Candidates see place for intelligent design
Posted on Sunday, August 13, 2006
Some candidates for major offices this year say students in Arkansas schools should have access to information on “intelligent design,” a theory on the origins of mankind often offered as an alternative — if not a rebuttal — to the theory of evolution.
Those candidates include Mike Beebe, the Democratic nominee for governor who says information on the subject should be “available” to students.
“I believe in intelligent design and I don’t think intelligent design and evolution are mutually exclusive,” Beebe said.
He and several other candidates for statewide office were asked about the theory of intelligent design by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette after a state lawmaker said he would introduce legislation in 2007 requiring that the state allow teaching of the subject in state schools.
Twice in the past, Arkansas legislation hostile to the theory of evolution has been successfully challenged in court cases.
Opponents describe the intelligent design theory — some call it doctrine — as biblical creationism in disguise. They dismiss it as an attempt to inject religion into public schools.
Supporters describe intelligent design as a scientific alternative to the theory of evolution, which they say is incomplete and flawed. They say even simple living organisms involve structures so complex as to be unlikely or impossible to develop in a random pro- cess and that an intelligent designer — some say God, others are more speculative about the identity of the designer — must have played a role in their development.
While most Republican candidates for higher office in November say they don’t think intelligent design should be required curriculum, they say that because of “academic freedom” teachers should be allowed to address the subject in class.
“Asa sees this as an issue of academic freedom, and he believes teachers should have the option to teach another viewpoint if there is scientif ic support for that viewpoint,” said David Kinkade, a spokesman for Republican gubernatorial candidate Asa Hutchinson of Little Rock.
Democratic candidates for attorney general and lieutenant governor say the lessons taught in science classes should be left to science teachers, not those running for political office.
“What is established as generally accepted science should be taught. I’d think the scientific and the education communities would be exactly who we would trust to do that,” said Democratic candidate for attorney general Dustin McDaniel of Jonesboro. “It’s up to our churches and our families to explain exactly how the scientific parts of the universe are created by God.” He added, “I’m not running to be the state’s science officer.” Beebe’s statement said he believes “information” about intelligent design “should be available to Arkansas students.” “This would provide Arkansas students background they need to wrestle with these and other fundamental questions as they become adults,” he said. “I believe both should be available because one is the consensus theory of the scientific community, and the other is the predominant belief of most Arkansans and Americans.” He didn’t say whether the theory should be a required part of the state’s curriculum.
A spokesman for his campaign declined to say how Beebe wanted to make information on intelligent design available to students.
He also declined to say whether Beebe also believed in evolution.
Late last month, the leader of a conservative group based in Northwest Arkansas, the Arkansas Republican Assembly, sent out an e-mail message saying “evolution is seriously flawed and insufficient to account for origins.” The author, Patrick Briney of Fayetteville, instead offered intelligent design as “an intelligent alternative to evolution.” One of the assembly’s officers, former state lawmaker Gunner DeLay of Fort Smith, is the Republican candidate for attorney general.
DeLay said he wrote a paper in law school on what he says is a teacher’s “right to academic freedom” under the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution to teach subjects that are “scientifically valid.” He said that could include intelligent design.
“The basis of my paper was that although legislative mandated efforts to teach creation science or intelligent design have been struck down, the courts have left open teaching those theories under an instructor’s First Amendment right to academic freedom,” DeLay said.
Such protected speech would have to have a “scientific basis,” DeLay said, adding that a science teacher “could not come in and say we’re all born under a cabbage leaf.” “The old creation science is the new intelligent design. And yes, I think it’s scientifically valid,” DeLay said.
Intelligent design is not listed in the state Department of Education’s science curriculum framework.
Teachers are expected to teach within the state’s curriculum, said Julie Johnson Thompson, a spokesman for the state Department of Education.
Whether and how teachers are punished for teaching subjects outside that curriculum is left to individual school districts, Thompson said.
In 2005, a state representative, Mark Martin, introduced a bill in the Arkansas House to require the state Department of Education to develop guidelines for teaching intelligent design that were constitutional.
He said his intention was only to make the information available to teachers who wished to teach it.
“That bill is pretty lightweight. It wasn’t mandatory, it was a voluntary thing,” the Prairie Grove Republican said. “All it really did was have the Arkansas Department of Education establish a constitutionally valid method for it to be presented.
“ And then allowed the teachers to teach it if they chose to.” The bill never made it out of a House committee.
Martin says he’ll introduce similar legislation when the legislative session begins in January.
The department issued a memorandum on the intelligent design debate, saying science faculty at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville had contacted state Education Commissioner Ken James after the introduction of Martin’s bill to express concern “with ensuring that evolution be taught and that intelligent design not be taught in Arkansas Schools.” Martin is up for re-election in November. He faces independent candidate Jimmie Johnson of Uniontown for representation of District 87.
According to the memorandum, the department responded by saying school districts needed to “align” their lessons with state curriculum frameworks and that “failure to adhere to the contents of the frameworks could subject the districts to sanctions per the Standards for Accreditation Rules,” according to the memorandum.
Like McDaniel, Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor Bill Halter of North Little Rock said the state should let scientists determine what should be taught in classrooms.
“It’s not the purpose of science classes to teach religion,” Halter said. “It’s the purpose of science classes to teach science.” He said he didn’t know enough about intelligent design to know whether it qualifies as science.
“I will leave that question to scientists and educators,” Halter said.
The Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, state Sen. Jim Holt of Springdale, said teachers should have the option to teach about intelligent design and that students should have the option to learn about it.
He called evolution “a fraud theory” and said that keeping intelligent design out of public schools is censorship.
“It is not scientific to censor other theories or hypotheses,” Holt said.
State science curriculum currently introduces basic principles of the theory of evolution to students in the eighth grade.
Students in high school are taught the subject in more detail, according to the state’s Biology Science Curriculum Framework.
That curriculum was selected by a group of about 80 science teachers across the state based on recommended lessons from national science groups like the National Science Teachers Association, Thompson said.
That curriculum defines evolution as “the long-term process through which a population of organisms accumulates genetic changes that enable its members to successfully adapt to environmental conditions and to better exploit food resources.” John Morris is director and president of the Institute for Creation Research in Santee, Calif., which describes itself as “Biblical Christianity’s defense against the godless and compromising dogma of evolutionary humanism,” calls evolution “the religion of naturalism” and public schools “cathedrals for atheism.” Evolution, he said, is “bad education, bad science.” “It is illogical, counterproductive and bad science to ascribe intelligent information to random causes, like mutation and natural selection,” Morris said.
“We all know that random choices don’t produce order.” Opponents of intelligent design see little science in that theory.
There are no “scientific arguments” to support teaching intelligent design in the classroom, said William Etges, a biology professor at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
“It’s not science,” Etges said. “It’s religion.” In a late 2005 ruling, a federal judge in Pennsylvania agreed.
The ruling came after the school board in Dover, Pa., voted to require that teachers of ninth-grade biology classes tell students that evolution is a theory and “is not a fact” and that “gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence.” The teachers were also required to tell students that “Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view” and to make available to students a book on intelligent design.
U. S. District Judge John E. Jones III ordered a permanent injunction against the school board’s order, saying it was a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution, which courts have interpreted to prohibit governmentsponsored religion in public schools.
The judge called intelligent design “an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion.” The ruling followed on others that have struck down prohibitions on teaching evolution, or laws requiring that “creationism” be taught in Arkansas public schools.
Those include a 1968 decision in a case brought by a Little Rock Central High School biology teacher, Susan Epperson.
The U. S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected the state’s ban on teaching evolution.
The state’s 1928 “monkey law” — enacted by a majority of the state’s voters — prohibited the teaching in public schools or colleges of “the theory or doctrine that mankind ascended or descended from a lower order of animals.” The Supreme Court ruled that the law was in conflict with the First Amendment’s prohibition against government establishing religion, with Justice Abe Fortas writing that the law should be struck down because it deemed the theory of evolution “in conflict with a particular religious doctrine, that is, with a particular interpretation of the Book of Genesis by a particular religious group.” “Government in our democracy, state and national, must be neutral in matters in religious theory, doctrine and practice,” Fortas wrote.
Twenty-three years later, the Arkansas Legislature passed another law requiring schools to give “balanced treatment to creation-science and to evolution-science.” It was challenged in a lawsuit brought by the Rev. Bill McLean of Little Rock and others.
Act 590 of 1981 defined creation-science in part as “the insufficiency of mutation and natural selection in bringing about development of all living kinds from a single organism,” and “separate ancestry for man and apes.” Creation-science also taught the “explanation of the earth’s geology by catastrophism, including the occurrence of a worldwide flood.” It, too, was rejected. U. S. District Judge William Overton in Little Rock said the law was contrary to the First Amendment and that “creation-science” was religion.
“No group, no matter how large or small, may use the organs of government, of which the public schools are the most conspicuous and influential, to foist its religious beliefs on others,” wrote Overton in his 1982 ruling.
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