By Jack Cashill

Courtesy of the Cashill Newsletter - August 13, 1999

It was a thrilling moment to be sure, maybe even an historic one.

There stood Loren Lutes, Co-Chair of the Kansas Science Education Standards Writing Committee. Before him sat the ten everyday folks on the Kansas State Board of Education. Around him stood a dozen camerman and an equal number of pretty, young infobabes.

Just like Spencer Tracy at the Scopes Trial, Lutes was going to hand these snakehandlers their hash. How dare they even consider rejecting the standards that his fellow “science educators” had labored over for months. How dare they threaten to excise macro-evolution from the document and return the issue of evolution to local control. Just who did these board people think they were trifling with?

Shaking with indignation, Lutes proceeded to read an endless list of educational big shots who stood firmly behind his draft, including all 27 members of his committee, the state’s school superintendents and university presidents and just about every dang science organization that has ever queued up for a government grant. His supporters in the crowd seemed confident that the board would wither before his righteous scorn.

They were wrong.

Just when we all had thought that the Supreme Court, the mainstream media, Hollywood, the National Education Association, the ACLU and sundry other progressive forces had made America safe for secular humanism, the board's six member majority found the courage to reject educators’ standards and insert its own.

Da noive!

In challenging the teaching of evolution, the state board has renewed an offensive in the nation’s ongoing “culture wars” along a front most Americans presumed dormant if not dead. In the process, they have exposed not just the cracks in the Darwinian dam but the gaping holes in the nation’s commitment to representative democracy. This exercise proved to be as much about civics as it was about science.

Among those most troubled by this unexpected breakout of democracy is the state’s entirely respectable Republican governor, Bill Graves. Indeed, the issue has evoked in Graves feelings of “great consternation and concern." Says he of the debate, “It certainly causes people to reexamine the question of the importance of the board in our efforts to make our public education system the finest that it can be.” In other words, if the people keep electing such peckerwoods, Graves just might deep six the board and the democratic process with it.

The local media establishment has been egging him on. Kansas City Star editorialist Laura Scott believes Graves would “have the pulse of the public on this matter” were he to dismiss the Board. Scott prefers the cozy and incestuous Missouri model. There, the Governor appoints the board, and the board elects a commissioner. Were Kansas to do the same, those folks who dare to reject what Scott calls ““accepted scientific theory” and “progressive changes” would have no say beyond their presumed trailer parks.

If “moderates” like Graves and Scott are now losing faith in the rough and tumble of the democratic process, America’s progressives lost it a long time ago. Appropriately, one of the first public manifestations of that loss was the famed Scopes trial of 1925. This rather bizarre chapter in American cultural history deserves a second glance as it has served as prototype for liberal reform strategy on a wide range of issues, evolution high among them. Even today, its echoes can be heard loud and clear across the state of Kansas.

The Scopes phenomenon began when the upstart American Civil Liberties Union, looking to win its first court case, decided to challenge a recent Tennessee law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools.

The ACLU had not involved itself previously in the forced secularization of American life. Indeed, Quakers had been instrumental in launching this organization during the First World War as a means of shielding religious pacifists from military service. But with war issues played out, and their faith in majoritarian democracy dimmed by the various oppressions that tend to accompany war, ACLU board members were looking for a new battleground and found one in the classroom.

Lacking confidence in the court of public opinion, the ACLU turned to the court of law. At the time, this was a novel and controversial strategy, even among progressives.The New Republic , for instance, wanted no part of it. In a strongly worded critique, of the sort no longer heard in liberal journals, the editors argued that the ACLU should have placed the onus for resolving the evolution issue, “not on the Supreme Court, but on the legislature and people of Tennessee."

To prevail in court, the ACLU first needed to find a “victim” of the new law, and it advertised widely to do just that. The boosters of Dayton, Tennessee knew a solid commercial opportunity when they saw one. They encouraged an agnostic young gym teacher, John T. Scopes, to make a point of teaching evolution, persuaded the city attorneys to prosecute the case (One, Sue Hicks, had to be the inspiration for Johnny Cash’s A Boy Named Sue), drew up a warrant for the Justice of the Peace to serve on Scopes, alerted the ACLU and, of course, contacted all the Tennessee newspapers. As Edward J. Larson comments in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the trial, Summer of The Gods, “The show had begun.”

The show featured two heavyweights of American popular culture, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. Both men presented problems for the progressives: Bryan, because on all other issues he was one of them; Darrow, because he said out loud what they would only say among themselves.

At issue, now as then, was just who controls the education of America’s youth. Despite three losses in his bid to be president, Bryan retained his populist faith in the will of the people. “Teachers in public school.” he stated succinctly, “must teach what the taxpayers desire taught.” Arguing in much the same vein as many of the Kansas petitioners, Bryan made no objection to teachers saying what they chose outside of class or even teaching evolution within as a theory, but not, he insisted, “as true or as a proven fact.”

Power attorney Clarence Darrow had no faith in the common people and even less in God. “We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States,” he declared openly in court, “and that is all.” A militant agnostic, Darrow considered Bryan’s fundamentalism “a fool religion” and, much to the remorse of his ACLU handlers, was not adverse to saying so.

The Scopes trial was a test run for liberal propaganda strategies that would endure to the present. Darrow, himself, proved to be an early master of the art of selective, self-congratulatory tolerance. “I never condemn, never judge,” he told the court before unleashing a hateful fury of name-calling that would make James Carville blush.

The intoxicating fumes of junk science left the media of that era just as giddy as they do today. “Darwin Theory Is Proved True.” declared the banner headline of a 1912 New York Times. The discovery in question just happened to be the transparently fraudulent “Piltdown Man,” the “alar” of paleontology. As the journalists proved at the Scopes trial, both through the slant of their coverage and their open displays of approval for the Scopes team, ideology has always trumped objectivity in the American media.

Although at the time few considered the Scopes affair a setback for the anti-evolutionists--the New Republic called the trial "a trivial thing full of humbuggery and hypocrisy"--academia and Hollywood have succeeded in transforming progressive propaganda into history. The rewriting began quickly with Frederick Lewis Allen's best-seller, Only Yesterday. Written in 1931, Allen's pop history concluded that the trial was the beginning of the end for fundamentalism. Other historians picked up the theme of "fundamentalism's last stand" even though all objective evidence suggested fundamentalism was growing. By mid-century, even influential historians like Richard Hofstadter were rubbing defeat in the face of their imagined foes. Bryan’s latter career, Hofstadter wrote with obvious spite, represented "the collapse of rural idealism and the shabbiness of the evangelical mind."

Inherit The Wind polished off the liberal rewrite job. The popular play and movie portrayed the Bryan figure as a slobbering buffoon, the Darrow figure as a fair-minded rationalist, and the townsfolk as a mob of witch-hunting McCarthyites. The image of conservative Christianity was fixed in the popular imagination. The trial was a humiliation. Fundamentalism was dying Anti-evolution was dead .

One problem. No one told the fundamentalists. They and their Catholic and even orthodox Jewish allies showed up in Topeka on a typically stark, hot, August day in the hundreds to make their final case before the Kansas Board of Education. They fanned themselves with hats and hand-outs to ward off the heat in the stuffy, L-shaped board room much as they might have in that Tennessee courthouse in 1925 They spilled into the halls to watch on jerry-rigged monitors. They restrained themselves admirably when opponents belittled their efforts. And perhaps 50 among them made impassioned two-minute pleas to influence the board's decision.

It was a beautiful thing.

"I'm deeply grateful," said one fellow, himself a Vietnam vet, "that you're willing to listen to the average citizen." Others repeated this refrain. "Community spirit and local control," added one woman in all sincerity, "has always been the backbone of this country."

The opposition, mostly science teachers and university professors, was not so sure. "Thank you for the democratic process," noted one teacher, before adding the deeply ironic, "I think." Indeed, he proved not to be very thankful at all as he ended up denouncing the event as "just another state board shenanigan."

"Local control," added a science teacher, "means limited opportunities for students." Like others on his side, the state geologist hit this theme hard. These new standards would put students at "a disadvantage in the world marketplace" and would mark Kansas as "an intellectual backwater" to be "ridiculed by people of learning and enterprise."

It pained the almost universally bearded crew of profs to be there. Until the board had taken the issue up, the profs had presumed that this debate ended with the Scopes trial, that all Americans believed in Darwin as hero and evolution as fact.

Didn't they?

Maybe not. Though an ardent Darwinian, the late TV astronomer Carl Sagan had acknowledged that only 9% of the American public accepted the central finding of modern biology, namely “that human beings have evolved by natural processes from a succession of more ancient beings with no divine intervention along the way.” As Sagan well understood, It was the “no divine intervention” part that soured the American people, 90% of whom profess to believe in God.

Regardless of what Americans believe, “No divine intervention” is what their kids have been learning in public schools. As late as 1995, before yielding to anti-Darwinian pressure, the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) made this clear when it described evolution as “impersonal, unsupervised, unpredictable.” “Unsupervised” means no one’s running the show. This point the fundamentalists in Kansas understood better than did their opposition. The few pro-evolution, self-identified "mainstream" Protestants at the hearing argued that Darwin and God were easily reconciled. In fact, they are really not reconcilable at all.

When famed evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson noted that “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind," he was quite clearly denying the existence of a creator.

So was reigning Darwinian Julian Huxley on the occasion of the Darwin Centennial in 1959 when he boldly claimed that “in the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created. It evolved.”

As the anti-evolutionists understand, the Darwinian position has grown even more materialistic since the centennial. Says Richard Dawkins, the most influential, if the least romantic, of contemporary evolutionary biologists, “We are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”

At the state board meeting, no evolution proponent acknowledged the inescapably atheistic thrust of Darwinism and neo-Darwinism, the presumed “blindness” in man’s programming,. This was the most prominent of many deceits. (What bothered the Catholics most, me included, was the educators’ flagrant and repeated distortion of the Pope’s thoughts on the subject). The six Kansas university presidents who submitted their own protest argued preposterously that, if encoded into standards. the very idea that science and religion were not compatible would “set Kansas back a century.”

To be fair, only one or two people testified that a that a teacher had actually ridiculed students about their belief in a creator. Rather, the weight of the testimony suggested that the educators indulge their students’ belief in God the way mom and pop indulge their little ones’ belief in Santa.

In Topeka, the parents weren’t about to be humored. The kind of people who would gladly give up a day of work for two minutes before a state board come prepared. Many seemed well schooled in the sophisticated arguments raised against evolution by what’s called the "intelligent design" (ID) movement. They posed question after question that the educators could not or would not answer. The only rationale offered for this silence was one prof’s remark that "intelligent design theory has roots in Christian creationism" and is thus beneath an educator’s dignity.

For sure, most proponents of intelligent design do believe strongly in the Judaeo-Christian God of western heritage. Others, however, follow no particular faith at all, political or religious. Well represented in Topeka was still another faction, often called young-earth creationists, who believe in the world’s origin as described in Genesis.

Inevitably, when the champions of evolution pick a fight with anti-Darwinians, they steer clear of the ID heavyweights in the academic community and lay into the young-earthers, already reeling from years of rabbit punches by their opponents starting with Clarence Darrow's savaging of creationist William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes trial. In the liberal hierarchy of demonization, the young earthers rank high and are allowed to stand in the popular imagination for all who might challenge Darwinism.

At Topeka, as happens often, Darwinian propagandists accused the entire ID movement of rejecting “evolution,” another little bit of deceit. ID partisans across the board acknowledge evolution. Some believe that all living thing share a common descent, guided, of course, by a higher intelligence. And all believe in micro-evolution: that is, evolution within a species, guided or otherwise. Certainly, everyone in Kansas knows that cattle can be bred to become fatter. But with the possible exception of some science educators, no one in Kansas believes that cattle can be bred to become elephants. (Headline from Topeka Capital-Journal on morning of hearing: "Driver injured, 10 cows killed in crash.")

What the ID movement challenges is Darwinian mechanics, random variation and natural selection. As Darwin saw it, nature preserved genetic variations that proved beneficial to the species. Over time, these adaptations would culminate in significant changes, even new species. An elegant idea in 1859, but in 1999 it’s still just an idea. Neo-Darwinians have as much trouble explaining how complex organisms like a wing or an eye could be the result of unguided, incremental change as Darwin did. Without all parts in perfect synchronicity, a wing or eye would be useless.

Darwin could only hope that the fossil record would one day prove him right. It hasn’t. If anything, it has done the opposite. No evidence has surfaced of an unsupervised step by step transition from one species to the next. Nor has anyone offered a satisfactory explanation for the rash of new animal life that abruptly and inexplicably entered the fossil record during the so-called Cambrian explosion.

In Topeka, ordinary citizens skillfully waged these arguments in the face of a hostile scientific community. One young guy in work clothes apologized that the other speakers had “perty near played out all my thoughts” and then proceeded to make an impressive case for honoring the scientic process.

Science, says board member Steve Abrams, is something that is “observable, measurable, repeatable, and falsifiable.” Darwinian macro-evolution appears to Abrams, a veterenarian, to be none of the above. It sustains itself now on the belligerent myopia of academics who proclaim, as one did at the hearing, that evolution is as "valid as the theories explaining gravity."

It ain’t.

Although the educators in Topeka would not admit it, gravity has a lot more staying power than Darwinism. More and more scientists, particularly in the fields of physics and astronomy, have come to accept the possibility of design in the universe. The “big bang” may unnerve the young earthers, but it has created more than a few theists in the science community.

Four decades of modern research into the cell have led biochemists either to a similar conclusion or to stubborn silence. Those who dare to question accepted theory are finding, as respected biochemist Michael Behe notes in Darwin’s Black Box, that “Darwinism is an inadequate explanation for understanding the origin of complex biochemical systems.”

ID proponents argue that not only do random variation and natural selection fail to account for systems as “irreducibly complex” as, say, a human eye, they fail to account for the development of a single cell within that eye. Behe’s studies have led him to the conclusion that “Life on earth at its most fundamental level, in its most critical components, is the product of intelligent activity.”

Adds Behe, “The result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science.”

One would think that an achievement of this magnitude would be worth teaching, at least worth exploring and debating. As one woman at the hearing argued, "The freedom to look at the truth new everyday is one of the precious freedoms we have in this country." Another asked that the students be allowed the same debate that the board was enjoying.

The board agreed. The science educators did not. John Staver, co-chair of the writing committee called the board’s decision “a travesty to science education.” Kansas, he added, “just embarrassed itself on the national stage.”

As to the ACLU, they are apparently threatening to do what they have done now for 75 years, take democracy to court.

Deja vu all over again.