P Mindell
    Reviewed by Andrew J Petto
28. Making Sense of Evolution: The Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Biology by Massimo Pigliucci and Jonathan Kaplan
    Reviewed by Roberta L Millstein

On April 19, 2008, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology opened a new exhibit to celebrate the central role of evolutionary science in modern biology.The exhibit, entitled Surviving: The Body of Evidence, runs through May 2009 and is the museum's contribution to the Year of Evolution of public programs and events that coincide with the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin and the sesquicentennial of the publication of On the Origin of Species.

The University of Pennsylvania and the Penn Museum are joined by major Philadelphia cultural organizations in launching an ambitious Year of Evolution of public programs and events. These events will draw on the contributions of many outstanding educational and research institutions in Philadelphia, including the Academy of Natural Sciences, The Franklin Institute, the Philadelphia Zoo, the Mütter Museum and College of Physicians, the American Philosophical Society Museum, and the Wagner Free Institute of Science. In addition to highlighting Darwin's contribution to modern biology, the partner institutions will offer special programs on the work of Gregor Mendel, evolutionary medicine, and primate ecology and evolution, as well as featured lectures and presentation from prominent internationally known experts in evolutionary science (including NCSE Supporters Donald Johanson and Kenneth R Miller).

According to the Year of Evolution website, the exhibit and related programs provide an opportunity to reflect on the importance of Darwin's contribution to biology and the impact it has had on our understanding of the history and diversity of life:

As we approach the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the originator of the modern theory of evolution, it is a rich time to take stock of how much we've learned since On the Origin of Species was published in 1859.

To round out the celebration, there will be additional lectures, Penn Museum programs for children and families, scholarly symposia, and an evolution-focused freshman class book-reading selection at the University of Pennsylvania.

For more information, visit the exhibit's web site http://www.museum.upenn.edu/surviving.

[Thanks to Pam Kosty at the Penn Museum for the information used in this note.]

The most commonly available form of Islamic creationism appears under the "Harun Yahya" brand. For the last ten years, books, articles, websites, and videos by Harun Yahya have been promoting an intellectually negligible but very postmodern and media-savvy form of creationism to a wide audience. The Harun Yahya operation is based in Turkey, but it has an international reach. Indeed, Yahya's influence goes beyond other Muslim countries and Muslim immigrant populations. Even my students, in a Midwestern university, will often stumble upon Harun Yahya web sites when researching creationism, and sometimes they do not realize that it is an Islamic rather than Christian form of creationism they have encountered.

Harun Yahya is a pseudonym, and Adnan Oktar, a Turkish sect leader and art school dropout, is said to be the person who writes all the Yahya material. Given the immense quantity of output under the Yahya label, this claim is implausible. I think of Harun Yahya as a brand, and Oktar as the public face of the brand. The details and funding sources of the organization that supports Oktar are not clear. The Science Research Foundation, BAV (Bilim Aras, tirma Vakfi in Turkish), is a group that supports creationism and boasts Oktar as its honorary president, but not much about BAV is known aside from its public activities in support of creationism and a moderate religious nationalism.

The Yahya form of creationism has been enjoying a degree of success that Protestant creationists based in the United States can only envy. But Oktar has also been embroiled in legal battles in Turkey, from long before he reinvented himself as a creationist guru. In May 2008, Adnan Oktar's legal troubles reached a new peak with the announcement that Oktar and some associates have been sentenced to three years in prison. He and a number of other defendants associated with BAV have been convicted of extortion and of forming an organization for the purpose of committing criminal acts.

The Oktar and BAV saga is far from over. There is an appeals process to look forward to, and Oktar and supporters are already calling foul and alleging that the Turkish courts have acted under political pressure. Given that Oktar has some wealthy and powerful friends — and likely some powerful enemies as well — there may be all sorts of goings-on unknown to the public. The mainstream Turkish press did not report many details on Oktar's conviction beyond the basic legal facts.

On May 10, 2008, Oktar appeared in a news conference to present his view of events. While expressing respect for the judicial outcome, he and his spokespeople described the conviction as a legal scandal and a violation of due process. In particular, Oktar and his associates attributed their legal troubles to a conspiracy, speaking at length of a Masonic plot against BAV and Oktar. Apparently the conspiracy is international, with European Freemasons behind the 2007 Council of Europe report against the teaching of creationism (see RNCSE 2007 Sep–Dec; 27 [5–6]: 20–5), which cited Harun Yahya as an example. As part of the worldwide conspiracy, Oktar's group said, Turkish Masons also oppose BAV and its work in favor of creationism and other religious, conservative, and nationalist causes. Oktar also said that he will soon have another book out, which will expose Masonic activities.

In the press conference, Oktar and his supporters emphasized the theme that the persecution they are facing right now was similar to that undergone by prophets, such as related in the story of Joseph in the Qur'an. Strong defenders of the faith should expect persecution by worldly powers, and possible jail time will be faced by true believers as a badge of honor. Oktar already interprets past episodes in this fashion, such as the time before he became a creationist figurehead when he was forced to spend time in a mental institution. This, too, was a conspiracy that only strengthened Oktar's resolve.

It is still unclear what the recent convictions mean for Oktar and the Yahya brand of creationism. Even if Oktar's appeals fail and he does time in jail, his movement may be able to turn this into a tale of martyrdom in the hands of secular powers. The prodigious output in the name of Yahya might slow down, which might give defenders of evolution in Muslim lands a respite.

But even if the Yahya brand were to vanish as a result of all these legal troubles, this would only be a minor setback for Islamic creationism. The Harun Yahya phenomenon has made it clear that the Muslim world resists evolutionary science, and that more evolution-friendly interpretations of Islam remain weak. The Yahya operation has established that there is a considerable market for an Islamic-colored version of creationism. If Harun Yahya were to fall silent, this could just be an incentive for other brands to compete for that market.

A strange thing happened in the scientific literature recently. A pair of creationists, who have seemingly legitimate scientific credentials, attempted to publish some creationist assertions in a peer-reviewed journal. Their effort was nearly successful, mostly because they hid their pseudoscience in the middle of the article, surrounded by legitimate scientific discussion of unrelated topics. Luckily, they were caught just in time, and it turned out that they were pretty clumsy. In fact, if they had been just a bit more clever, they might have gotten away with it.

First, let us examine the facts: the two authors, Mohamad Warda and Jin Han, submitted a review paper to the mainstream journal Proteomics. This is a well-regarded journal, with a distinguished editorial board, which focuses on novel technologies for studying the protein content (the "proteome") of a cell or a tissue sample. Virtually all scientists reading this journal are familiar with evolutionary theory, but the journal itself is not a forum for discussion of evolution. No one would expect a paper on creationism to appear here.

The paper submitted by Warda and Han was a review paper about mitochondria. The mitochondrion is an organelle contained within the cells of most multicellular life, including plants and animals. Mitochondria are often referred to as the "energy factories" of the cell, because they produce adenosine triphosphate, ATP, which is the source of much of the chemical energy that a cell uses. Of course, mitochondria do not "make" energy — they merely help to convert energy from food into another form of energy that the body can use.

Review papers are different from other scientific papers: rather than describing novel experiments and results, they review and summarize the work of others on a particular topic. Reviews do not normally contain new conclusions, but once in a while a review paper might distill many related findings into a broader result than any of the individual papers discussed in the review. The Warda and Han paper professed to be a summary of how proteins in the cell interact with the mitochondrial genome. Fair enough. It turned out, though, that Warda and Han are creationists, and their "review" was a stealth attempt to get their creationist claims into the peer-reviewed literature. This report describes what they did and how they got caught.

The paper and the "mighty creator"

Like many journals, Proteomics releases papers on-line before the official publication appears. In early February 2008, I was alerted by Andrew MacArthur, an evolutionary biologist, that there was a new paper in Proteomics that gave a "mighty creator" credit for designing the mitochondrion. The paper was titled "Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul: Proteomic prospective evidence." Much of the paper reads like any review paper, with considerable technical detail and 239 references to the literature. However, the paper had four major red flags that the journal's reviewers and editors should have caught before accepting it for publication:

The title
The abstract
The creationist claim
The conclusions

The title. Scientific papers do not talk about the "soul", and although this could be just a clever metaphorical usage of that word, the title should raise suspicions that the paper contains something other than science.

The abstract. The very first paragraph of most papers is the abstract, a short summary of the main results. Warda and Han write that their review includes "novel proteomics evidence to disprove the endosymbiotic hypothesis of mitochondrial evolution that is replaced in this work by a more realistic alternative."

First of all, novel evidence does not belong in a review, so the reviewers should have been on the alert when they saw that. But more important, this claim should be quite startling to any evolutionary biologist. The endosymbiotic hypothesis proposes that the mitochondria found in many organisms today are the remnants of an ancient bacterium that was engulfed by an early, single-celled ancestor of eukaryotes about two billion years ago. This hypothesis dates back many decades (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiotic_theory) and has been gaining support since the 1960s; for example, see the papers by Kurland and Andersson (2000) and Gray and others (2001). The sequencing of the mitochondrial genomes of many animals and plants has greatly strengthened the endosymbiotic hypothesis. So what do Warda and Han have to offer as an alternative? The abstract does not say.

The creationist claim. The paper reviews the literature in a rather dry fashion until page 8, in a section titled "Mitochondrial integrated function disproves endosymbiotic hypothesis of mitochondrial evolution." In this section, Warda and Han do some funny things. First, they cite a number of references that have nothing to do with the findings in this section. Then they offer up the statement that attracted the most attention from the blogosphere:

Alternatively, instead of sinking into a swamp of endless debates about the evolution of mitochondria, it is better to come up with a unified assumption. ... More logically, the points that show proteomics overlapping between different forms of life are more likely to be interpreted as a reflection of a single common fingerprint initiated by a mighty creator than relying on a single cell that is, in a doubtful way, surprisingly originating all other kinds of life.

Aside from the fact that this sentence is so badly written as to be nearly incomprehensible, the phrase "mighty creator" sticks out like a sore thumb. Boiled down to its essence, Warda and Han are saying "God did it."

The conclusion. Does the article contain any more creationist assertions? After the "mighty creator" section, it just jumps back into review mode and continues like that almost until the end — until the very last paragraph. There, Warda and Han had one more surprise. They concluded that "many controversial questions still need to be answered, e.g., how signaling molecules ... precisely translocate from or to mitochondria in a matter of milliseconds while crossing a huge ocean of soluble and insoluble barriers." Perhaps this is a legitimate question, but then they wrote: "we still need to know the secret behind this disciplined organized wisdom. We realize so far that mitochondria could be the link between the body and this preserved wisdom of the soul devoted to guaranteeing life." This is simply nonsense — the mitochondria are linked to the "wisdom of the soul"? It is gibberish, and nothing in the article supported it, but somehow it slipped past the reviewers.

The plagiarism is uncovered

Thanks to the rapid action of the blogosphere, and four blogs in particular, this paper came to the attention of many scientists before the print version appeared. I first blogged on the paper on February 7, 2008 (http://genefinding.blogspot.com/2008/02/stealth-attempt-to-sneak-creationism.html). Attila Cordas (http://pimm.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/http://pimm.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/can-you-tell-a-good-article-from-a-bad-article-based-on-the-abstract-and-the-title/) and Lars Juhl Jensen (http://larsjuhljensen.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/commentary-neither-buried-nor-treasure) also blogged about it. PZ Myers mentioned it a day before I did on his widely-read Pharyngula blog (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/02/a_baffling_failure_of_peer_rev.php), and within a matter of hours a commenter named Sili asked, "has anyone yet checked to see whether this might be plagiarized?" The disjointed style was the first clue — much of the article appears technically competent, although the writing style varies, and the creationist claims are written very poorly. Within a few more hours, the first evidence of plagiarism was uncovered: an entire paragraph copied verbatim from another article.

From there, the evidence quickly snowballed. Within a few days there were dozens of examples, and it appeared that the majority of the text was simply copied wholesale from other sources. John MacDonald, a professor at the University of Delaware, compiled many of these into a document (http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/wardahan.pdf) showing that Warda and Han stole much of their article from six different articles plus a scientific website. The examples fill eight pages. In all cases, Warda and Han copied text word-for-word without attribution.

Plagiarism is a gross violation of scientific ethics. From the journal's point of view, it represents another problem: copyright violation. Because the text was taken without attribution and without permission, the authors were violating the copyright of the original authors. Ironically, the discovery of plagiarism by the bloggers gave Proteomics an easy out: because of the plagiarism, editor-in-chief Michael Dunn insisted that Warda and Han retract the paper.

The article was removed from the journal website, which now says only that the retraction is "due [to] a substantial overlap of the content of this article with previously published articles in other journals." Further adding to the irony, the article remains the fourth most highly-accessed article for the journal in the past year, no doubt because of the controversy.

The authors

Mohamad Warda and Jin Han submitted the article from Inje University in Korea, a relatively new university that as yet has little international stature for scientific research. Han has published multiple scientific articles in respectable journals; Warda was apparently working as Han's student or postdoc, and now lists his address as Cairo University in Egypt. Warda and Han had published together previously, including at least one paper in the journal Proteomics. The authors were contacted directly by James Randerson of The Guardian, who reported the incident on his blog (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2008/feb/13/thankstocjv5040forputting). Only Warda responded, and his response makes it clear that (a) he is a creationist, and (b) he cannot write English well. In an e-mail quoted by Randerson, Warda wrote:

The problem is that we described in very clear and definite way the disciplined nature that takes part inside our cells. We supported our meaning with define proteomics evidences that cry in front of scientists that the mitochondria is not evolved from other prokaryotes. They want to destroy us because we say the truth; only the truth.

And in response to a question about plagiarism, he wrote "I not burrow [sic] any sentences from others," despite the obvious evidence that he borrowed voluminously.

PZ Myers was able to get a response (see http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/02/one_author_responds.php) from Jin Han, who explained that:

I found the serious mistakes in the paper during the process of edits, which I confused between the early drafts and the latest versions: I did not check the use of the sentences in the references (more than 200 references). Finally I made serious error to make the final version. In order to rectify an error, I requested to retract the paper to the editorial office of Proteomics.

Myers pointed out, correctly, that this response does not really explain anything: not the creationist claims, nor the bizarre title, and certainly not the extensive plagiarism.

Clearly, based on their efforts to sneak false creationist claims past reviewers, Warda and Han are dishonest scientists whose work should be viewed with great skepticism in the future. Their extensive plagiarism is a second offense, and that alone would disqualify them from work in most legitimate scientific laboratories. In the United States, plagiarism is one of the few activities that can (and has, in some cases) lead to the firing of a tenured professor. Warda and Han should at a minimum be censured by their universities, but thus far there is no evidence that any action was taken.

The editor's response

I contacted the editor-in-chief of Proteomics, Michael Dunn, to find out more about what happened. Many scientists have speculated publicly that the peer review process went seriously wrong for this paper. Dunn assured me that the paper was reviewed by two "well-respected and highly competent reviewers" both of whom recommended minor revisions. For some reason, though, "neither picked up the references to creationism, nor did they recognize that sections of the text were plagiarized," according to Dunn. It is not too surprising that the reviewers missed the plagiarism, but the title and abstract should have raised huge red flags warning the reviewers that this article had questionable science. I have to conclude that the reviewers were very sloppy, incompetent, or both; at the very least they were inattentive in this case, despite the editor's claims to the contrary. And Dunn himself is not without responsibility in this case: he must have seen the reference to "the soul" in the article's title, and he should have been more pro-active. His failure to make any public statement about the creationist claims in the article also raises questions about the leadership at the journal.

Conclusion

This entire episode points out a weakness in scientific peer review that creationists and other pseudoscience proponents may try to exploit again. We only caught this attempted fraud thanks to the diligence of bloggers: the journal itself had already missed it. What is perhaps more troubling is the fact that the journal relied solely on the plagiarism to force the retraction: if not for that, the article might have been published despite its unsubstantiated creationist claims. I asked Dunn specifically about this issue, but he declined to comment. The Warda and Han paper demonstrates a new strategy that proponents of creationism might attempt again, and perhaps next time they will not be so foolish as to plagiarize their text. We can only hope that the publicity surrounding this incident will alert both reviewers and editors of scientific journals to be on the lookout for "stealth" creationist claims in the future.

Curriculum standards have many important applications. They are used as guidelines by curriculum developers, by textbook publishers, and by examination writers, among other things. I was first asked by the Thomas B Fordham Foundation to evaluate the science education standards of every state that had them in 1997. I surveyed 36 documents — a pretty dull but (I hope) useful task (Lerner 1998).

When I did a second review in 2000 (published as part of Finn and Petrilli 2000), the number of documents had increased to 46. As in 1997, far too many were mediocre to bad. There were several general reasons for this poor quality. More often than not, a poor standards document stumbled on more than one count. But one common failing of poor standards was a poor treatment of biological evolution. Such a treatment could be badly written; or it could be confused; or error-filled, or timid, or hypocritical. It could suffer from some combination of these, or biological evolution could simply be absent. Quite often, the evolution of the earth and the universe suffered as well. With this in mind, the Fordham Foundation commissioned me to do a study focused on the treatment of evolution in K–12 science education standards, and this was published later in 2000 (Lerner 2000).

Since then, there has been a surge of public interest in accountability and evaluation in public education. And it will not be long before the No Child Left Behind Act mandates statewide testing of all students.

In response to all this activity, the Fordham Foundation commissioned a new review in 2005. By this time, the District of Columbia and every state but Iowa had published standards, and the tendency was toward longer documents. The task had become so large that it was undertaken by a six-member team of scientists, science teachers, and a philosopher of science. Each team member surveyed all the standards but concentrated on his or her specialty. Our report was published in December. Although the evaluations were based on the overall quality of the standards documents, experience dictated that we devote special attention to the treatment of evolution.

As I had done in the earlier reports, we used a set of criteria such as clarity, organization, sound content, rigor, and steady development of subject matter consistent with the maturation of the student. We assigned numerical scores for each criterion and used the total scores to assign letter grades A through F (Figure 1). There is a tendency for good standards to concentrate in the Southwest and Northeast. But that oversimplifies the fact that there are good and bad standards to be found in all regions. For example, South Carolina's and Virginia's standards were excellent, while New Hampshire's, Wisconsin's, were Oregon's were very poor.

Figure 2 shows the distribution of grades. The good news is that 19 states, where more than half of American students go to school, have excellent or good science education standards (A or B). Not so happily, 16 states scored mediocre to bad (C or D) and 15 states flunked (F). Kansas is a notorious special case to which I will turn shortly.

Curiously, there was a lot of churning between 2000 and 2005. Some states improved and some declined. Figure 3 shows the changes. Standards quality did not change in the states shown in white. Quality improved in the gray states, and declined in the black ones. Overall there was little change, but of the 45 states (plus the District of Columbia) that were evaluated in 2000, 12 improved, 19 declined, and 15 did not change.

I do not think we can take comfort in the overall steady state, given the broad attention paid to standards in recent years. Rather, it is bad news. We might expect that the availability of good state standards written in a wide variety of styles would make it easy for those states with poor standards to make improvements. Here is a situation in which the most punctilious critic will condone cribbing!

Evolution in the standards

Turning specifically to the treatment of evolution, Figure 4 shows the results of our 2005 study. In this map, lighter colors represent better treatment of evolution. We lumped the As and Bs together as "sound," shown in the lightest gray (for example, California). The next darker shade of gray (for example, Arizona) stands for "passing" or C. The next darker shade (for example, Texas) represents "marginal" or D, and the blacks represent "failed" or F. Again, Kansas was a special case, rating a shameful F-minus.

There is a strong — but far from complete — correlation between good quality overall and good quality in treatment of evolution. There are a few exceptions. Maine's standards, for instance, rated B in overall quality but F in its treatment of evolution. For North Carolina, we found B overall but D for evolution. In most cases, however, the difference was at most one letter grade.

Figure 5 shows the overall results for treatment of evolution in 2000 and 2005, summed over all the states. Overall, we see pretty much the same thing as for the standards as a whole. The number of states earning A or B declined from 24 to 20; C grades held steady at 7, D grades rose from 6 to 10, and F grades remained at 12. Kansas, having fluctuated wildly in the interim between reports, retained the dubious distinction of "not even failed" — F-minus.

It is interesting to note that, although there is a disproportionate concentration of ill-treatment of evolution in the Bible Belt, geography is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for such treatment. Georgia and South Carolina, for instance, treated evolution very well while New Hampshire and Wisconsin did not.

Just as in the general standards for science education, poor treatment of evolution in the standards can have several causes. In some cases, the issue is simply one of competence: the writers either did not or could not present evolution (or the life sciences in general) in a cogent, accurate manner. But more often, we see design at work (in more than one sense of the word!). The deliberate effort to ignore, minimize, or distort the central organizing principle of the life sciences has a long and varied history.

The standards exhibit a variety of strategies for finessing evolution: Mississippi, for example, follows a "what they don't know won't hurt them" or "ignorance is bliss" strategy. The Mississippi standards simply avoid the use of the dreaded "e-word" and present only bits and pieces of the underlying evidence. (One may draw a parallel between this approach and the ubiquitous "abstinence-only" sex education programs adopted by Mississippi, among many other states.)

Alabama, more aggressively, begins its science education standards document with the notorious "Alabama disclaimer," which singles out evolution as somehow less reliable than any other science:

The theory of evolution by natural selection, a theory included in this document, states that natural selection provides the basis for the modern scientific explanation for the diversity of living things. Since natural selection has been observed to play a role in influencing small changes in a population, it is assumed, based on the study of artifacts, that it produces large changes, even though this has not been directly observed. Because of its importance and implications, students should understand the nature of evolutionary theories. They should learn to make distinctions among the multiple meanings of evolution, to distinguish between observations and assumptions used to draw conclusions, and to wrestle with the unanswered questions and unresolved problems still faced by evolutionary theory.

The Fordham report cuts to the heart of this disclaimer:

Although this is focused on evolution, and it paraphrases the "critiques" of evolutionary biology currently advanced by "intelligent design" creationism, it quite effectively derogates every branch of science. (There are, for example, many basic, "unanswered questions" about the fundamental forces of nature. Do we, for this reason, warn students to be suspicious of, or to "wrestle with," the "unresolved problems" of physics?) The Alabama preface sows confusion and offers a distorted view of what science is and how it is pursued. The quoted paragraph is preceded by mention of Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein, all physicists or astronomers; it then launches into an attack by misdirection on (evolutionary) biology. (Gross and others 2005: 27)

Other school systems have mimicked Alabama, using either the language or the general approach in this disclaimer (for example, Cobb County, Georgia).

Kansas stands alone

With a history somewhere between melodramatic tragedy and low comedy, Kansas is a unique case. In 1998, when a creationist majority took control of the autonomous Kansas Board of Education, they took a workable set of science education standards and edited out all references to evolution. They went still further and deleted any subject connected to the age of the earth or the universe. This excision included such basic topics as radioactive decay (because it can be used to date objects much too old to fit a simple-minded view of the Book of Genesis) and the Big Bang (which took place long before Noah's Flood.) From this trashing of science comes the F-minus the Kansas science education standards earned in 2000.

The ensuing furor led to the voting out of creationist board members in 2000 and the re-establishment of a science-friendly majority. The new board reinstated the original standards, with slight modifications. This happened soon enough that the creationist efforts had no impact on science teaching.

In the following two elections, however, a creationist majority was reestablished. The new board took a somewhat more subtle tack than their predecessors; they adopted an "intelligent design" creationist approach, but did not stop there. They formally redefined all of science to include inquiry into the supernatural. This direct attack on science as a whole is even more blatant than the indirect attack that inheres in a mistreatment of biological evolution. These grotesque distortions stand today and have earned Kansas a brand-new F-minus. Many Kansans, including the governor, the university communities, and the great majority of the science teachers, were dismayed. In the 2006 state school board elections, those in favor of keeping evolution in the standards became a 6–4 majority of the board (see http://ncseweb.org/news/2006/08/pendulum-swings-kansas-00814).

Conclusions

In conclusion, let me put science education standards in a broader context. Good standards are only one step toward quality education. It is a long way, after all, from the Department of Education in a state capital to the small rural schoolhouse in the mountains or the plains. And standards can be and have been used as a basis for writing undemanding exams, at least in language arts and mathematics. Many other matters need to be considered as well. Among these are finding and using quality textbooks, making sure teachers have adequate preparation in their subjects, and finding enough money to attract quality personnel to every aspect of public education. But if the standards are poor, it is difficult to assure quality education in all the schools of a state (an exception may be in schools in affluent neighborhoods, where well-educated parents raise well-prepared children).

With respect to the teaching of evolution in particular, poor, absent, or counterfeit treatments in science education standards are practically a guarantee that evolution will vanish from state exams, textbooks, and from many classrooms as well. There are plenty of creationists, "intelligent-design" or otherwise, who are eager to make this happen. In our day, as in the days of Scopes — or Galileo, for that matter — science needs its defenders.

Teaching about Scientific Origins: Taking Account of Creationism is a patchwork of thoughtful essays on evolution and creationism from some prominent voices in science education and philosophy. According to the editors of the volume, the aim of the book is to "address the challenges of teaching about scientific origins in the context of religious concerns" (p ix). This text is an excellent contribution to the Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education series because of its polyvocal representation of the evolution/creationism controversy.

Polyvocality is a postmodern textual representation that showcases multiple, often non-convergent, viewpoints (Guba and Lincoln 2005). The aim of a polyvocal text is to highlight the complexity of an issue by problematizing rather than resolving. Traditional texts offer solutions; polyvocal texts ask questions. The editors of Teaching about Scientific Origins prepare the reader for a polyvocal style by stating: "It needs to be stressed that there is not a single account of how the authors in this book see the relationship between science and religion nor of how we envisage that that relationship should be taught, if it is to be taught at all" (p 8).

Even without the projection of a single metanarrative, twelve of the thirteen chapters are written from the scientific consensus position, as supported by National Science Education Standards (National Research Council 1996) and by science organizations (AAAS 1990, 1993), that evolution is the cornerstone of the biological sciences and that teaching biology without evolution is a mismanagement of the science curriculum.

The first third of the book looks at the history, sociology, and politics of teaching evolution as viewed from outside of the classroom. The second third of the book shifts argumentation. Here the authors either present an argument for a particular position, such as teaching creationism or evolution, or they dissect the arguments that others have employed. Within this second portion of the book is a chapter presenting a creationist perspective on teaching evolution, notably the only chapter not reflecting the views of national and international science organizations. Finally, the last third views the professional and personal nature of the evolution/creationism controversy through the lens of teacher and student. These chapters describe the impact of the controversy in classrooms and recommend ways of dealing with it, such as insisting on respectful interpersonal relationships, particularly with students who may have creationist beliefs.

Beginning the first third of the book, Randy Moore and Michael Ruse examine the historic politics that led to the modern controversy. Moore describes the social discord between evolution and creationism as it was expressed in the late 19th century and in early 20thcentury politics. In the second half of the chapter, he answers some questions that teachers have about the legal boundaries to teaching evolution (or creationism) in public schools.

Ruse writes specifically about "Christianity" and "Darwinism," emphasizing the contrasting epistemologies that define the modern evolution/creationism controversy. He challenges contemporary polarized debates about science and religion, referring to such conflicts as remnants of the 19th century. Using Richard Dawkins, a biologist and vocal atheist, as a focus, Ruse describes how arguments from the extreme ends of the belief spectrum — such as arguments between evolutionary dogmatists and fundamentalist creationists — anchor science and religion to a common, confrontational center point.

Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 shift the reader’s attention toward the argumentation tactics used in the broad conflict between science and religion as well as strategies used by proponents within specific domains, such as creationists. David Mercer conducts a highly philosophical examination of the conflict between science and religion, criticizing the tendency to oversimplify the nature of both science and religion. Media sources and public science particularly are chastised for giving such oversimplified representations. Mercer recommends that we talk about science and religion in a more humanistic way that is representative of the manner in which the controversy is lived and that we think about the science curriculum through an inclusive social context that he calls "science studies" (p 53).

Robert Pennock traces the emergence of "intelligent design" (ID) creationism in schools and specifically focuses upon the ID proponents’ argument to "teach the controversy" of biological evolution in science classrooms, dissecting, by way of example, a video developed by ID advocates intended to show teachers how to legally "teach the controversy about Darwin." Pennock describes the ID argument as "smoke and mirrors," contending that the ID argument intentionally and strategically neglects science in order to promote its non-scientific goals. In the concluding remarks, his perspective on the debate is clear: teach real science.

Michael Poole unpacks and redistributes what he calls "areas of difficulty" between science and creationism, where meanings are in conflict when considered from creationist versus scientific perspectives. They include understandings about the age of the earth, chance, atheism, naturalism, explanation, reification, and evolutionism. Poole develops the essay by first making a statement of conflict and then examining it from scientific and religious perspectives. For example, he examines ideas that connect science and atheism by discussing the statement "Science is often presented as an atheistic activity that makes no place for God" (p 83). I particularly appreciate how Poole resolves the conflict about science and atheism with a description of how the omission of religion from science is not a denial of religion: "It need be no more surprising to the religious scientist not to find God mentioned in science texts than to find that Henry Ford is not mentioned in the instruction booklet of that make of car" (p 84).

Shaikh Abdul Mabud argues that evolution, as it is taught in schools and represented in selected British textbooks, is treated as "fact" and does not provide science students with a balanced perspective, offering arguments for and against evolution. A creationist from the Islamic faith, he uses many of the arguments found in other creationist literature, such as challenges to homology, complex biochemical events, and natural selection. Mabud is the only strong anti-evolution voice in the text, but the inclusion of this chapter shows how polyvocal texts break from authoritarian truth notions.

The next five chapters examine the evolution/creationism controversy from the perspective of teacher and/or student. Several authors tell personal stories about their experiences with the evolution/ creationism conflict in the classroom. Wolff-Michael Roth presents a discourse analysis of conversations with a high school physics student who deliberated on his personal conceptions of science and religion. Roth’s analysis untangles some of the complex and multifaceted relationships between self, science, and religion, providing insight into how science and religion interact in lived experience. The chapter concludes by encouraging teachers to consider the complexity of human understanding of science and religion and recommending that teachers find ways to discuss what Roth calls the "different life domains" (science and religion) with students in the hope that such conversations will translate into students’ having a personal understanding of how different domains interact in their own lives (p 122).

David L Haury emphasizes the role of curriculum in the evolution/ creationism controversy. Observing that human evolution has been overlooked in science standards documents and biology curricula,Haury blames the human evolution gap in American biology curricula on the prevalence of creationist ideology and goes on to describe several concepts that, combined, serve as a rationale for teaching human evolution. These concept — which include the nature of science, evolutionary theory, human family, ecological identity, worldview, and spirit of discovery — mediate dichotomous arguments such as science versus religion (or evolution versus creationism). Like many of the other authors in this portion of Teaching about Scientific Origins, Haury’s approach is scientifically grounded while remaining considerate of students’ beliefs.

Lee Meadows explains that conflict management, rather than conflict resolution, is an appropriate instructional aim in biology classrooms. Meadows explains that conflict management shows respect for religious students who are likely to experience conflict with evolution. After a discussion of clashing religious and scientific worldviews, Meadows offers five recommendations for teachers who wish to adapt their teaching aims to incorporate conflict management: 1. Respect your students’ religious beliefs, 2. Present evolution as an undeniable scientific understanding; 3. Model the difficult process of facing biases and conflicts of belief; 4. Consider teaching evolution as a case study in the nature of science; and 5. Don’t push religious students who may not have the emotional maturity to deal with the conflicts between their religious beliefs and their science learning.

David F Jackson recounts his personal experiences as a teacher educator who moved from the liberal northeastern US to more conservative Georgia where many, if not most, of his students are practicing Christians. Jackson discusses the overlap and conflict that science teachers feel within "the personal and the professional" aspects of themselves. His approach to mediate controversy within the classroom is to be sympathetic to students’ beliefs but maintain scientific integrity. Additionally, he encourages science teachers who are Christian to give voice to their own life experiences, exposing and exploring the personal and professional selves.

Co-editor Leslie S Jones presents a personal reflection on the impact of the evolution/creationism controversy in her college biology courses. Jones shares how she came to a deeper understanding of the conflict by learning about students whose creationist backgrounds have taught them to distrust science. By having personal conversations with her students, she was able to gain trust and open the door to learning evolution. Jones's essay shows how important it is for teachers to make a distinction between belief and understanding, especially when teaching topics that potentially challenge students' beliefs.

In the concluding chapter, "Teaching about origins in science: Where now?", coeditor Michael Reiss synthesizes the first twelve chapters and identifies three themes that ran through many of the essays — teaching the nature of knowledge, teaching about controversial topics, and consideration for the personal significance of the controversy. Reiss offers insights into the relationship between controversy and uncertainty, explaining that naïve students assume that evolution is uncertain because of its association with controversy. By teaching about the relationship between science and religion, educators can inform students about the controversy without unnecessarily introducing a conflict between science and religion.

The controversy surrounding science and religion (and evolution and creationism) is a resilient social and political conflict. The many perspectives involved in this controversy make the arguments complex, highly emotional, and often deeply personal to individuals, regardless of their position on the controversy. Teachers, as intermediaries between science and the public, have a responsibility to develop their own understanding of the controversy's complexity. Well-informed teachers realize that absolutist notions of "right" and "wrong" are blurred by the chance to engage in dialog. This approach to teaching about evolution is a marked shift from more dogmatist approaches to teaching science in areas where belief and truth claims may come into conflict. Although a dogmatic approach to teaching science is not scientifically inaccurate, the approach could be insensitive to students' beliefs.

While Teaching about Scientific Origins may not be appropriate for use in a K–12 science classroom and does not offer any narrow, prescriptive directives for teaching evolution, the text provides valuable insights into the science–religion controversy, examining its complexity from a variety of educational vantage points. I think that diverse perspectives, such as those presented in this book, lubricate conversations, opening up safer spaces for us to discuss the otherwise hidden conflicts that educators and students experience with regard to creationism and origins.

Awaited with curiosity since initial news reports of this meeting, this book proves doubly disappointing. It is regrettable that top Catholic leaders seem drawn toward "intelligent design" (ID); but it is disturbing that they seem not even aware of relevant and better thinking within their own church.

As a former theology professor, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) has for the last thirty years met annually with his former students to discuss current theology and philosophy. This book, on the timely topic of evolution, documents for the first time the discussions of such a session, the one held September 1–3, 2006. It was first published in German as Schöpfung und Evolution (Augsburg: Sankt Ulrich Verlag, 2007), as noted in RNCSE 2006 Nov/Dec; 26 (6): 8.

This well-produced hardback English edition (from a right-wing Catholic publisher) merits attention not only for showcasing the views of the present pope, but even more those of Vienna's Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, who made a stir with an essay favorable to ID in The New York Times (2005 Jul 7). Schönborn seems to have dominated the 2006 discussion, and his opinions, more outspoken than the Pope's own, may reveal more about the thinking in Vatican inner circles.

The book comprises a foreword by Schönborn, papers read by four participants (including Schönborn), an edited and augmented transcript of the ensuing discussion, and an appended essay by theologian Siegfried Wiedenhofer, plus biographical and bibliographical notes. Its philosophical arguments are not always easy to follow, but deserve close attention because they constitute a version of ID now deeply entrenched at the top of one of the world's most influential organizations.

About 70% of Schönborn's foreword consists of quotes from earlier writings on evolution by Ratzinger, the Catholic Church's longtime monitor of orthodoxy. This anthology of the Pope's views is welcome, especially since he contributed relatively little to the discussion recorded later in the book. As quoted by Schönborn, he expresses himself in moderate, nuanced, even progressive-sounding terms, apparently embracing a mainstream view of theistic evolution, and rejecting philosophical materialism that erroneously claims to be the only view compatible with science: "The theory of evolution does not invalidate the faith, nor does it corroborate it" (p 16). Ratzinger's quarrel is only with evolutionism as a materialistic worldview and universal explanation of reality.

Or so it seems at first glance. But he also reveals in passing a doubt about macroevolution (p 19), and then adopts the conventional false dichotomy between the world as a "meaningless" product of "chance and necessity" and as the product of "the creative power of [divine] reason" (p 20). As becomes clearer later on, he and his friends have not taken into account the insight of contemporary Christian "evolutionary theology" (see Domning 2002a, 2002b) that divine reason can employ that very "chance and necessity" (such as Darwinian selection) in order to create.

The first and longest formal paper, by chemist and Austrian Academy of Sciences president Peter Schuster, is an able and uncompromising exposition of "the state of the art in the theory of evolution." Schuster stoutly defends the efficacy of Darwinian processes. He reviews with clear diagrams the basics of molecular genetics; explains the phenomenon of self-organization as illustrated by cellular automata; and details the most important steps in macroevolution, citing Maynard Smith and Szathmáry (1995), whom Ratzinger had earlier misinterpreted. He emphasizes the "tinkering" aspect of evolution, and the important role of gene duplication. He concludes that evolution "goes on according to natural laws and needs no external intervention. Furthermore, the natural scientist at present is making not one single observation that could be explained compellingly only by the interference of a supernatural being, nor is one necessary for the extrapolation of our present knowledge to the interpretation of events in the past" (p 58). Only in regard to the narrow range of cosmological constants and planetary environments that is permissive of life does Schuster concede that there might "be room for a bridge ... between theology and natural science" (p 59). This sophisticated briefing paper could have fruitfully served as the basis for the whole discussion; too often it met instead with skepticism and incomprehension.

Next, philosopher Robert Spaemann argues that integration of the natural sciences with the humanities is still premature, but that only the idea of creation unifies these two worldviews — science and our human self-understanding. That is, the same divine will accounts for both evolution and evolution's producing an intelligent being who acknowledges his Creator. Science can explain in Darwinian terms how humans and other species have evolved, but this does not exclude a separate explanation for the true, the good, and the beautiful.

The third essay is by Paul Erbrich, a Jesuit priest and professor emeritus of natural philosophy. Like the others, he concedes the fact of evolution and the efficacy of "Darwin's mechanism of chance and natural selection" (p 71; emphasis in original) as a "mechanism of optimization"; but with the reservation that this "presupposes something to be optimized": namely, "an innovation that must have come about in some other way" (p 72). For Erbrich, "evolution as a whole is goal-oriented .... For phylogenesis is an orthogenesis, a development toward a higher level ... an ever greater emancipation from the constraints of the environment, certainly not for every species of living thing, but for the front-runners in the evolutionary crowd" (p 74). He cites the emancipation of amphibians and reptiles from water, amniotes' evolution of climbing and flight, adaptation to cold climates, and human intelligence. These advances he credits to true teleology, "purposefulness in the living things that are ... selected", which makes competition possible — not a mere teleonomy or mechanical simulation of goal-seeking (p 72–3). Because "if there is purposefulness, then there is no more compulsion [for scientists] to keep appealing to chance" (p 76).

Erbrich infers a "leap" (from inorganic to organic) that he thinks evolutionists try to gloss over with the idea of self-organization. He doubts that "[a] really original totality could ... come into being through composition": for example, fusion of egg and sperm "would not be the origin and first cause of a living thing," but only a prerequisite for "a new foundation in a radical sense," that is, a creation of God (p 83). Evolutionary theology would allow instead that "composition" is simply a way that creatures participate in God's creative act — no longer a shocking notion to many Christians, but one not easily grasped by this traditionalist strain of philosophy.

In his own essay, Schönborn takes up the same theme, with quotes from Isaac Newton attacking Cartesian materialism and deism and arguing for God's active governance of the world as inferred from "the appearances of things." For Schönborn, Newton's arguments contain in a nutshell "the essential questions that are still at issue today ... between science, reason, and faith" — particularly in Schönborn's New York Times article (p 86). Unfortunately, he disregards the post-Newtonian answers to these questions; so what follows lags disappointingly behind where today's discussion ought to be.

Schönborn sets out "to release Darwin from Darwinism, free him from the ideological fetters" of a materialist worldview (p 90), which he says can only be done on the level of metaphysics. He explicitly disavows the "creationist" position, which is "based on an understanding of the Bible that the Catholic Church does not share" (p 91). "The possibility that the Creator also makes use of the instrument of evolution is admissible for the Catholic faith." He rejects Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria," insisting there must be "intersections" between theology and science, though "not every variation on the theory of evolution is consistent with faith in creation" (p 92). So far, so good: his objection is to atheistic evolutionism à la Dawkins, and I would agree.

But then he quotes with approval the view that origin of life from "blind matter ... is incompatible with the Christian doctrine of creation," and argues that the strictly methodological materialism of science "cannot do justice to the whole of reality" because, as an intellectual act, it "presupposes reason, will, and freedom" (p 93). Of course, a methodological (rather than a philosophical) materialist would not claim that science can address the whole of reality. But in asserting that intellectual acts "cannot be the effect of forces that are of a purely material sort" (p 94–5), the cardinal reveals how deeply his thought, like much Christian philosophy, is tainted by the Gnostic heresy — which denies that anything good, let alone spiritual, can come from mere matter.

Schönborn affirms that there is "purpose" throughout nature, but at the cost of denying any real independence of internal natural laws (which are really the workings of an externally imposed divine design). He sees Aristotelian "substantial forms" as the underlying reality of things (for example, species), and strongly hints that it is the business of science today, as in Newton's time, "to read God's traces in creation" (p 100–2). These views are needlessly at odds with today's understanding of evolution and science in general.

Schönborn has plainly learned his biology from creationist sources. He parrots the canards that "the 'missing links' ... simply do not exist"; reptiles could not have been rebuilt into birds by "innumerable small mutations"; "survival of the fittest" is problematic because survival is often a matter of luck; and therefore acceptance of evolution must be dictated by ideology (p 103). Only because he has no good explanation of suffering, and wants to spare God the blame for it, does he concede that "we should not be over-hasty about trying to point out 'intelligent design' everywhere" (p 105). But his commitment to a version of ID is clear.

The ensuing discussion consists largely of Schuster's answering objections to his account of biology, and rebutting views such as those of Erbrich about "leaps" and "goal-oriented activity" (p 144–52). One response by him is an apt summation: "people look for gaps in the science so as to hide in them subjective things that are inaccessible to natural science" (p 131).

When the Pope finally joins the discussion, he betrays a surprisingly weak grasp of how science works: "to a great extent the theory of evolution cannot be proved experimentally"; it "is still not a complete, scientifically verified theory" (p 162). Yet he also acknowledges that disorder and "the terrible element in nature" (for which he admits he has no philosophical solution) are problems for the notion of design (p 173). He gives the impression of being slightly less committed to the ID critique than Schönborn, and more open to modern theistic evolution if properly presented; or he may just be more guarded in his speech.

These critics of Darwin simply repeat the philosophy they were taught: a textbook of their time (Phillips 1948, ch 18) embodies the views and even the polemical tone adopted by Schönborn. Strikingly, they consider only the polar alternatives of materialism and divine intervention (today's ID) — altogether ignoring noninterventionist theistic evolution with its concept of a truly autonomous, "purposeless" creation that nonetheless accomplishes the purposes of its Creator. This is an idea that, in these minds trained in Scholastic philosophy, simply does not compute.

No new ground was broken at Castel Gandolfo. Ratzinger, Schönborn, and the other exponents of the Church's traditional philosophy are the rear guard, not the vanguard, of Catholic evolutionary thinking. Among these prelates and their conservative followers, the ancient Aristotelian/ Scholastic notion of unchanging "essences" of things is still in vogue, and almost precludes a grasp of the evolutionary paradigm. The term "emergent properties" appears nowhere in this book, nor do contemporary Catholic evolutionary theologians such as John Haught and Denis Edwards (see Domning 2002a). Seemingly unaware of other forms of theistic evolution, the Pope's associates are pushed toward ID because the pro-evolution side is dominated by atheists like Richard Dawkins. This is understandable, but tragic, because theologians in their own church offer better solutions to these problems than the ones they learned in school, or borrow from the relatively alien ID movement.

The Evolving World was a book that needed to be written and ought to be read by everyone — but particularly those of us who promote evolution education to the general public. The main message for this audience is that other scientific theories, such as germ theory and heliocentrism, that are now widely — though perhaps not universally — accepted among the general public took much longer to gain acceptance than has evolution — at least so far. This conclusion may be a little skewed, since public access to published information and the variety of media options clearly worked against rapid dissemination of, say, heliocentrism even among members of the research community. Still, the point is well made in several examples: new scientific theories take time to get accepted, and this happens more readily when the new theories connect to issues and concerns that the general public has in everyday life.

The first 190 pages of this book make this point well with a variety of examples, and supporters of evolution education would do well to become familiar with these. They show the direct impact of evolutionary science on things that matter to everyday life: health and disease, food production, conservation, forensics, and more. Mindell argues that the resistance to evolution, when it occurs, happens at the most personal level and often derives from cultural narratives that purport to inform us about the meaning and purpose of life. And this is why it is so important for supporters of evolution education to find how the evolutionary sciences affect the issues that people find most important in life.

The next section of the book deals with other common usages of the word "evolution" in the sciences and in general discourse. This is useful in a way, because it shows that, like the word "theory", the e-word has a number of meanings, and that different people — and even different scholarly disciplines — may favor different ones. Part of the reason for the proliferation of meanings is what Mindell calls the "evolution metaphor" — the idea that Darwin's basic concept of differential success in various biological structures under different environmental conditions could be extended metaphorically to human cultural institutions as well. This section is helpful for making that point, but sometimes it is less clear that the extension of evolutionary ideas into these realms is metaphorical.

There are a few specific inferences that could generate significant disagreement. For example, Mindell suggests that evolutionary science has helped "to free religions of the burden of literalism" (p 245) because the evolutionary metaphor of cultural developments allows us to identify how religions change as a result of changes in human history rather than through divine intervention. However, it is evident that the move away from literalism did not depend on modern science for its engine. Theological traditions that eschew literalism usually do so for theological, not scientific reasons, though it is clear that scientific discoveries do make certain factual claims difficult or impossible to sustain as they are written in Scripture; for example, there are no "waters above the firmament" (which contains the stars and planets) as reported in Genesis 1:7. In contrast, the move of the mainline Christian churches away from strict literalism occurred long before there was any significant evolutionary science, and this view of Scripture was — and remains — a major complaint of reformed denominations. So the extent to which scientific discoveries about the material world affected interpretation and application of tenets of religious traditions — or rather the mutual influence of the intellectual evolution in science and theology, since it is clear that it was not a one-way street — would make a very interesting, and perhaps informative, discussion. However, it is difficult to justify non-literal theology as primarily caused by the application of the evolutionary metaphor.

Aside from such concerns, this is a book that would be very useful to anyone who needs to explain to a member of the general public why evolution matters. It matters because it reaches into many aspects of our everyday lives; and not just in a metaphorical way, but in a tangible way.

Making Sense of Evolution is an ambitious book synthesizing the views of a practicing biologist (Massimo Pigliucci) with those of a practicing philosopher of biology (Jonathan Kaplan). It begins with central concepts in evolution that are referred to throughout the book, and then moves on to such topics as how to measure natural selection, the debate over the units or "levels" of selection, adaptationism, functions, testing adaptive hypotheses in human evolution, and the concept of species.

Readers of Reports of the NCSE may be familiar with Pigliucci's Denying Evolution (2002); however, this book has a very different audience in mind — graduate students and professionals in biology and philosophy of biology. Indeed, laypersons who pick up Making Sense of Evolution based on the title alone are likely to walk away disappointed; it is replete with technical terms from both biology and the philosophy of biology. That being said, the authors do an admirable job in explaining much of the jargon; boxes and diagrams, although occasionally overused (as when they span multiple pages), are extremely helpful in highlighting key points and concepts.

I cannot help but remark that this is exactly the sort of book that creationists exploit, given its stinging criticism of contemporary evolutionary practice. The authors are aware that their words could be taken out of context and misused, but say that they seek to provide a more accurate picture of science as it really is: nuanced and provisional. Although I applaud and agree with this general sentiment — neither philosophers of biology nor biologists should hold back when there are criticisms to be made — in this case the authors are overly critical. Our current evolutionary models and methods are limited in various respects, and Pigliucci and Kaplan are right to point out these limitations. However, they deemphasize the utility of these models and methods. To give one simple example, it is true that some evolutionary models do not work well for making long-term predictions; however, these same models work quite well for short-term predictions. Pigliucci and Kaplan acknowledge this, but suggest that it is long-term predictions that we really care about. Yet that is far from obvious; indeed, it could reasonably be argued that the models of population genetics were intended to apply primarily to short-term predictions, so that the apparent limitation is not really much of a limitation at all. Someone who is not fully conversant with the models and methods in question might get the impression that evolutionary biology is in much worse shape than it actually is, whereas someone who is more familiar with these practices is likely to feel that the full story has not been told.

The picture of contemporary philosophy of biology that emerges is also somewhat misleading. Citations to key sources are spotty, so that a reader who wanted to follow up on the issues would have a difficult time doing so. For example, the view that natural selection is a "force" is introduced without a citation to Elliott Sober, evolution is described as a historical science without citations to Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould, and underdetermination is discussed without a citation to Pierre Duhem. To anyone who is familiar with the literature, these omissions are almost akin to discussing the development of the theory of natural selection without citing Charles Darwin. More substantively, some of the concepts that are used throughout the book — concepts that are supposed to provide clarification and insight into more complex issues — are unclear and not fully defended. For example, Pigliucci and Kaplan introduce two concepts of fitness, one at the level of individuals and one at the level of ensembles of populations, and, correspondingly, two concepts of natural selection. However, it is unclear why natural selection should not be seen simply as one kind of cause with corresponding effects at the level of ensembles of populations. And again, following the citations will be of little help — in this case, because Pigliucci and Kaplan have misinterpreted the position of the authors credited with developing these concepts, Matthen and Ariew (2002), who hold that natural selection is a statistical summation at the level of populations.

Another central concept, random genetic drift, is similarly ill-treated. We are told that the many biologists who think they are comparing the outcomes of selection and drift are confused, because drift is not a "force," a "cause," or a "process". Yet no argument is given; the authors simply take one definition of drift ("a name we give to certain outcomes that are at a particular place in the statistical distribution of likely outcomes") and point out that on this definition, it makes no sense to talk of drift as a process. But that definition ignores the fact that biologists identify "drift" with a number of biological processes — most commonly, the "random" (or more accurately, "indiscriminate") sampling of gametes in the process of fertilization; in such cases, heritable differences between gametes are causally irrelevant to which gametes are successfully joined (see Beatty 1984 and Millstein 2002, which are cited but not discussed). On this alternative definition, one need not reach the conclusion that generations of biologists are simply confused about what it is that they are doing.

Even though at times I found this book to be a frustrating read — for example, we are supposed to think that it makes no sense to talk of developmental constraints simply because development makes selection possible (as though that which enables cannot simultaneously constrain) — I do think that there is some value in it. In particular, I applaud the authors' joint venture — certainly there is much to gain from collaborations between biologists and philosophers of biology — and their overall theme emphasizing the need for models and methods that reveal the causal processes underlying statistical patterns. We can be so dazzled by our statistical methods that we forget their limitations, and if representing nature is a goal of our science, retooling our models and methods to uncover the causes at work will help us achieve that goal. Nonetheless, conceptual and methodological clarity will have to wait for another day. But then again, this just means that evolutionary biology and its philosophical analysis are ongoing rather than static; this should be no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the true nature of science.

Acknowledgments

I thank Ayelet Shavit and Vadim Keyser for reading this book with me. My understanding of the issues at stake is very much in debt to their helpful comments and insights.