Evolution -- The Darwin and Intelligent Design Wars

Proponents of intelligent design believe that evolution, Darwinism, is incomplete. You're not intelligent enough to dismiss the idea that there might be an intelligent design in the creation of the world. The latest front line in America's culture war between scientific theory and religious belief. And there's controversy tonight over the origin of life and how to teach it in school. A decision by officials in Kansas could have repercussions across the country. This is my mother. Her name is Muffy. Muffy Moose. A few years ago, she began sending me articles from the Kansas City Star. Of course, mothers like to do that with their sons, but these articles were about one issue, the controversy over the teaching of evolution in Kansas. That was in 1999, when the creationists tried to take over the Kansas school board. They lost that cause, so Muffy Moose quit sending me the Kansas City Star articles until 2004 when she started clipping articles and sending them to me again. But this time it was about a different story. It was no longer about religion. Now it was about trying to introduce into public schools a supposedly new science called intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. And accompanying all the media attention was the usual comic theatrics that have always been a part of the evolution debate. okay what's the funniest thing you've seen so far in this whole issue oh dear i don't want to get into names and personalities but there is a lady that said evolution was all a fairy tale you've called evolution a fairy tale did i i think so i think you wrote that somewhere i read it the tradition reaches all the way back to 1860 when the man known as charles darwin's bulldog thomas henry huxley debated creationist bishop soapy sam wilberforce in front of the oxford debating society and basically made a dodo out of him. Six decades later, the next great anti-evolutionist, William Jennings Bryan, met the same fate when Clarence Darrow made a dodo out of him at the Scopes Monkey Trial. A pattern seemed to be emerging. Attack evolution and go down in history as a dodo. But the story's not that simple, because how is it today, 150 years after Darwin published The Origin of Species, we've ended up with this? I don't believe that we actually descended from apes. I do not believe that in any way, shape, or form we descended from apes. I didn't believe that until I met my uncle who had more back hair than I have facial hair. So yeah, I kind of believe that now. There's no religion in school anymore. So the only one they can teach is the, what do you call it, the new intelligent design. In fact, a recent Gallup poll shown here in this pie chart asked Americans whether they think Darwin's theory is supported by the evidence, just one of many theories, or dunno. Which, by the way, totals to only 99%, showing that 1% of Americans know how to have their opinions erased from a poll. But if you're like me and have always accepted evolution as a simple and obvious fact, then it appears something has gone seriously wrong in the communication of evolution to the public. So maybe there's something more to this story than just a couple of dodos. Maybe we're talking about an entire flock of dodo's. What is intelligent design? Intelligent design is just the idea that you can detect the effects of intelligent activity in nature. Dr. Michael Behe is a biochemist at Lehigh University and the author of the 1995 Foundation book on intelligent design, Darwin's Black Box. Today he's considered by most to be the top scientific authority on intelligent design. And a better way, I think, is to illustrate it with an example. And the classic example is Mount Rushmore. If you're walking by the Rocky Mountains and somebody asked you how they got there, you'd probably just say plate tectonics or erosion or some such thing. But if you walked by Mount Rushmore and somebody asked you how that got there, you'd immediately say, well, somebody carved that. You can, by the physical features of the mountain, you can detect the effects of intelligent activity. Intelligent design is the idea these days that we can detect the effects of intelligence in life. In effect, we see Mount Rushmore's in the cell. So next year is going to make 10 years since the book came out. Have you thought about doing a 10-year update? Yeah, as a matter of fact, just a couple weeks ago, my editor said that he wanted to issue a 10th anniversary edition, so I'm going to write an afterword for that. Do you get any sense how many copies it sold? It's sold, I think, somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000, which is pretty good for a science book. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And this is me. I used to be an evolutionary ecologist. I spent 15 years studying coral reefs around the world before becoming a filmmaker. When I made the transition in the mid-'90s, I thought evolution was still pretty much of a fact. But that was back before the red, white, and blue had split itself into just the red and the blue. So as those articles from my mother accumulated, I began to wonder if something had changed since I left the world of science a decade earlier. I started calling old evolutionist friends in Kansas, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, California, Washington, and what I heard was that this topic of intelligent design was cropping up on virtually every college campus. To gain some insight into this movement, we sent our producer, Ty Carlisle, to an intelligent design conference deep in the backwoods of Greenville, South Carolina. It's going to be a bunch of toothless hillbillies with pitchforks coming after us, Joe. They wear your Nikes. But what Ty encountered the next day was pretty much the opposite of the Bible thumpers and goobers that once characterized the creationism movement. These people were well-dressed, well-groomed, well-behaved, and they spent a lot of time listening to the tedious lectures from chemists talking about the complexity of life and how there must be a designer behind it all. So where exactly did this whole idea of intelligent design come from in the first place? The subject goes back to over 200 years ago to early thinkers like British theologian William Paley who felt organisms are so perfect in their structure that there must be some sort of designer behind their creation. The subject of intelligent design has evoked a great deal of ridicule from cartoonists to scholars. In this film, I'm not going to engage in that. However, when you start asking questions about perfect design, the answers can get a little ridiculous. Is the human heart perfectly designed? It isn't you looking at the best example. I have suffered a problem with my heart ten years ago and it needed eight bypasses in one surgery. Our circulation around the heart is so poor that if anything goes wrong you get into trouble right away and the reason is that our heart comes from the reptilian heart which in turn came from the fish heart and so we are stuck with that one artery the coronary artery and there is really no what we call collateral circulation that means that there would be alternative branches we don't have that and therefore again this heart is really designed for the cardiologist and they're very good at fixing things and what about non-humans are they perfectly designed I put the question to dr. Jim Hankin of Harvard University who chose the example of the digestive tract of plant-eating mammals to illustrate overall cows are really good at processing their food they have this unusual system where they first they swallow the food process it regurgitate it's a little screwy. I wouldn't design it that way if I could, but that's the way they have it. Horses have a fermentation chamber, but in horses, the fermentation chamber is not up at the, it's not in the foregut up at the mouth end. It's so-called hindgut fermentation. There's a problem with that because by the time the food gets to the fermentation chamber, it's already passed by the small intestine, which is the main site of absorption. But the award though for unintelligent design i think you'd have to give to rabbits rabbits have a truly what we from a human vantage point a truly disgusting design of their gut same thing they eat plant matter they chew it up as much as they can in their in their mouth pass the food down past the stomach past the small intestine past the large intestine into the cecum there's a chamber way way in the back that's their fermentation chamber problem is this has now passed the absorptive site in the in the gut well they then excrete through the anus these little pellets they're called cicatrophs because they're produced in the cecum it's not feces they're but they're they excrete them they turn around eat them process them again and pass them now by the small intestine where the nutrients are assimilated into the bloodstream. Where is the intelligent design in that? Here it is actually. Okay. Health of your rabbit. If you observe your pet rabbit at night you might be surprised to see it eating its poo. This is normal. It really says that I swear to god. This is my homeboy Eric and we're here at his house and we're going to check out his rabbit. Supposedly they are evolved from a predator which didn't eat grass. We're just going to set up this night vision equipment and watch it from the sanctity of your living room. Dude, he's totally doing it. He's chewing right now, too. You can see him chewing right after it happened, dude. It was there, and it's not there anymore. He totally went... That's it, man. That's totally... That was the one. That was the obvious one. It was there, and then we saw it go. So this is where I say intelligent design. I say, what intelligent design? I defy you to first show me, document for me, how all of this supposed great intelligence... Of course, there are... Everybody talks about the eye, the eye is beautifully designed. It really is remarkable how it does what it does. And there are other instances like this, things that are really wonderfully built to do what they do. I don't dispute any of that. But as I say, for every one of those, I can cite you ten others of unintelligent design. In the two centuries that followed William Paley, ideas of design were largely drowned out by the loud voice of creationism, which got its day in court in 1925 with the Scopes Monkey Trial. Quiet, children. It's not King Kong. It's Mr. Ape, symbol of the monkey trial that rocked the hot and dusty town of Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 and set the nation on its ear. Everybody got into the act as a local biology teacher was hauled into court for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution that man had descended from monkey. The defendant's name was John Scopes. To Dayton to conduct the prosecution came he of the silver tongue, William Jennings Bryan, three times a presidential candidate. Opposing Bryan before the odd local gentry was America's most dazzling criminal lawyer, Clarence Darrow. Scopes was found guilty, but Bryan, though victorious, was shattered by Darrow's relentless cross-examination. From Tennessee to Mississippi to Louisiana to Arkansas, it keeps coming up, but each time gets knocked back by the courts, always deciding that teaching creationism violates the separation of church and state. The most recent challenge was in 1999 with the Kansas School Board, and that failed as well. But just as the anti-evolution skies seemed darkest, William Paley's old ideas of design and nature suddenly resurfaced in the late 20th century. And this time they have a whole new look and feel. And the driving forces think that the religion issue is no longer a problem because... No, intelligent design isn't a religion. It doesn't depend on any religious presuppositions any more than your ability to determine that Mount Rushmore was designed is a religious conclusion, or detecting radio messages from outer space, say, from some space alien, that wouldn't be a religion either. It's a conclusion based on the physical evidence. Is evolution a religion? Well, I don't think anybody who is a scientist would say that evolution is a religion, although there are others who might say so, who are not scientists. I think of science as something that is continually changing, whereas religion is something that is fixed in its ideas. We can divide evolution into two really big questions that people are interested in. One is, how did life originate on Earth? And the second, then, is, from that time, how did life evolve and change through time over the several billion years? The central idea of Darwin's theory of evolution is the mechanism of change through natural selection, which means, in essence, that when the environment changes, a species must change along with it in order to survive. species that fail to change will go extinct the dodo was actually extinct less than a hundred years after it was discovered by humans the main reason it went extinct at first it was thought because they ate them because they did actually eat them although apparently they didn't taste very nice but obviously when human beings come to islands they often bring rats and dogs and cats and so basically those animals we think spread had a huge population explosion all through the island and that they probably were eating the dodo eggs because they nested on the ground. Oops! The crowning achievement of evolution is the end result of adaptation. Species which are selected by nature end up adapting to their environment. We can see evidence of this in the skulls of animals just by looking at their teeth. Here's the skull of a panda bear which has large flattened molars to grind up the bamboo on which it feeds. An anteater has no teeth at all. The leopard seal eats penguins and has canine teeth that are as large as your thumb. Its skull is as big as an Alaskan grizzly bear's. And look at the molars on this skull, how frilly and ornate they are. This is a crab eater seal which catches crabs and shrimp and uses its molars as a sieve to remove the seawater before swallowing. We can see the evidence of adaptation and even the remnants of structures which are no longer needed. Just look at this sperm whale skeleton. of course don't have legs, but they do still have two pelvic bones left over from their legged ancestors. The evidence of evolution is all around us. So how do intelligent designers deal with the overwhelming amount of evidence for evolution? The answer is they accept most of it. You agree that the earth is 4.6 billion years old, roughly something in that neighborhood. You agree that species have changed over time, macroevolution has taken place, and you agree that microevolution occurs all the time, changes in gene frequency. In fact, most intelligent designers are even okay with the idea that we share over 90% of our DNA in common with chimpanzees. They aren't holding on to the extremely non-scientific ideas of creationists. But they just don't think that evolution alone can account for all the complexity and diversity that we see in life. The big stumbling block, they feel, is something Dr. Behe first termed irreducible complexity. The idea that some structures and organisms that there's no way evolution alone could have created them. There had to be something else at work. There had to be an intelligent designer guiding it all. Irreducible complexity is a phrase that means that some machines or some systems can't be approached gradually, or at least it's not obvious how they could be approached gradually, because they need a number of parts to work. And that's important because Darwin always insisted always insisted in The Origin of Species that evolution, as he saw it, had to work in tiny steps over a long time. My example illustration of it is a mouse trap. A mouse trap's got a number of parts. It's got a wooden platform and a spring and another metal part called the hammer, which the spring pushes over to squash the mouse. And there's a little bar that stabilizes the hammer in position until the mouse comes along. And if you take away any of those parts, the mousetrap is broken. It doesn't work. So it's hard to see how you would get to that by a Darwinian evolutionary process. What would you start with? Would you start with, say, the platform and hope to catch mice inefficiently and trip them or something like that? No, it doesn't work. These intelligent design guys have hit on a few interesting issues. One of them is, How do you get a complicated structure that functions, you know, really, and they point to things like the flagellum in a bacteria, and how there's all these different proteins that have to do just the right thing in order for this thing to work. And that if you just pull out one of those proteins, the whole thing collapses. How do you evolve a structure like that? And I think that's a really good question, actually. And it's a question that evolutionary biologists can answer, I mean, basically, I mean, there are really good answers to those kinds of things, but we haven't done a good job of of explaining ourselves about that. So here's the basic situation. One side, the evolutionists, say there's only one thing to teach in biology class, which is evolution. It's science and involves only natural explanations of how species originated and have changed over time. The other side says there's not just one explanation, that evolution has flaws and that there are many other equally viable explanations, all of which adds up to what they feel is a controversy, and thus the message they promote is to teach the controversy. As the lead scientific spokesman for the intelligent design movement, Dr. Behe has played a major role in the success ideas had with the media. But it's hard to say these days who is his evolution counterpart. I knew that the world of evolution had lost its greatest voice in 2002 with the death of Dr. Stephen Jay Gould. That had affected me because I was a graduate student in evolutionary ecology in the early 1980s at Harvard University when he was at his prime. He had been my hero when I first arrived at graduate school. I attended his Tuesday paleontology lunch group, was a teaching assistant for him twice, spent as much time around him as possible, and yet was always so mesmerized by his brilliance that I could hardly speak in his presence. Seriously. He authored so many amazing books on evolution, had such a great sense of humor, and spoke so fast that I swear he's the only person I've ever known who could speak while inhaling as well as exhaling. His was a great mind, and me, by comparison, I was but a dodo. But this gave me an idea. There used to be a poker game in the anthropology department at Harvard, which I remember fondly. Occasionally, Steve Gould would drop in for a few hands. But more importantly, I heard that several of the old poker players were still living in Boston and still playing poker more than 25 years later. Yes, Senor Tomas Gibnish. Calling for Dr. Mark. You got it. What are you doing? Greetings, Dr. Steve Orzak, on Project Steve Fame. The Dirty Dealer. The Dirty Dealer. Intelligent design is mendacity. Basically, this is a movement of, by, and for lawyers. They have attempted to say, look, pattern in the natural world has to be caused by some intelligent agency. If you ask, who is that intelligent agent? I don't know. How many of them are there? I don't know. What powers does this agent have? I don't know. But what does that have to do with public education in high school? I mean, there's a lot of idiocy being taught in high school. Why do we think a list out is so especially important to fight? Because I think religious fanaticism is a really dangerous thing. I mean, we've seen it through history and over and over again, and I think this can actually cultivate that. I really think part of it is rhetorical in that we should stop talking about the theory of evolution and we should start talking about the fact of evolution, because evolution is a fact. Before you can advocate the teaching of intelligent design, you have to demonstrate that there's a need for it. This is achieved by showing that the existing theory, evolution, has problems. I grew up thinking Darwinian evolution was correct. I'm a Roman Catholic, but Catholics don't have a big problem with evolution. It was only when I was a faculty member here at Lehigh in the late 1980s that I read a book, Evolution, a Theory, and Crisis, by a guy named Michael Denton, that I even saw a scientist raise questions about Darwinian evolution and many of the questions he raised I could not answer and that startled me. At that point I began getting interested and began becoming skeptical too. Don't you think that most of the major evolutionists of the last 20 years none of them have had the feeling that evolution is a theory in crisis? Ernst Mayr didn't exactly check it in feeling like the whole field field of evolution was dissolving. Well evolution is widely, almost universally accepted among many scientists. Darwin's theory is more tentatively accepted. Wait, what's Darwin's theory? That it occurs by random, that the development of life occurs by random mutation in natural selection. The word crisis has It has been used a number of times to describe evolutionary knowledge. I think to the scientists who study evolution, they don't see it as a field in crisis at all. As a matter of fact, they see it as a field where we have a really enormous ferment. ...that is allowing us to understand things better. Well, maybe, but the truth is these days the issue looks more like a prize fight. In this corner, weighing in with 150 years of knowledge, we have the champion, evolution. In this corner, with a handful of books, a mousetrap, and Mount Rushmore, we have the Intelligent Design Movement. And, at the moment, they seem to have the upper hand. Though Dr. Behe and others are developing the theory of intelligent design, scientists alone are not enough to create a social movement. I wanted to know who was actually behind the promoting of intelligent design in our society. And I suddenly realized something. In all those articles Muffy Moose had sent, there was one name that she kept circling. John Calvert. A lawyer who had taken on intelligent design as his life's mission, traveling the country to promote and defend it. And the reason she'd circled his name was because he lives just around the corner from her. So I realized I needed to pay a little visit to my home state. Do you know whether we wanted me to have a hat or not? Uh, sure. Well, we'll see. Whatever you're comfortable with. Well, uh, if it, uh, let's see. We don't care. We're cool. We're cool. Okay. I keep reading letters to the editor. I would say of the ones that I have read, and I have read both sides. I like to read both sides because it keeps me up with what people are thinking. I'd say there's more defense of evolution, but that does not represent the general feeling of what's going on. I went to junior high, high school, and started college at the University of Kansas. So it was only logical to begin my exploration at my favorite place in the entire state, the 50-year-old bar in Lawrence, Kansas, where I wasted too many nights as a freshman, The Wheel. Joining me throughout this journey is my closest friend to the past 32 years and former fraternity pledge brother, Ed Lidecker. And to give me a general introduction to the intelligent design issue in Kansas, I asked conservative author and filmmaker Jack Cashel to meet me at The Wheel. Jack produced Triumph of Design, the first and still most authoritative video on the intelligent design movement, which he revised and updated in 2005. His most recent books include Sucker Punch, His Look at Muhammad Ali, and Hoodwinked, How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture. I read Darwin on Trial, totally changed the way I looked at the world. Now, I didn't jump overnight. I mean, I started reading more and more and more, and I, you know, it was sort of like evolutionary process i began to see that that darwinism as it's been taught is a borderline hoax but for the last century uh practicing biologists have made no advance at all in fact they've made they found hole after hole after hole after hole in evolution and evolution you don't think dna studies have revolutionized a few of the understandings dna studies cellular microbiology in general have thrown a huge fright into the darwinian establishment how do you think it's going right now in the struggle between the two sides on evolution versus intelligent design a major change took place six years ago and it started here in kansas and that is and i was there at the ground floor i saw it happen in fact i helped advise on it uh the forces of intelligent design which is a very sophisticated very science-based uh and many of these guys aren't even Christians or Jews or Muslims, many of them are agnostics, took control of the anti-Darwinist movement from the creation scientists. Before 1999, before I went to the school board hearings, I didn't know anyone thought the way I did. I thought I was alone. I never even talked about it on the radio to my friends. And then I started finding out that many of my very smart friends, you know, intellectuals, had long ago come to the same conclusions. For us in 1999, school board hearings, we're allowed to out ourselves. Ah yes, the Kansas school board, with ten elected members whose job is to determine what gets taught in Kansas schools. The board is in fact a highly polarized microcosm of the United States today, with four minority members, two Democrats and two moderate Republicans, but they're simply outvoted on almost every issue from math standards to sex education to the teaching of evolution by the six-member conservative Republican majority. And since when do state school board members become national celebrities? It was pretty common all during the campaign from about June 2000 until the primary in August that I had some type of national media, national or regional media with me virtually every day. We were on CBS Morning News, Evening News, ABC, Evening News. In fact, Sue Gamble had become such a major celebrity I needed to bring in a professional to interview her, my mother, Muffy Moose. Actually, she and Sue are both realtors and have known of each other for 25 years. I just recently got disturbed about this because I'm a grandma and I'm an older grandma, and I know that you're keeping your eye on the school kids. Now tell me what's going on. Well, what's happening right now with science standards is that a group on the board, and unfortunately it's the majority of the board currently, are trying to interject concepts into the science standards that would have explanations other than natural ones. And of course, we all know that science can only investigate the natural world. It is not an honest set of standards. And that is the crux of the discussion. That is true. Because I believe they are on a set of standards. I believe that it does not deal with religion. I believe that, and I have stated repeatedly, this is what is about science from a peer-reviewed science. In Kansas, people like to refer to the two recent evolution conflicts as Evolutionary War I, the 1999-2000 attempt by creationists to change the teaching of evolution, and Evolutionary War II, the current effort to introduce the teaching of intelligent design. In both cases, the major goal has been to undermine the teaching of evolution by calling it a controversy. But, you know, school boards get split over whether or not to build a new gymnasium. Why is this any different than that? You guys, it's not the same thing at all. Jesus Christ. Crusades? Let's talk about Galileo, who was only retrospectively pardoned a few years ago. Only a few years ago was he pardoned for what? For saying hypothetically, not himself, but writing essentially a novel saying, well, what if it were to be the case that the sun did not move around the earth, but in fact it was the opposite, that the earth moved around the sun, and he was forced to recant what he knew to be true, And as a consequence of that, the science was stifled. I don't believe it. It wasn't, though. It went on. No, wait a second. It wasn't. I mean, we know the truth. I mean, it's not as though we're arguing what the truth is. Well, yes, because the Inquisition wasn't quite as assiduous subsequently. But, you know, before Galileo was called before the Inquisition and was forced to plead, basically, for his life, His buddy, Bruno, was burned at the stake for saying, oh, the universe, I think the universe is infinite. I think the real issue here is that all these matters speak to truth in government and transparency in government. And when you can compromise the truth in textbooks through quasi-governmental bodies like the school board, or when you can quash government reports, it all leads to the same place. It leads to a breakdown in our democracy. And I think that's the crux of this issue. The intelligent design side basically once says to the science establishment and to the educational establishment, just allow us to teach the controversy. Allow us to teach Darwin honestly. Allow us to teach his flaws as well as his virtues. The science establishment, the educational establishment, which is backed largely by suburbanites who are embarrassed that Kansas is in the news, do not want the controversy taught. But they do not want Darwin challenged, and when it is challenged, they'll do whatever they have to do to make sure the challenge is rejected and suppressed. People say today our society is highly polarized. Does this end up being a microcosm of that? I think it reflects the divisions that Americans experience, and if the presidential elections are any indication of the last two, we've certainly been very closely divided. And in Kansas, I think that it particularly reflects that, although Kansas is a red state. The school board held hearings about creationism in 1999, but in 2005, the evolutionists decided they'd had enough. So they boycotted the hearings, sending only a single attorney as their representative against 25 experts on intelligent design. When the scientists on the pro-evolution side didn't show up, it's just one more manifestation of their lack of humility. I was in Kansas for the hearings in 1999, and I saw them when they did show up. And they were among the most obnoxious people I've ever seen make public presentations. They were vying with each other to see who could humiliate the school board most. They were vying with each other to see who could insult the taxpayers most. They were vying with each other to see who could denigrate the other side most viciously. They were a mess. Public relations-wise, they were a disaster. They were just as well to stay home. One of the newest and most conservative members of the board is Kathy Martin. Ms. Martin is a teacher who ran for the board last November, and she brings a very socially conservative, religiously conservative, and fundamentalist view to the board also. To speak with her, we had to drive out to the center of Kansas on Highway 70, which goes so straight our driver was actually able to catch up on his sleep. She lives with her husband Mac Martin on their 400 acre wheat farm. He's a fourth generation Kansas farmer. She's a retired elementary school teacher. So you began on the board in January. Has it been exciting? It has and I've learned a whole lot. I've had to do a lot of reading, a lot of working with email and other, you know, answering people, visiting on the phone, visiting with reporters, which was all kind of new to me. I've learned a little bit. Kathy wound up making the news when she tried to support the intelligent design scientists who had failed to read the material for the hearings. The lawyer for the majority reporter, evolution side, was really being rude I felt to the expert scientists, many of them with two and three Ph.D.s. He was saying things like, you mean you came all the way out here to Kansas to testify about our children and you didn't even bother to read the standards? So finally at one point I said, don't worry about that because I haven't even read, I haven't read them myself or something like that, but I was talking about draft two, draft one I've read, draft two had just come out, you know, so it was like draft two had what, 20, 15 changes, you know, and it's like a two or three hundred page document. What made you want to become a member of the school board? I'm not sure. I was thinking about retiring anyway and just interesting something to do, another way to keep your mind sharp. And I was asked to run by a group of Republicans that wanted someone to challenge this man because he was considered a moderate. And they had fundraising organizations then for you, the Kansas Republicans? Yeah, the Republican Party itself has an organization, yeah. Is it the Kansas Republican Association? Is that one of them? It's the Kansas Republican Assembly. Assembly, yeah. They're a conservative group. Yeah, that would be one of the ones that backed me. The Kansas Republican Assembly represents the far right wing of the Kansas Republican Party. On their website, they call themselves the conscience of the Republican Party. They have a quote from Thomas Jefferson, and they endorse hope for homosexuals. Yeah, I'm a Christian. I'm not going to deny that. I mean, I certainly am. I believe that God designed each one of us for something special, for a purpose. And so you feel like the extrapolation of that is that he probably designed all the other creatures as well. I certainly do. And I think nature leads us to God, if you let it, if you're not close-minded about it. Do you believe George Washington was the first president in the United States? I think so, sure. And what's that belief based on? Evidence in history books, writings, historical writings. Is that different from the evidence of the fossils that we see, where we can see transitional stages and progressions? But we're not seeing transitional stages, not enough. There's not enough transitional stages yet. They haven't found them, at least that's the information I've received. This is a big controversy, because some people think the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, contrary to all the physical and geological evidence. And because a small number of people who, frankly, are yahoos, who know nothing, are ignoramuses, they really do not understand modern science. Because of that, public education is interfered with. Now, you know, one should never mock people's religious beliefs, and I certainly don't believe in doing that. I think that it's not my position, it's not my position to persuade people you shouldn't believe in God or you should believe in God. But when they come into the scientific arena, and they start saying things that are manifestly wrong, that are manifestly ignorant, I think people have to stand up and say, you know, you're an idiot. I mean, I could give you lots of spiritual ideas of where we came from and why the monkeys walk like us and all those good things, but ah, come on. Everybody's got their own idea when it comes to religion, and that's great. That's the way it ought to be. How does that pattern, looking back through the fossils, differ anything from the historical record of George Washington being our president? Because there are people actually alive that saw George Washington being the president. Nobody was actually alive that saw a lungfish crawl out of the water. Oh, okie dokie. I mean, if you love evolution, stay in California. That's what I told somebody. He said, oh, I just can't, we just won't come to Kansas anymore. I said, well, fine, don't come. You'll miss beautiful states. They were talking about Ohio or something. After our discussion, I pulled out my evolutionist hat to pose for a picture with Kathy. But when we went into the house for brownies and lemonade, she couldn't take it anymore and made me switch to one of Mac's Kansas hats. We're open to all views. That's the neat part about it. The neat part about this country is you can agree to disagree or do what we want to and then work towards what we want to do. You're right. Hopefully it'll turn out for the best for everybody. So what can you say about good people like this? Is it really worth hating them over something so esoteric as evolution? Casey Jones, he was a mighty man. And now he's resting in the promised land. The only kind of music he could understand Was a big eight-wheeler under his command He made a freight train boogie all the time He made a freight train boogie at a... There was one more board member that I simply had to meet, Connie Morris. If there's a media darling on the Kansas School Board, it's definitely Connie, since she provides an endless string of outlandish proclamations on evolution. Connie was elected two years ago from western Kansas, and she's brought rural, traditional, religiously conservative views. Probably three-quarters of our school districts in the state are facing rather severe declining enrollment situations which means that they're having to close schools and lay off teachers. People are looking for some kind of anchor and I think Mrs. Morris represents a lot of that frustration and anxiety about decline and holding on to some absolutes and for her the absolute really reflects her religious views. She sees herself as She wrote an autobiography, and it gets at this notion of vulnerability and how her salvation lay in Christianity and in a fundamentalist religion. How are you doing? Hi, I'm Connie Morris. Nice to meet you. We're doing a documentary film on the evolution of design this year. Are you? Any chance you'd be up for talking to us? No, I'm just tired of it. I find it boring at this point. I've said what I have to say. I don't know how many other ways to say it. I'm just out of ideas. Worn out? Worn out. I have no ideas. We saw Connie a month later, and this time the media had her cornered, but she hadn't changed her tune. It just goes on and on and on. It's really quite boring. But there's something important to note here. Connie has charisma. She's funny, she's fun, she's likable, and there's no anger coming out of her. This was my first major note in looking at how these two sides are communicating this issue. You've called evolution a fairy tale. Did I? I think so. I think you wrote that somewhere. I read it. Do you still believe that? Do you believe that? To get the perspective of evolutionists on John Calvert, I stopped to see an old friend at KU, Dr. Daphne Fountain. She brought with her Dr. Steve Case, who plays perhaps the most central role in the whole conflict. The ten-member school board approves the standards for teaching throughout the state. But someone has to write these standards. That job falls to the writing committee, which is made up of educators throughout the state and includes several intelligent design supporters. The chair of the writing committee is Dr. Case. So I was actually on the committee in 1998 when the standards were adopted by our state board in 1999 and the first controversy. Well, some of us here in Kansas refer to the time around 1999 as Evolution Wars 1, EW1, when there was an effort by the State Board of Education to exclude teaching evolution from the standards. The public hearings last all around were a circus. There were people booing and catcalling from the audience, and it was an unpleasant, potentially dangerous zoo. The very first speaker at the first public hearing was a fire and brimstone preacher who was sending the entire committee to hell for believing in evolution. This time around, they just want to open the doorway a little bit, and they're doing that with intelligent design theory and by changing the nature of science. They're trying to include in the nature of science supernatural causation, or God did it in the case of intelligent design. The theology that these guys are promoting is a really destructive theology. It's a God-of-the-gaps theology. God lives in the gaps of our understanding. And irreducible complexity is a beautiful example of that. They say that the universe is so complex that we cannot understand it. So the question a kid is going to ask is, well, why would we do science? If we're not going to get it anyway, what a waste of time. But, you know, the thing is for a child then to adopt that theology, That means the more you learn, the smaller God gets because he's in where we don't understand. Well, that means we're setting kids up to be anti-intellectual or have a crisis of faith where they reject their faith. Neither one of those things should be going on in a public school. That's not what we do. Who are the major spokespersons within the state for intelligent science? John Calvert and Bill Harris. And how long have you known of them? They showed up in EW1 at the very end. I met John Calvert at the 1999 Kansas School Board hearings. I met Bill Harris there, too. They met each other there. And it was kind of a fateful meeting because Calvert went on. He was a high-powered corporate attorney at a major Kansas City law firm, phased out his practice, and now has taken on the work of the Intelligent Design Network full time. And he's done very good work. He's probably now the best schooled attorney in America on constitutional issues, and I know he's been to Georgia, he's been to Ohio, he's been to New Mexico, Minnesota, helping out there as needed. John will argue now that the Ohio Science Academy adopted a definition of science that is open to intelligent design. Well, what John doesn't tell you is he went to Ohio, wrote that definition, and helped get it adopted in a political process, and now he's using that as scientific credibility for this change in the nature of science. I like John Calvert. He's a charming kind of guy. Not that we know each other at all well. I think he is very quixotic. Literally, he's the man of La Mancha, where he has these grandiose ideas, and he brings in these forlorn people to help him, these scientists. So the time had come to meet the two main spokesmen for the intelligent design movement in Kansas, starting with cardiologist Dr. William Harris at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. I'd hoped to debate evolution with him, but what I found was that he just doesn't have the background for it. Undergrad was in chemistry, so there's not a lot of evolution in that. Did you ever study embryology much? Not much. I mean, I know you start with two-cell or one-cell, and if you bang it here, it goes that way. But again, that's, you know. Have you ever tried speaking at a scientific meeting on the subject of intelligent design? I don't even know where you'd do that. Calvert is much more the strategist than I am. I mean, I've got a day job and he doesn't. I'm thinking about this and he, you know, he wants to tackle the religious thing head on. Just looking at the photo on his website, I felt I already knew the man. He looked just like all the obnoxious, grouchy old fathers of all my friends growing up at Lake Quivira. I used to caddy for those guys, and some of them still owe me money. So I was totally disoriented when I finally met him I finally met him and found myself talking to someone completely different from his photo, who turned out to be a really nice guy. I was curious how John became an advocate for intelligent design. But I'm too much of an independent thinker to survive in the Army. And so I spent my two years in the Army. What was fascinating, when I was in Germany, I was an air observer in a battalion adjutant. I had to handle non-judicial punishment, and so I got involved in some legal proceedings, and I found out that I had an aptitude for it. Were you kind of devoutly religious through all those years? No. I was an agnostic until I was 37. What changed? What brought you around? Human reason did not solve all the problems. yeah I went through a divorce and it had a major impact on you know I changed my whole worldview and with this I actually found myself connecting with Mr. Calvert when I was 33 I too underwent a divorce that also left me adrift in the world and sometimes I think that in dealing with it I could very well have also turned to religion but instead I kind of headed a different direction so all of a sudden you know your life is moving in a particular direction and then zap it's different and so I was looking for answers to deeper questions. I was looking for a singles group and I went to a Jewish community center because that's where I was taking scuba diving lessons so I called them up and I said do you guys know of any singles group and they said no we don't have any but there's by the way there's this church down the road that's got a singles group and so I went to that church and it was the first time in I don't know 18 years I'd been in church when did you first start getting interested in creationism it was in the late 70s or early 80s i read an article about dna in a popular popular magazine and i was in the army and i studied the morse code i know how the morse code works and i said the dna works the genetic code works just like the morse code this was new for me and i and i said this this is designed this is really incredible. This is really sophisticated. What made you say that? Because it looked designed. And this is Mr. Calvert's homegrown approach to intelligent design that is firmly grounded in his Midwestern common sense. In fact, he and Harris draw the comparison of the search for intelligent design to other professions in which people search for evidence of a human hand at work, such as archaeology or forensic science, which seems to make great intuitive sense, but there's a big difference with what exists for nature. With forensics, we have data from previous crimes committed by humans. We know what to look for. But with life, we have no previous data. We've never discovered life before and been able to show it was designed. There's no database with which to create a hypothesis. So forgive me if I'm just a dodo in the end, but when it comes to intelligent design, I just don't understand how you can scientifically detect it. So our three-hour discussion wound through a wide variety of subjects, but in the end, it wasn't much more of an evolution debate than my meeting with Harris. And in the case of Calvert, I have some specific problems with his sources of information. Have you read Icons of Evolution? Well, yes. Not only have I read Icons of Evolution, but Dr. Behe chooses it as one of his top three intelligent design books. Obviously, yours is one. What other two or three would you pick? Philip Johnson's Darwin on Trial, Bill Dembski's The Intelligent Design Revolution. Another one is Icons of Evolution by a man named Jonathan Wells. The subtitle of Wells' book is why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong. Not some or little, but much of what we teach. That's a hefty accusation. The idea that these are some sort of pillars supporting this kind of wobbly structure up top is, you know, a hallucination on Wells' part. Wells chooses 11 standard examples used in the teaching of evolution, what he calls the icons of evolution. We don't have time to go through all his examples, but if even one of them is wrong, then we have to wonder about his whole book. I choose the one that hurts my ears. I was trained as an embryologist, so his citing the case of Heckel's embryos in teaching caused me to say, what? Let's listen to the accusations from the author himself. When I studied biology as an undergraduate, my textbook had a series of pictures, now famous pictures, showing a line of vertebrate embryos, embryos of animals with backbones, and they all look very similar. And the idea behind the picture is that these similar embryos, as they develop, become frogs, fish, salamanders, humans, and so on. And those early similarities then are taken to be evidence for our common ancestry with the fish. The problem is, as a Berkeley graduate student, I studied embryos, and I discovered that embryos don't look anything like that at all, in many cases. It turns out that the drawings were faked, and this was actually known since the 1860s. Well, lo and behold, they don't look nearly as similar to one another as Heckel claimed or represented them in the illustrations. Many of his drawings were not accurate. So basically, we published a report that showed that, in fact, Heckel's drawings are inaccurate. it. So Wells is right. Heckel did commit scientific fraud. Look at how similar his drawings are for early stage embryos of everything from fish to birds to humans compared to actual photos made a decade ago by Richardson, Hankin, and others. But there's a second part to his book, which is the accusation that Heckel's drawings continue to be used in textbooks. What Heckel did with his drawings is that he ignored this huge difference at the top, and then he misdraws them so that they really do look... But he's 120 years ago, it's so far in the past, it's not, there's no relevance to what's taught today in embryology courses. Well, and the biology textbooks, that's what you find. No, you don't find, there's no trace of, other than a mention that Haeckel once upon a time came up with this fixed idea of ontogeny, recapitulating, phylogeny. Well, that's what Wells' work was, was to review biology textbooks. Right, right. And he found repeated use of these images. I notice you've got an intro biotech there. I'm sure we could pull it out and look at what they've got for Heckel's Law. I don't think, I mean, Jonathan is, I know Jonathan, and I've, you know, I've looked at the textbooks myself. I haven't, I can't say that I've done an analysis for Heckel's embryos. I mean, if you want to. let's take a look at that textbook right there when we look up if they've got heckle in here and this will be interesting is that a college book or is that yes this is a well college and high school i think uh and it's a question of how they even spell heckle um you see the blue one oh that blue one yeah they they don't even mention that one here look under embryo Not even mentioned in this text so far in the past. Biogenesis, but I wouldn't even have it. Do you think that embryology classes are making any mistakes in misusing Haeckel's embryos in their teaching? Oh, certainly not. I think most embryologists that I know, and I know hundreds of them, I go to conferences in embryology, they always present things in a hard historical context. Even before this recent controversy, you'd see Haeckel's embryos as an example of kind of a historical, It would be in the introductory section of the book or when they're talking about the history of evolutionary biology Nobody was teaching from these things anymore. Oh, no, wait a second. Here we go in this book Ah, there's an older book here. We have a book that does mention it and Let's see. This is from what year? This is from 1914 the icons of evolution book strikes me is really just a one big long tabloid style article It's a very cleverly written National Enquirer piece on evolution and why it has to be so wrong. And just like we all like to read the National Enquirer and other tabloids, this makes for interesting reading too. So Mr. Calvert didn't make an intelligent designer out of me, but I did enjoy our discussion, in part because I saw in him elements of both of my parents who were also spiritual, each in their own unique way. My father solidified his religious convictions at West Point, where he graduated as part of what U.S. News and World Report called the class of heroes in 1939 he shipped out to the philippines and was stationed on corregidor island serving under the command of general douglas macarthur and included in macarthur's staff was my grandfather richard jacqueline marshall cousin of george c marshall general marshall had a daughter named muffie who would later become known as muffie moose my parents fell in love on the eve of world war ii but as the japanese approached my mother was sent back to the u.s my father was captured survived the batan death march and spent the rest of the the war in Japanese prison camp, while Muffy Moose became a model and an all-around party girl in Chicago. But he survived prison camp, they reunited after the war, and so he wound up with an understandable lifelong devotion to his religion. My mother developed her own brand of spiritual exploration that began to jump the track in the 60s with her interest in the sleeping prophet, Edgar Cayce. She used to make us eat almonds because Edgar Cayce dreamed they prevent cancer. Then Eric Von Daniken in the 70s, space aliens in the 80s and by the 90s she was certain she was either a gypsy or a witch. And today? Boy, I'm a spiritualist. I believe in all of it. I'm asking you, when did you last get an NSF grant? I get it on any experience. Alright. Well, I'm telling you today, right now, right now, excuse me for asking for the floor, but if you have an NSF grant today that bears on evolutionary biology you were told you were advised are you getting them excuse me i have a floor that when you get the money you were told by your program director when you do your plain english summary yeah that you do not mention evolution you talk about relationships yes several times and it happens to all of us it doesn't happen it doesn't happen i'm not going to reveal his name because he could get into trouble. Well, I know who he is. Is there a reason? But, no, it's serious. I can tell you. And I can tell you, I can tell you that there is a, no, I swear, I swear on the bones of Charles Darwin, it's true. But you're getting the money. Don't say that, man. But, Steve, you're being stupid. If Rick Santorum, pardon me, I'm speaking, don't speak over me, if, I'm sorry, if Rick If Rick Santorum were to get the word that it was evolution, he would work to have that grant unfunded. When ODB died and the Wu-Tang Clan went down, that was a sad day for me. So as I left Kansas, there was one clear pattern that emerged, and it made me think of news pundits talking about a popular question in the last election. Ah, yes, and there's a new buzz along the campaign runway. Which guy would you most like to, quote, have a beer with? I feel the same way about these people enmeshed in the evolution versus intelligent design debate. Who would you rather play poker with, history professor Bill Wagnon, writing committee chair Steve Case, museum curator Daphne Fountain, or businessman John L. Birch? Or the sweet Kathy Martin, the jovial Jack Cashel, the friendly John Calvert, and the sexy Connie Morris? Deal me in. So while the storm of revolution in Kansas continues, it turns out it's really only a small part of the larger national story. This is one of the unfortunate things is that the conservatives are allowing themselves to be used by a group of activists out on the West Coast, the Discovery Institute people that are funded by folks like the Unification Church, Reverend Moon. some wirehousers, for instance, that are underwriting it, it's well, it's well healed. This was the first that I had heard of the Discovery Institute, and I suddenly realized that where John Calvert was but a small fish running his intelligent design network out of his house with a few thousand dollars, the Discovery Institute is truly the big fish in this picture, with an annual budget of around five million dollars. They're based in Seattle, and though they state clearly on their website that they're not advocating a religion-based government. According to the New York Times, their funding comes from 22 right-wing foundations, at least two-thirds of which have explicitly religious mission statements. On their website, they say they are challenging neo-Darwinian evolution. They see the teaching of evolution as a godless materialistic source of evil in our society. In 1999, their anti-evolution manifesto, known as the Wedge Document, was leaked out and posted on the internet. In it, they verbatim say that the Discovery Institute seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. We are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. We view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree. Our strategy is intended to function as a, quote, wedge that can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. This evil tree metaphor arises from older creationist conceptions, which can be found on the internet, showing the tree that consists of such evils as drugs, alcohol, abortion, communism, and dirty books. I'm a filmmaker in Los Angeles, and I was hoping to talk to you or somebody from the Discovery Institute. So I tried hard to speak with the Discovery Institute. Over the course of six weeks, I left five phone messages and sent three emails to their communications director. I even had Dr. Behe write them a very nice email saying we had a fair and productive discussion. But they didn't answer, until finally I got John Calvert to give me the cell phone number of one of their program directors whom I caught off guard. Only then did they respond and say that they were too busy to grant me an interview. So where can we see the Discovery Institute at work? In Kansas, they helped provide funding for the outside experts to testify at the May 2005 hearings. In South Carolina, they helped organize the Intelligent Design Symposium. And in Dover, Pennsylvania, they helped light the fire that erupted into the biggest intelligent design controversy to date. Dover is a tiny community of 1,815 people and a lot of churches. But their local school board got in trouble in 2004 when they became a little more enthusiastic about intelligent design than the Discovery folks had wanted. They put together a mere two-paragraph statement about intelligent design to be read in the ninth grade biology classes. but that was enough to produce a major court case over the violation of separation of church and state. We visited with the only two pro-evolution board members, Jeff and Carol Brown, who had quit the board in protest. I asked them to read me the two-paragraph statement. Because Darwin's theory is a theory, it is still being tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations. Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view. The reference book of Pandas and People is available for students to see if they would like to explore this view in an effort to gain an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves. As is true with any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. This is the statement that had to be read or was to be read, but the teachers refused categorically to read it, and their union backed them. So they remained in the room, And our superintendent spent his day going from classroom to classroom, reading this statement, and then refusing to answer any questions from the students. There's a lot of misinformation going around. The school board is not pushing Bible and biology class. The school board is not teaching intelligent design, not mandating that we do teach intelligent design. This biology curriculum is teaching evolution and only evolution, and with a one-minute statement that there are other theories. I can't for the life of me understand why anybody would be against talking about intelligent design in biology. Actually, 11 pairs of parents disagreed with Dr. Behe and filed a lawsuit, which was quickly joined by the American Civil Liberties Union. Sensing a possible defeat in Dover, the Discovery Institute withdrew all involvement and went so far as to state on their website that they feel intelligent design is not yet ready to be taught in schools, leaving the Dover School Board on their own. The defense of the Dover School District was picked up by the conservative Thomas More Law Center of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The star expert for the defense was Dr. Behe, who spent three days testifying and along the way reiterated what he had told me about the designer. I do think the designer is God. So, of course, therefore, I think it has theological implications. It's certainly friendly to people who believe in a being that could have done such things. Well, I heard Dr. Behe, and he's one of the ones that founded the theory of intelligent design. And he did a tremendous job, tremendous job. Do I need my props? and this is Behe's presentation and he'll show you a mountain range and he'll say how did that mountain range get there and you'll say I will tell you that got there through geologic processes through rain erosion uplifting and movement of the continents and I will ask you was there a designer behind that in your opinion there could very well have been I have no way to test one way the other that's right that's exactly right here's another mountain range and when you look at that yes you can see clearly that's mount rushmore and clearly see that there was a designer there was a human designer there was a designer human designer you could put that anywhere in the world you could put that on mars and you will see there was a designer human designer human designer there was a designer it didn't get there by itself do you think some of the outside backers of intelligent design know the pain that this issue causes here no some might some i doubt care because to some people this is a power play pure and simple there are you know don't get me wrong i think at the grassroots the religious fervor is real i think the farther up the food chain you get the more suspect it becomes in december of 2005 the forces of intelligent design were dealt a stunning defeat in the Dover lawsuit. Judge John E. Jones, a Bush appointee, ruled that intelligent design is in fact repackaged creationism, and the school board's decision to introduce it into the classroom he called breathtaking inanity. So let me give you my personal take on intelligent design. It's a movement that has stalled out at the intuition stage. A great deal of very valid and important science begins as mere intuition, scientists looking at nature and having a gut instinct about how things work which they then figure out if they're right by creating hypotheses and putting them to the test. There's nothing wrong with intuition and we can see it's a major part of the process for both John Calvert who looked at DNA and intuitively knew it was designed and Dr. Behe who looks at the bacterial flagellum and intuitively knows it is designed. But this is where they've stalled out. They've been unable to advance their intuition into testable hypotheses. And so in the end, all they're left with is intuition. And the problem is there's not that much difference between that and faith. This is what the Dover judge picked up on, leaving him to conclude that intelligent design simply is not a science. And thus we can see that the intelligent designers have an idea which starts in the gut, like many great discoveries. But while scientists eventually move their ideas up to the brain for critical analysis, it appears at present that intelligent design has gotten stuck in the heart. So even if intelligent design is stalling out, the attack on evolution continues unabated. I think anytime you have a five million dollar budget and people willing to continue to fund it, this is not going to be over for a long time. And this is where the anti-evolution forces have the upper hand because they're willing to allocate the sort of money needed to communicate effectively today. The budget of the largest organization combating the attack on evolution is dwarfed by that of the Discovery Institute. And how skillful is the Discovery Institute with communications? Well, for starters, they know who to hire. In the spring of 2005, they commissioned the services of the public relations firm Creative Response Concepts, the public relations firm that masterminded the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign in 2004. For the Discovery Institute, according to the New York Times, in May of 2005, they recruited Austrian Cardinal Gustav Schomborn to write an editorial, in essence, reversing the endorsement of evolution by the previous pope. And we got a small glimpse into how the Discovery Institute works at the South Carolina Conference where Ty had heard that among the 600 intelligent design supporters, there was a lone evolutionist. And he seemed to be saying the same things we'd been advocating in terms of the need for improved communication. We need to get together. Different sides need to be able to talk to one another in this country for the sake of our common educational enterprise in the public schools. I would remind my colleagues of a Darwinian persuasion that The Origin of Species was a popular book and sold in railway stations. Those that defend Darwin should never be fearful or refuse the opportunity to appear before the public and explain the logic of Darwin's position and its importance to teaching young people in the public schools. All of which seem admirable and even brave to us that here he was, the only evolutionist willing to venture into the opposing camp until we saw him from a different perspective. He's a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute and has worked with them for over a decade. Here's what threw us. Listen to how he introduced himself with no mention of being a part of the Discovery Institute. John Angus Campbell, I'm a professor of communication at the University of Memphis. And listen to what he says about intelligent design. I'm not an expert on intelligent design. He's been a part of the Institute almost since its founding. He attends these conferences encouraging everyone to debate evolution, but isn't that the same as teaching the controversy? And exactly where did these anti-evolutionists come up with their whole new concept of teach the controversy? Well, if they didn't get it from me, it's a hell of a coincidence, isn't it? Meet Professor Gerald Graff of the University of Illinois, who's the subject of an article in Harper's Magazine by Stanley Fish entitled, Academic Cross-Dressing, How Intelligent design gets its arguments from the left. For over 20 years, he's been advocating teaching liberal arts by focusing on areas of debate, what he calls teaching the conflicts. But in so doing, he's unintentionally provided the blueprint for the attack on evolution. So the catchphrase of the Intelligent Design Movement now is, teach the controversy. What would you say is the equivalent catchphrase for the evolution movement? Well, I would say that people who are scientists who study evolution feel there There is no controversy that it's been manufactured by those who would like to see evolution. Scientists and professors are some of the worst communicators I know. They understand things like way up here, we're like way down here, and they can't even get halfway. A lot of science discredited in the public's mind, but in reality there's no controversy. Teach the science. Is that something you've heard people saying? No. But I would say teach the science. Is there any catchphrase for the evolutionists that you've heard propagated? No. Have you? No. And as for the specific skills of evolutionists in dealing directly with the public, well, to my surprise, that issue emerged at the end of the poker game brought up by, of all people, my old Kansas buddy, Eddie. I was a communications major at KU, University of Kansas. is my question to all you intellectuals that I've been hanging out with for the last 30 years is, why are you losing this game? And why are you not able to communicate to these people and convince them, when I sit here all night and I hear this story, that I can't believe that you've allowed your profession to be attacked? So effectively? I'm curious as to why. What's the new process of the ability to communicate to these people and these kids and get them excited about your careers and the research that you've done over the years? I think part of it is human nature, that humans like a simple answer for any complex problem. And intelligent design offers a simple explanation that is not founded in science. That people are no longer connected to nature. And this essentially is a question about nature and how nature arises and how nature evolves. and more and more people are urban and they don't love nature and they don't, they just don't get interested in biology and it makes it much harder to communicate with them about something as fundamental as evolution. I also think it's because evolution biologists haven't fought the fight. They sort of, they don't respect the kinds of arguments that these people are making and so they just ignore it and think that it's going to go away and that's probably one of the problems is they just haven't gone to task with these people in the way that they need to. Most self-respecting evolutionary biologists wouldn't give them the time of day. I mean, they won't go to debates with them because they think it's so ridiculous. I think that's a lot of it. There was a contemporary of Darwin named Louis Agassiz at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and he used to give lectures in the Cambridge Common on how living organisms were organized. And while he did not believe in Darwin's theory, what was significant about how he reached out to the public was he treated them as equals. And I think, perhaps... The white folks, anyway. Exactly. He was a horrible racist. He was a horrible racist, but that said, I think we can learn something from Louis Agassiz's approach to reaching the public, in that he treated the common person as having a tremendous amount of intelligence and had respect for that intelligence. and try to reach to a higher level than perhaps we're trying to do now. So in America today, we now have two voices for evolution. The first voice, that of academics, is handicapped by their blind obsession with the truth. The second voice, emerging from public relations firms, understands the need to tell simple, clean stories not constrained by the truth. There's a famous quote that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution. We can modify this quote to account for our situation now by saying that nothing in our society today makes sense except in the light of the information explosion. Our cultural environment has changed drastically over the past 50 years as we've witnessed our knowledge and information increase exponentially. The result of this changed environment is a general public that is less capable of processing the surpluses of information they're handed. And this has led to new techniques for mass communication. Public relations firms have figured out the need for simple slogans, and instead of wasting time explaining entire stories to the general public, they know how to jump to the conclusions and provide followers with what have come to be known as the talking points. There's not enough transitional stages yet. And clearly see that there was a designer. Just allow us to teach the controversy. And so we're faced with the question of who will dictate science for our society. Will it be the scientists, or will it be public relations firms? Will scientists adapt to this new communication environment? Or will they go the way of species who failed to change along with their environment? This is not going to be over for a long time. We've woefully undereducated the American public in the area of science. It's going to take a long time to overcome that. So is the anti-evolution campaign working? Well, on the Monday after our poker game, President George W. Bush basically endorsed the whole teach the controversy notion notion, when he said, both sides ought to be properly taught so people can understand what the debate is about. But is it possible that some debate isn't necessarily productive? I ran into one of my former boardmates, and this is someone I've known for close to six years, and that individual accused me of destroying the board. He said that because I was an Episcopalian, I was going to hell. I had no chance of heaven. And I walked away crying. I had a great deal of respect for this individual, and I thought the individual had respect for me. But obviously that's no longer true, because I go to the wrong church. This made me think of our third president, who advocated a wall of separation between church and state. And we all know where that president ended up. There is a culture war going on in the United States right now, and it's not about left or right. It's not about Democrat or Republican. In my opinion, this whole movement that is focused on fear and not on what people really deep down want. Augustine in book five of the Confessions addresses the idea that people of faith should not talk about science. It's about those people who believe that there's a larger intelligence in the universe and those who don't. And that's the essential divide in America today. But they want to protect themselves against that thing they fear the most. And that's what this movement has been all about. And as I read my Bible, God has some pretty nasty things to say about testing him and testing faith. And yet that's what's being promoted here theologically, and I think that's a real problem. I'm trying to think about studying Buddhism now because, you know, they believe in these things. And they have a great philosophy. They have a happy philosophy. probably have the happiest philosophy I've heard yet. So I might do a little studying on that one. Why do you believe it? Well, I like what they're saying about look forward to the next life. Don't agonize over death. You know, come on, let's get with the program. The flower blooms, lives and dies and then goes on. Where does it go? Well, I think they have a nice theory. It goes on to have another life yep and finally because my heart does still rest with the evolution side I have to give the last word to an evolutionist so there appears to be what we might call the school board circle of life which begins with a new school board, then the emergence of an anti-evolution majority, followed by the revolt of voters, the ousting of the anti-evolutionists, and finally a return to normalcy. This has happened once in Dover, Pennsylvania, once in the little town of Darby, Montana, and twice in Kansas, where the August 2006 primaries completed the second circle. The public voted, the conservatives lost, a pro-evolution majority will return. And among those defeated in Kansas was the author of From the Darkness. In Dover, Pennsylvania, they voted out all eight pro-intelligent design board members, including... It's like a fly. It's annoying, and it's just there, and you can't get it. But not all were pleased. National evangelist Pat Robertson told the people of Dover, if there's a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. And as for what the future holds for this issue, only one person knows for certain. Well, let's just ask my intelligent eight ball.