GOOD SCIENCE, BAD SCIENCE:
TEACHING EVOLUTION IN THE STATES
TEACHING EVOLUTION IN THE STATES
LAWRENCE
S. LERNER
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH
Published by
The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
September 2000
Note: This version
has been reformatted for ease of printing and viewing; the
original with
formatting defects is at: http://www.edexcellence.net/library/lerner/gsbsteits.html
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Key Role of Evolution in
the Sciences
How Do Good Standards Treat Biological
Evolution?
Controversial vs. Consensual
Knowledge
What Students Should Learn
About Evolution
Extrascientific Issues
The Diversity of
Anti-Evolutionists
Anti-Evolutionism from the
Left
Why Anti-Evolutionism
Persists
The Evolution of
Anti-Evolution Pressures on the Public Schools
How Do Science Standards
Reflect Creationist Pressures?
Evaluation of State Standards
A. Very good to
Excellent
B. Good
C. Satisfactory
D. Unsatisfactory
F. Useless or Absent
F-minus. Disgraceful
Further Analysis
Grades for Science Standards
as a Whole
Appendix B: Evolution and Its Discontents
Appendix C: State Documents Examined
Appendix D: Ratings of State Science Standards as a Whole
List Of Tables & Figures
Figure 1. Treatment of Evolution in Science Standards: A State-by-State Evaluation
Table 2. National Report Card on the Treatment of Evolution in Science Standards
Table 3. Distribution of Grades for Treatment of Evolution
Table 4. Scoring Summary for Treatment of Evolution
Table 5. State Report Cards on the Treatment of Evolution
Table D1. Detailed Grades for Science Standards as a Whole
Forward
Trouble in Kansas
When two state school board members were unseated in the August (2000) Republican primary election in Kansas, the story made national news. Indeed, the media spotlight had shone on the Kansas race for months. And the school board contest itself was fought harder than such races generally are. One candidate raised over $90,000 and purchased the first TV ad in school board election history.
Why so much attention? Because this election hinged on perhaps the touchiest issue in the school curriculum, one that has drawn headlines at least since the celebrated Scopes trial in 1925: whether and how the public schools will teach evolution. When the votes were counted, the defeated candidates included two of the incumbent board members who a year earlier had voted to erase evolution from the state's academic standards.
It was not just Charles Darwin and biological evolution that vanished in August 1999 (by a 6-4 vote) from the list of topics that young Kansans are expected to master as they pass through the state's public schools. So did the "Big Bang" and all references to the age of the earth itself.
Putting All Fifty States Under The Microscope
All this came as a shock to Americans who assumed that the political debate over teaching evolution in the public schools had itself evolved into generalized acceptance of this central principle of biology. But we were not very surprised. Since 1998, when the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation published its first appraisal of state science standards by Dr. Lawrence Lerner, we have known that a number of states treat evolution in less than competent (and sometimes less than forthright) fashion. When Lerner reviewed state science standards a second time for this Foundation (see The State of State Standards 2000), he identified slipshod treatment of biological evolution as a continuing problem in many places. We wanted to know more and felt the public would want to know more.
For example, to what extent is weak handling of evolution simply a manifestation of generally weak science standards and to what extent does it reflect something more complicated? So we asked Lerner (now emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at California State University, Long Beach) to revisit the science standards of the fifty states yet again (using the latest version of these oft-revised documents). This time, the specific focus was on how they treat evolution; the present report is the product of his investigation.
Structure of this Report
The report begins by explaining the role of evolution as an organizing principle for all the historical sciences. Lerner then outlines the components of good science standards that don't shrink from expecting children to learn evolution's central role. He recounts the main arguments that are advanced against the teaching of evolution. (This discussion appears in the report's text, in an appendix, and in an annotated bibliography.) And he characterizes various ways in which states have responded to anti-evolutionist pressures.
The core of his report is a state-by-state evaluation of the treatment of evolution in science standards. The good news is that thirty-one states do an adequate-to-excellent job of this. They do not all have exemplary standards, but they handle evolution pretty much the way they handle the rest of science. (There are a few interesting exceptions, which Lerner discusses.)
The bad news is that nineteen states do a weak-to-reprehensible job of handling evolution in their science standards. Twelve of them shun the word "evolution" and four avoid teaching biological evolution altogether. (Several of the nineteen don't "discriminate" against evolution; they simply have weak science standards across the board.) Tables in the body of the report show the areas in which various state standards are lacking -- and also allow for easy comparison of a state's "evolution grade" with Lerner's evaluation of its overall science standards.
Politicization of Science
Besides reporting this mixed news, can we help to explain what is going on? Part of the explanation is contained in another (April 2000) Foundation report, Politicizing Science Education, by Paul Gross, University Professor of Life Sciences emeritus at the University of Virginia. Gross found that evolution is just one of a number of domains where science education is beset -- from both left and right -- by efforts to bend it to advance the enthusiasms, viewpoints, or doctrines of particular groups. This was disconcerting to learn. While anyone following the K-12 education scene has become accustomed to efforts to manipulate standards and curriculum in other subjects, we might not have expected them in science. But they are there in plenitude -- with grave consequences for our children's scientific literacy.
With respect to evolution, Gross was as blunt as one would expect from a distinguished biologist. He dismissed as pure propaganda the claims made by creationists and others trying to discredit the theory of evolution or shield children from learning it. "No evidentiary claim against 'Darwinism' has so far withstood testing," Gross wrote. "On the other hand, the evidence in favor of natural selection grows exponentially and meshes ever more tightly with the rest of science....Any scientist who found a basic flaw or a genuine, deep gap in evolutionary theory would be an overnight celebrity."
Gross's report, particularly the case study of evolution, provoked a strong reaction from some of our readers, including people with whom we ordinarily agree about education issues. As their calls, letters and, especially, e-mails and web postings revealed, the dispute over teaching evolution in U.S. schools is far from over.
Debate over Evolution not so Simple
This dispute, however, turns out to be more complicated, more interesting and more nuanced than many people suppose. Secular liberal intellectuals tend to simplify it into a battle between truth and superstition. People of deep religious faith are more apt to see it as a contest between God and atheism. Political analysts are inclined to depict it as a clash between left and right. In fact, it contains all those elements and more; it is not easily put into a little explanatory box.
As Gross and Lerner both attest, there is no serious debate among today's scientists over whether evolution occurs, though there are disagreements over how it occurs. But even as evolution is accepted as the central concept of biology by almost all scientists, a 1999 Gallup poll found that 68 percent of Americans favor teaching both creationism and evolution in the public schools. In an early-2000 survey by People for the American Way, half the respondents said that evolution is "far from being proven scientifically."
The public, in other words, is not nearly so ready as the scientists to mandate that all schools teach evolution and only evolution. This important political fact begins to explain the dilemma that state policymakers encounter when they set about to promulgate standards for science education.
Role of State Standards
To be sure, state standards do not single-handedly determine what is taught and learned in U.S. schools. Many factors come into play, including the selection of textbooks, the adequacy of teachers' own knowledge, the organization of the curriculum (e.g., how much time is devoted to science), what is included on statewide tests, and whether the tests' results bring consequences for children, teachers, schools, or others. We're also mindful that some states with low marks for academic standards have nonetheless embraced bold and imaginative education reform strategies that appear to be bearing fruit. Standards are obviously not the whole story.
Yet the knowledge and skills set forth in state standards are supposed to form the core of "standards based" education reform. They are meant to serve as the frame to which everything else is attached, the desired outcome that drives countless other decisions about how best to attain it. If a state's standards are unsatisfactory, some of its other reform efforts are apt to be less likely to succeed, maybe even futile. That is why standards matter -- and why we have gone to considerable pains to have them carefully evaluated. Academic standards are where a state (or other jurisdiction) spells out what it wants its pupils to come away from school having learned. It may produce good results without having good standards -- and fine standards don't assure solid results -- but the odds are a lot better if it begins with clear and well-conceived academic expectations.
Standard setting, however, is itself something of a political act. (How political varies with place and circumstance.) The typical state seeks to promulgate standards that represent a reasonable consensus of what experts, practicing educators, and laymen judge to be important for children to know and be able to do. In an area of the curriculum where no such consensus exists within the state, it's exceedingly difficult to establish good standards for students, teachers, and schools.
Science and Faith
As this report makes rather painfully clear, a number of states have not been able to find -- or develop -- much of a consensus about how and whether evolution should be taught. That's why state standards in this area are such a mixed bag. But the politics of evolution aren't simple. Which is to say, while scientists are more or less unanimous about the science itself, those who oppose teaching evolution and only evolution to schoolchildren are a surprisingly diverse group. As Lerner describes, there are "young earth" creationists who believe that the Earth and its inhabitants arose roughly 6,000 years ago through a process described in the Bible. There are "intelligent design" people who argue that certain complex biological structures and processes could not have arisen through natural selection, and therefore must have been created by some outside force or prior intelligence. There are others -- harder to label -- who believe simply that what is taught in K-12 science classes goes far beyond what has been proven by scientists and includes uncertain claims on behalf of science that disrespect religious faith. And there are lots of Americans who are okay with evolution being taught so long as religious explanations are also taught -- somewhere in the curriculum.
Speaking for ourselves, we believe that schools have an obligation to teach the best science there is. We have certainly not been persuaded by "young earth" advocates or "intelligent design" theorists that K-12 science standards should refrain from providing a full and accurate measure of evolution. Yet we also find much merit in the claims of Americans who believe that schools must respect people's religious and philosophical beliefs, that they should teach about religion and about people's diverse and strongly held beliefs (even if they are precluded from efforts to impart religious faith or observance). They ought not address such matters in science class. But what about history, civics, geography, "contemporary issues," or literature?
The Limits of Science
Scientists, alas, can be as intolerant of religion as creationists are of evolution. Each "side" is too apt to insist that its explanations account for everything, even to shun opportunities for open discourse with people who favor other explanations. Dogma and orthodoxy can be found in science as well as in communities of religious faith.
We don't believe that schools, especially public schools, have any business imparting anybody's dogma. Of course, science classes should teach science, and proper science includes evolution. No equivocation there. People who feel strongly that their children should not be exposed to evolution ought not expect the public schools to assist them with this project. They remain free to consider the options of private or home schooling.
But science teachers also need to respect the religious faith of their pupils and ought not bridle when parents and clergymen (and other teachers) explain to children that what they're learning in science class is not the whole story. Educating children, after all, entails a lot more than ensuring that they learn science. The school curriculum, too, includes more than science. If it neglects the powerful role of religious faith in human history and contemporary culture, it is not doing a good job of educating its students.
In the concluding section of this report, Dr. Lerner quotes a defense of science education by the primatologist Andrew Petto: "We must help our students master complicated information so that they can appreciate the wonder and grandeur of this view of life..." Scientists and science teachers do well to keep in mind that a large majority of Americans believes that faith in God is the surest way to appreciate the wonder and grandeur of life itself. Schools need to recognize and honor that faith.
By now, we suspect, the reader will at least appreciate that this has been a tough issue for many states, one that a number of them have not handled well. While Kansas has gotten most of the attention, those who set science standards in dozens of other states have faced pressure from groups opposed to the teaching of evolution. We are especially admiring of those state policymakers who, after a fierce battle over evolution, ended up with satisfactory science standards. We wish there were many more of them. We wish, too, that all fifty states would see that their schools respect the elements of a child's education that science alone cannot explain.
About the Author and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
Lawrence S. Lerner is Professor Emeritus in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at California State University, Long Beach. He has published extensively in condensed-matter physics, history of science, science and religion, and science education and he is a frequent commentator on various aspects of K-12 science education, including curriculum, standards, textbooks, and teacher education. He contributed to the development of California's landmark 1990 science framework and has advised on science standards for a number of states. He is a member of the National Faculty for the Humanities, Arts, and Sciences, and other organizations concerned with K-12 science education. He can be contacted at lslerner@csulb.edu or at the Department of Physics & Astronomy, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA 90840.
The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation is a private foundation that supports research, publications, and action projects in elementary/secondary education reform at the national level and in the Dayton area. Further information can be obtained from our web site (www.edexcellence.net) or by writing us at 1627 K Street, NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20006. (We can also be e-mailed through our web site.) This report is available in full on the Foundation's web site, and hard copies can be obtained by calling 1-888-TBF-7474 (single copies are free). The Foundation is not connected to or sponsored by Fordham University.
Chester E. Finn, Jr., President
Marci Kanstoroom, Research Director
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
Washington, DC
Executive Summary
Almost all of science is the study of the evolution of systems in time. Biology is no exception; its central organizing principle is the evolution of living things, just as geology centers on the evolution of the earth and astronomy on the evolution of the universe.
That evolution is the central organizing principle of all the historical sciences is not a controversial issue among scientists, nor among most of the world's educated persons. Consequently, the teaching of science worldwide stresses evolution as a routine matter. The United States is exceptional in this regard. In much of this country, the teaching to K-12 students of evolution as scientists see it -- particularly biological evolution -- evokes bitter controversy. Specifically, many persons object to the teaching of part or all of the facts and theory of evolution in the public schools at the primary and secondary level. This controversy is not really about science but about religion and politics. Those who object to the teaching of evolution often assert that evolution has not taken place, that scientists are profoundly misguided in the picture of the universe that they have developed over the past two centuries, that it is "only fair" to present creationist views to students in tandem with evolution, and that teaching evolution will lead children into immoral lives. In pursuing the first two of these assertions, many of the opponents have advanced what they call "creation science," a pseudoscientific rival to evolution that the courts have repeatedly held to be thinly veiled religion.
This essentially nonscientific controversy is reflected in the primary-secondary (K-12) science standards of many states.1 It is manifested in a variety of ways, which are discussed in detail in the body of this report. However, there are two principal ways in which objections to the teaching of evolution are expressed:
- The fundamental concepts and facts of evolution are covered to some extent -- usually briefly -- but the word "evolution" is carefully avoided, at least in the context of biology. Such incorrect and misleading euphemisms as "change over time" are used instead.
- The subject is avoided altogether or barely mentioned, reducing the sciences -- especially the biological sciences -- to disjointed lists of facts.
There are other ways in which the teaching of evolution is sometimes short-changed. In particular, a few states go much further in dismissing or obscuring important scientific knowledge. These states are considered on a case-by-case basis in the main text.
The states have been assigned letter grades for their treatment of evolution. The results are displayed in Tables 1 and 2 and Figure 1. (More detailed explanations of the scoring system, as well as a description of what is typically observed in the standards of states receiving particular letter grades, can be found on pages 10-17.)
*For convenience, we include the District of Columbia in the term
"state" throughout this report.
On balance, the news is good. Thirty-one states (almost two-thirds) do at least a satisfactory job of dealing with the central organizing principle of the historical sciences -- at least at the level of their statewide academic standards. Ten states do a very good to excellent job (A) of presenting evolution and twenty-one do a good or satisfactory job (fourteen B and seven C). The bad news, of course, is that more than one-third of all the states do not do a satisfactory job, and thus seriously damage or even erase the possibility of teaching science to their young people as more than a confusing collection of facts. Six states rate an unsatisfactory D and thirteen more an F or worse, signifying that their standards are quite useless for purposes of teaching evolution. These nineteen states are a major focus of this report -- and chief sources of the concern that we hope it will raise. Seven of the nineteen mention evolution, but ten never use the "E-word," one (Maine) uses it exactly once, and one (North Dakota) hides it. Of the seven states that do mention evolution, all but one treat it so skimpily that the coverage is nearly useless. Of the twelve that avoid the term, eight try to sneak in some of evolution's ideas, with results varying from poor to abysmal. Three ignore evolution altogether or touch on it only in a minor way in non-biological contexts. One (Kansas) goes still further, shunning biological evolution while also deleting all references, direct or indirect, to the age of the earth or the universe, including even radioactive decay; for this it has received an "F-".
Figure 1. Treatment of Evolution in Science
Standards: A State-by-State Evaluation
Table 2. National Report Card on the Treatment of Evolution in Science Standards
Introduction
In his recent essay, Politicizing Science Education,2 Paul Gross discusses the damage done to science education in the United States by a wide spectrum of pressure groups that, in pursuit of their own political or ideological ends, seek to give K-12 students a distorted view of the methodology and content of science. As Gross shows, many of these efforts have been successful enough to inflict significant damage on science education. Evolution, the central organizing principle of all the historical sciences, constitutes a prime target for political pressure groups. In many parts of the country, the harm done to the teaching of science by this spectrum of political groups has been considerable. Biological evolution in particular has been a longstanding target. In this report, we concentrate on biological evolution, particularly on how this part of what students are expected to learn about science is set forth in the official state science standards.
Why are standards important? Statewide standards serve as the foundation for a host of curricular activities that affect what goes on in a state's classrooms. District curricula and teachers' lesson plans are often written with the standards in mind. So are the increasingly popular statewide exams administered at certain grade levels, often with such fateful consequences as pupil promotion or graduation hinging on exam scores. Textbook publishers shape the content of their products according to the standards of some of the larger states. Standards are the obvious recourse of parents who want to know what their children are supposed to learn in school and how their classroom activities measure up. And, with an increasingly mobile population, standards provide a basis for some degree of uniformity -- at least within states -- and thus ease the transition for students who move to new schools. Finally, statewide standards provide a basis for comparative evaluation of what is expected of students in various states, and thus an incentive for change in their K-12 education systems.
We appraised state science standards with respect to their overall quality in two earlier publications: State Science Standards: An Appraisal of Science Standards in 36 States (March 1998) and The State of State Standards 2000 (January 2000), hereinafter referred to as Standards 2000.3 States' grades on the latter study can be found in Table 5 and in Appendix D. Both the earlier studies used the same extensive set of criteria -- twenty-five criteria in five categories -- to evaluate quality. For each standards document, we considered its: (1) purpose, expectations, and audience, (2) organization, (3) coverage and content, (4) quality, and (5) negative elements that detract from the standards. The detailed criteria may be found in Appendix D.4
The treatment of evolution was but one of many matters considered in these earlier, more comprehensive evaluations. It is particularly important, however, as the quality of the treatment of evolution necessarily affects a state's performance vis-a-vis many of the individual criteria under all five general categories. It is thus a matter of special concern to scientists, educators, and policymakers. We therefore resolved to study the treatment of evolution in the standards as a separate matter.
The Key Role of Evolution in the Sciences
What do we mean by evolution, and what is its place in the sciences? The universe is a dynamic place at every scale of space and time. Almost all science is the study of the evolution of one system or another -- systems as large as the universe itself or as small as a neutrino; systems whose time scales are measured in billions of years or in attoseconds.
Thus, evolution is an indispensable concept across all the sciences. But biological evolution in particular has come to occupy a peculiar position in American education. The public attention that it attracts is different in kind and intensity from that attracted by evolution in other scientific fields. As a consequence of this attention, treatments of the subject in K-12 education vary considerably more in quality and quantity than treatments of any other scientific subject.
This situation is nearly unique to the United States; in no other country is the teaching of biological evolution subject to similar nonscientific, nonpedagogical pressures.5
Although American K-12 science standards are most variable with respect to their treatment of the biological sciences, there is a significant spillover into the other major historical sciences: geology, the evolution of the solar system, and cosmology. The physical sciences are affected as well, but more indirectly.
In the pages that follow, we consider the following questions:
- What constitutes a good set of standards as they concern evolution, biological and otherwise?
- What kinds of public pressures oppose good standards in this area? What are the bases for the opposition?
- How have various states reacted to these pressures?
What is the effect of such reactions on the quality of science standards overall -- and thus, by reasonable inference, on the quality of science education in America today?
How Do Good Standards Treat Biological Evolution?
The writing of science standards is especially challenging on account of the tight and ramified structure of the sciences. It does not suffice to list a collection of facts that students are expected to "know" -- more precisely, to memorize. As the French philosopher-scientist Henri PoincarÈ put it almost a century ago, "Science is constructed of facts as a house is of stones. But science is no more a collection of facts than a house is a heap of stones."
Facts are indispensable, but they would have little meaning were it not for the role of scientific theory. Theory is the logical structure that ties together an otherwise bewildering array of observations, and sieves through the incalculably greater multitude of observations already made to single out those that are significant. Theory also provides the basis for making predictions -- for designing the crucial experiments or further observations that make it possible to progress to further knowledge.6
In the 1620s, in his New Atlantis,7 Francis Bacon proposed a scientific method that involved little more than accumulating vast bodies of fact and inferring conclusions from them. At just about the same time, his contemporary Galileo Galilei blazed the trail to modern science by forging a methodology whose core was an unremitting interplay of observation and theory construction. So successful was Galileo's methodology, and so universally was it adopted, that a century later Jonathan Swift found it worthwhile to burlesque the Baconian approach in Gulliver's Travels. In the nearly three centuries since Swift, we have heaped success upon success by elaborating on Galileo's methodological heritage.
Any decent education in science requires that the student come to understand the central role of theory in scientific methodology. This understanding does not emerge full-blown; young people must grow into the ability to understand the abstractions essential to the methodology at the same time that they accumulate the broad evidentiary basis that cries out for the organizing discipline of ever-broadening theoretical insights.
Lacking these insights, the student inevitably comes to see the sciences as a stultifying heap of disconnected facts, some of them counterintuitive and all of them hard to sort out. This luckless student soon learns how to commit the required facts to short-term memory, squeak past the next test, and then thankfully forget what he has so painfully memorized. The present state of scientific literacy among American adults bears dour witness to the ubiquity of this kind of science learning experience.
Controversial vs. Consensual Knowledge
Baconian methodology has its uses in the early stages of a science. As the philosopher of science T. S. Kuhn8 pointed out, there is much work to be done before a broad theoretical basis for a science can first emerge. In this pre-paradigm stage, workers accumulate vast stores of observations, as did physicists before 1600 or so, chemists before about 1800, geologists before about 1830, biologists before about 1860, geophysicists before about 1950, and psychologists to this day. This work was far from useless, but progress was inhibited by endless controversy as to what observations were most important. In geology, for example, vulcanists vied with neptunists; in psychology, nature still vies with nurture.
With the advent of the first satisfactory theoretical framework, a science experiences a dramatic change. As Kuhn put it, it then becomes unnecessary for each new practitioner in the field to devise his or her own introductory textbook to the subject; there is general consensus as to the basics, and energies can be focused on controversies at the frontiers. As the frontiers advance, the body of noncontroversial, consensual knowledge grows apace. Scientists pursuing such fields are no longer divided into warring schools. This powerful methodological tool underlies the spectacular progress of the sciences over the past four centuries. In physics, this revolution was accomplished mainly by Galileo and Newton; in chemistry by Lavoisier and Dalton; in geology by Hutton and Lyell; in biology by Darwin and Wallace; in geophysics by Wegener, Runcorn, and others. (This list is not exhaustive, of course.)
The strong, universally accepted theoretical framework is the basis on which the sciences acquire tighter structure than any other fields of human inquiry except for mathematics. In particular, the sciences are characterized by central organizing principles. For classical physics, these principles are centered on Newton's laws; for modern physics, Newton's laws are extended into and subsumed by the principles of relativity and quantum mechanics. For chemistry, the central principles are conservation of mass and energy, the periodic law and table of the elements, and the laws of quantum mechanics. For geology, the central principle is the theory of plate tectonics and its underlying mechanisms. And for the life sciences, the central principle is biological evolution.
Biological evolution has been the subject of intensive study for about a century and a half. Enormous amounts of data of extraordinarily diverse kinds have been interrelated and made understandable on the basis of the theory. Today, biological evolutionary theory informs, and is vindicated by, a larger and more varied body of evidence than that associated with any of the other major branches of science.9 Moreover, biological evolution is seamlessly joined with geological evolution, and is completely consistent with the principles of physics and chemistry.
What Students Should Learn About Evolution
Given the central place of evolution in the life sciences, what is required to provide the student with a good understanding of these sciences and the unifying role that evolution plays in them? As with all the sciences, the theoretical framework of evolution is somewhat abstract. Like other theoretical structures, it does not reveal its power to persons who are not familiar with a reasonable sampling of the broad spectrum of facts that the theory explains and correlates. At the primary grade levels, therefore, standards should focus on those basic facts and ideas of evolution that can later be incorporated into broader world views. At the K-3 level, for instance, students should be expected to understand that:
- All living things reproduce.
- Offspring are similar to but not exactly like their parents.
- Offspring have to grow up (or change; e.g., metamorphose) before reproducing themselves.
- There is a fit between individuals, or species, and their environment (e.g., terrestrial, aquatic, aerial).
- The earth is over 4 billion years old, allowing much time for biological as well as geological evolution.
At higher grade levels, these ideas can be supplemented by an understanding of:
- The nature of competition for survival between and within species;
- The consequence that not all offspring live long enough to reproduce;
- The limitation imposed on the number of offspring that survive by such environmental factors as availability of food and water, predators, and temperature;
- The variability among individuals that leads to differential survivability in a particular environment;
- The specialization of species to fit ecological niches and the impact of environmental change on the tenability of those niches;
- The underlying role of genetic variation that results from both sexual reproduction and random mutation;
- The nonrandom way that natural selection operates on the existing population in spite of the many random factors that determine the survival of any individual.
At the middle- and high-school levels, these ideas can be unified, and such concepts as genetic drift, sexual selection, and other significant mechanisms can be introduced. Coevolution and the complex interactions of ecosystems are important applications of the basic concepts. The magnitude of the geological/evolutionary time scale is so different from the time scales of every day life that it is difficult to grasp, and must be introduced with care. The fact that the same general time scale underlies both geological and biological evolution is an important link between the two sciences.
In parallel to these macroscopic concepts, the underlying microscopic mechanisms must be introduced at suitable grade levels. These include the relation of genotype to phenotype, DNA as an information carrier, the expression of DNA in protein synthesis and the implications thereof at the various levels of organization from organelles through cells, tissues, organs, and individual organisms, to populations.
It is also important to introduce, at the proper time, the understanding that biological evolution does not take place in a vacuum. The biota of the earth coexist with the nonliving parts of the earth, and each influences the other. Therefore, the facts and, subsequently, the theoretical structure of geological evolution must be introduced in parallel with biological evolution. Similarly, the earth is part of the solar system and the solar system is part of a hierarchy of still larger structures, up to the universe as a whole. The student should be empowered to view the history of the universe, from the general cosmological picture down to the smaller scales characterizing the earth and its smaller elements, as a seamless whole.10
There is no single formula for writing good standards that conform to the criteria set forth above. Appendix A gives excerpts from two excellent examples, the standards of California and North Carolina The two are quite different. The California approach is very detailed and introduces sophisticated concepts at relatively early grade levels. The North Carolina approach is more general, describing in principle what is to be taught and following the general statements with specifics less detailed than those in the California standards. Abstractions are introduced mainly in high school. Both sets of standards, however, can function very well as the basis for a thorough science education.
Extrascientific Issues
Evolution (especially biological evolution) remains a controversial issue in American K-12 science education. As we have already noted, this controversy is in no sense scientific. Rather, it is political and, to a degree, religious. Its extrascientific character is highlighted by the fact that, in contrast to the K-12 situation, no controversy at all exists at the university level. Curriculum at the university level is more or less fully under the control of the faculty. As they are experts in their fields, they share the consensus as to basics that is a hallmark of the sciences. In contrast, K-12 instruction is subject to considerable intervention from persons such as school board members and legislators with no expertise in -- and often little or no knowledge of -- the fields whose curricula they govern. Such persons can and often do consult with experts, but some do not and others flatly reject what experts have to say. Absent an understanding of the compelling logic of the sciences, these persons are liable to be influenced by other pressures.
The Diversity of Anti-Evolutionists
Although the extrascientific pressures against the teaching of biological evolution are diverse, they manifest themselves in three major classes of objections, which correspond to the following factual and theoretical implications of biological evolution:
- To achieve the diversity of life we observe today, the evolutionary process has required several billion years.
- All living things, humans not excepted, are descended from common ancestors.
- The evolutionary process is a natural one susceptible to scientific investigation and thus by definition cannot include supernatural intervention as a necessary component.
The first of these premises conflicts with a particular interpretation of the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis. According to this interpretation, the universe is less than a millionth as old as the scientific evidence implies -- that is, a few thousand years rather than some tens of billions. This particular interpretation of Genesis, generally called young-earth creationism, is held mainly by a subset of evangelical Protestants and some ultra-orthodox Jews and Muslims. Young-earth creationists fear that the alternative interpretations of Genesis supported by most Christians and Jews undermine the entire authority of the Bible.
Other religious groups object for the opposite reason. In particular, members of the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) hold that the universe is trillions of years old, while adherents of some Native American religions hold that their ancestors have been located in their traditional tribal areas forever (i.e., for an infinite time.)
The second premise is objected to by young-earthers and some others who hold that humankind has a special, divinely ordained place in the universe and is the central concern of the divinity. According to this belief, God could not have lumped humans (for whose benefit He created the universe and everything in it) with mere animals, let alone other living things. Such believers hold, moreover, that teaching the biological relationship of humans to other animals inevitably undermines any possible moral or ethical teaching. If, they argue, humans are "only animals" they will "act like animals" (whatever that means).11 Teaching evolution thus leads to such broadly diverse social phenomena as atheism, communism, socialism, naziism, inflation, homosexuality, women's liberation, sex education, teenage sex, abortion, pornography, family breakdown, school shootings,12 crime, alcoholism, and drug addiction, to name but a few. The same believers often hold as well the view that certain political and religious positions presuppose adherence to creationism; that is, a person cannot truly be a religious or political conservative without also being a creationist.
The third premise, though shared by the groups discussed above, is the special province of a class of anti-evolutionists called intelligent-design or irreducible-complexity advocates. These persons have revived a position set forth in the seventeenth century by John Ray13 and just after 1800 by William Paley.14 Intelligent-design advocates strongly agree with young-earthers that adherence to an evolutionary view of the bio-sphere is conducive to atheism, or even that only atheism is consistent with an evolutionary view of the universe, to which they assign the name "naturalism,"15 a term which they construe as pejorative.16 Specifically, they dust off Paley's argument and apply it to evolution. They conclude that living beings are too complicated to have evolved, and that their creation by an intelligent (read divine) designer is just the entrÈe into the natural world that God requires if we are to believe in Him. (See Appendix B for a more detailed discussion of this point.)
Anti-Evolutionism from the Left
Lest it be inferred that anti-evolutionism has roots only in political or religious conservatism, let us note that evolution has had equally vehement opponents on the political left. The classical Marxist view of "Socialist Man" was official doctrine in Stalin's USSR, where it held a position analogous to that of the doctrine of original sin in conservative Christianity. Holding that the evils of society and human immorality stem exclusively from socioeconomic injustices, and that humans will become entirely virtuous in the Marxist utopia, the Stalinist view required rejection of any implications that human behavior might have biological roots. The Lysenkoist debacle was only one of many baleful consequences of this ideology.17 Utopian socialists, though their approach was more benign than that of Stalin, held similar views of the perfectability of human nature under the proper socioeconomic conditions.18
Although Stalinism is dead as a political power, there still exists in America a left-wing intellectual opposition to evolution. (Indeed, some well-known figures whose careers have been marked by a swing from the far left to the far right have maintained throughout a contempt for evolutionary views.) From a practical point of view, the left-wing opposition has far less political power than the opposition at the other end of the spectrum, and we need not consider further its influence on public-school science instruction in the United States.19 While this left-wing faction has had little effect on American K-12 science teaching, it has done significant damage in other fields, notably environmental education, history, and mathematics.20 And, although the intelligent-design movement appears to be gaining strength and resources and is sure to be heard from in the future, its views (where they differ from those of the young-earthers) have not yet had disastrous influence on the writing of state science standards.21
As can be seen from the brief discussion above, anti-evolution views span a wide spectrum. Moreover, creationist views have evolved over time, responding to judicial and social pressures, competing to fill "ecological" niches, and scouting for new ones to occupy. The literature devoted to anti-evolution views is diverse and vast, and there is likewise a great body of literature that refutes the various species of anti-evolution views. The Bibliography cites some of the best known of the works devoted to these matters. It would be impossible to summarize all this material in brief, but Appendix B attempts to set forth enough to hint at the flavor of the discourse.
Why Anti-Evolutionism Persists
Not surprisingly, the states that find it necessary to wrestle with the teaching of evolution are largely (though not exclusively) those having substantial populations of Protestant evangelicals. Although most Protestant evangelicals probably are not anti-evolutionists, those who are certainly constitute the largest and most significant bloc that opposes the teaching of evolution in public schools. In all probability, the success of creationist efforts at the state level is due to a sympathetic chord struck by creationist activists in a wider public who do not share, or lack strong interest in, creationist ideologies. As Levitt has put it,
The universal acceptance of heliocentric astronomy is often cited as the classic instance of the triumph of sustained rationality over embedded tradition. ... Most individuals in industrial cultures accept the idea because it has been incessantly repeated since childhood and because there is no apparent emotional cost to accepting it. ... On the other hand, the theory of biological evolution, especially as regards human origins, still provokes pain, rage, and defiance in many quarters. This is true despite the fact that, in any scientific sense, evolution is as thoroughly established as the picture of the solar system due to Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. Both are equally familiar to the public at large and are vouched for by the same scientific authority. ... It is clear that evolution remains "controversial" at the level of mass opinion, not merely because certain impassioned cultists denounce it, but also because, unlike heliocentric astronomy, it provokes anxieties about the status of humanity in the natural world. ... Its religious opponents thrive, in this culture, precisely because they are able to play on this discomfort ... of many who are, in other aspects, indifferent to the underlying theology.22
Certainly, a significant number of Americans who are not scientists feel uncomfortable about evolution in general and biological evolution in particular. Many polls have inquired into Americans' views on the subject. The results, of course, depend to a considerable degree upon just how the questions are asked. Nevertheless, it would appear that about a quarter of Americans adhere to the literal Biblical account in one form or another, perhaps a third are strongly convinced of the validity of the scientific account, and the rest -- a considerable number -- are ambivalent.
More germane to our concerns here is the question of Americans' attitudes toward the teaching of evolution and creationism in the public schools. The most recent poll on this subject23 was conducted in November 1999 with results released in March 2000. Of the respondents, 66% held the view that only evolution should be taught as science; subgroups held that only evolution should be taught at all (20%), that evolution should be taught in science classes and religious creation accounts should be taught in social science or other classes (17%), and that evolution should be taught in science classes as a scientific theory with creationism mentioned as a belief (29%). The "equal time" view, that evolution and creationism should be taught together as competing views in science classes, was held by 13%, with 4% more feeling that both should be taught but uncertain as to the details. Finally, 16% believed that only creationism should be taught. Interestingly, only 1% belonged to the "don't know" category. Still more interestingly, these percentages varied over a range of less than 10% from region to region.
The Evolution of Anti-Evolution Pressures on the Public Schools
Holding that biological evolution is in conflict with religion and conducive to immorality, anti-evolutionists have unsurprisingly tried in the past to interdict its teaching in the classroom. As we have already noted, the only anti-evolutionists to have had significant influence on K-12 public education up to the present time have been the young-earth creationists. But a long series of court decisions, including two by the U. S. Supreme Court,24 have held that the underlying premises of creationism, however they may be cloaked in euphemisms, are religious rather than scientific and thus have no place in the public-school science classroom. Largely in response to the court decisions, creationism has itself evolved. When Epperson v. Arkansas struck down laws forbidding the teaching of evolution in 1968, creationists responded with a pair of curiously conflicting claims:
- Creationism and evolution are both based on articles of faith and are therefore both religion, not science.
- Creationism is a scientific approach to the study of the living world just as evolution is.
The second of these claims achieved rather more currency than the first. It became the basis for model legislation introduced in many state legislatures and passed in at least two. This "balanced-treatment" legislation required that whenever "evolution science" was taught, "creation science" had to be taught on an equal footing as an equally valid, competing explanation of the living world. It was further argued that "scientific creationism" was independent of "biblical creationism," although completely compatible with the latter. A series of court decisions, culminating in a 1987 Supreme Court ruling, declared that this argument was an attempt to veil religion as science.25 In particular, creation implies a creator and that is a religious concept. For this and related reasons, the courts held that "creation science" was not science and had no place in the science classroom, although creation stories could certainly take their place in history, social science, and literature studies.
The failure of "creation science" to gain acceptance by the Supreme Court led to the reemergence of a strand of creationism known as "intelligent design" creationism. Proponents of this view argue that some biological processes and structures are so complex that they cannot have arisen through variation and natural selection, and therefore must have been created by an "intelligent designer." The intelligent-design approach is vehemently opposed by the young-earthers. But as we have already noted, it is gaining popularity although it has not yet had much influence on state science standards.
Appendix B gives more specifics concerning the claims and tactics of creationists. For a very detailed history of anti-evolution legislation, see the Bibliography, especially Ronald Numbers's fine 1992 book, The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism.
How Do Science Standards Reflect Creationist Pressures?
States that respond to creationist pressure do so in different ways and to varying degrees. The responses ordinarily take one or more of the following forms:
- The standards include many of the central principles of evolution -- usually briefly -- but the word evolution is carefully avoided. Inaccurate and misleading euphemisms such as "change over time" are used instead of the E-word.
- Biological evolution is simply ignored. Geological evolution, the history of the solar system, and cosmology may well be treated, often even employing the word evolution. Fossils are sometimes mentioned, but only in the context of geology, not biology.
- Evolution of plants and animals is treated to some degree but human evolution is ignored.
- All scientific discussions that imply an old earth or universe are deleted. Kansas is the only state to do this completely, but Mississippi, Tennessee, and West Virginia come close.
- Creationist jargon is used.
- In Alabama, all textbooks are required to carry a disclaimer that calls evolution "controversial" and labels it "a theory, not a fact." The disclaimer also cites a number of other standard creationist ploys. The details of this approach are discussed below.
- Some or all of the historical sciences are treated lightly but no attempt is made to elucidate the connections among them.
The grades given in this report for the treatment of evolution in state science standards reflect the extent to which states have resorted to the anti-evolution tactics sketched above. States get lower grades if they avoid mention of the word evolution, if they ignore human evolution or biological evolution, if they use creationist jargon, etc. A more detailed explanation of the grading criteria appears in the next section.
Evaluation of State Standards
Forty-nine of the fifty states and the District of Columbia have published science standards (also sometimes called frameworks, curriculum guides, etc.) As a matter of policy, Iowa does not write statewide academic standards in any subjects. The documents reviewed are listed in Appendix C.
The treatments of evolution in the fifty science standards fall into six categories, which we have denoted A, B, C, D, F, and F-minus to correspond with traditional letter grades. Table 3 below shows the distribution of the grades.
The grades were determined by establishing a set of eight criteria consistent with the principles set forth in the section entitled "How Do Good Standards Treat Biological Evolution?" Each state's standards were evaluated according to the criteria listed in Table 4 on p. 12, and the standards were assigned points based on how they handled each criterion. Table 4 shows how many points each state received for each of the eight criteria.
For each state, the points assigned for these eight criteria were added. (The maximum possible total is 110 points; the totals are given in column 10 of the table.) The totals were then normalized to the familiar 100-point scale (i.e. converted to percentages), which are shown in column 11 of Table 4. Finally, letter grades were assigned as follows:
|
A = 90-100 |
Treatment of evolution is excellent or very good |
|
B = 80-89 |
Treatment of evolution is good |
|
C = 60-79 |
Treatment of evolution is satisfactory |
|
D = 40-59 |
Treatment of evolution is unsatisfactory |
|
F = 0-39 |
Treatment of evolution is useless or absent |
|
F-minus = negative values. |
Treatment of evolution is disgraceful. |
Brief comments on the strengths and weaknesses of the standards of different states appear in Table 5 on pp. 14-15. In addition to showing the grade given to the standards for their treatment of evolution, Table 5 also shows the grade that was given to each state's science standards as a whole when the standards were evaluated in 1999.
Table 3. Distribution of Grades for Treatment of Evolution
Ten states treat evolution very well or excellently. That is, they introduce at least some of the basic processes of biological evolution early, building on them later, and they make evolution the centerpiece of the life sciences. Evolution is treated in depth in Grades 9-12, and in some cases earlier. Many of these states also treat the historical sciences seamlessly. These states are California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Indiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina.26 All but Delaware and South Carolina also treat human evolution explicitly, and all do at least a satisfactory job of treating the other historical sciences and the connections among them. South Carolina treats human evolution implicitly. However, as we have noted in an earlier study,27 extra-solar-system astronomy is too often limited to the upper grades. Earth history usually gets better treatment but there is room for improvement in many cases.
Instead of illustrations here of top-quality state standards, the reader is again encouraged to examine Appendix A, which offers excerpts from two exemplary (albeit quite different) treatments of evolution drawn from the standards of California and North Carolina.
Thirteen states and the District of Columbia handle evolution well but do not fulfill all the criteria for a first-rate treatment. They are Arizona, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Idaho, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, and Washington. As a general rule, their treatments of evolution are not as complete as those of the A-level states, and all but Michigan fail to treat human evolution explicitly. In one case (DC), the brevity of the treatment of evolution merely reflects the excessive brevity of the science standards as a whole.
Excerpts from the Oregon, Massachusetts, and Colorado standards demonstrate typical B-level achievement (see pages 18-19). Each of the three examples misses out on an A in a different way. Oregon presents good if brief material but does not elucidate the central position of evolution in the life sciences as a whole. Massachusetts -- oddly -- treats evolution quite explicitly in the detailed science standards, but uses incorrect terminology in the introductory material. Colorado treats human evolution only implicitly, as the excerpt shows.
Seven states rate a C -- that is, they are satisfactory but not terribly good. These states are Louisiana, Maryland, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, and Texas. The excerpts from the New York and Louisiana standards will serve as examples of relatively better and weaker C-level quality (see pages 20-21). Although these standards leave much to be desired, they can still serve as bases for good curricula.
Six states rate an unsatisfactory D. They are Alaska, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Virginia, and Wisconsin. The reasons for these weak performances vary.
The standards of Arkansas and Wisconsin do not balk at use of the "E-word." These standards mention evolution in the context of biology but treat it so skimpily that the coverage is useless or nearly so. They ignore human evolution altogether. It is hard to know the reason for this stratagem. Possibly, the standards writers hope to achieve a degree of scientific respectability while not ruffling creationist feathers. Or the stratagem may be based on the expectation that, if mention of evolution is limited to a few statements tucked away at the highest possible grade, most students will never "get to it." Either way, the student is the loser.
Illinois and Kentucky avoid the dreaded "E-word," at least in the context of biology; Virginia comes close to doing the same. This naturally puts the standards at a great disadvantage in discussing evolution. Virginia makes the best of a bad job. Illinois and Kentucky do not even rise to that level. The situation is evocative of the old theater superstition according to which mention of the title of Shakespeare's Macbeth brings bad luck. In order to avoid the "M-word," actors speak of "the Scottish play," or "the play about Scotland that I've never read." In the theater, this conceit can be taken lightheartedly. After all, the marquee still says "Macbeth." Unfortunately, the result of such dodging is more damaging in science, where terms have precise and well-defined meanings. Some of these states substitute the phrase "change over time," but that does not mean the same thing.28 "Evolution" has a different and broader meaning than the euphemisms used to replace it. Using the word "evolution" in the geological or cosmological but not the biological context, as some states do, reveals the hypocrisy of the approach -- a point which will not be lost on students.
Twelve states fail so thoroughly to teach evolution as to render their standards totally useless. These are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Maine, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Nine of these states -- Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Wyoming -- attempt to teach a little something about evolution but miss the mark completely (see p. 22). Five sedulously avoid or (in one case) carefully conceal the E-word, at least in the context of biology. These states are Alabama, Florida, North Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma. Most employ the misleading euphemism "change over time"; Oklahoma prefers "biological adaptation." Ironically, a few of these states use the word "evolution" freely in the context of geology or cosmology.
Curiously, Ohio, which carefully avoids the use of the E-word even in non-biological contexts, touches on human evolution by inference, though few readers are likely to be in a position to catch it.29
Alabama is a special case among the states with failing grades. About four years ago, the State Board of Education mandated that a sticker bearing a disclaimer be pasted in the front of every science textbook that deals with evolution. Remarkably, the disclaimer cites many of the most common and most thoroughly discredited arguments used by creationists in objecting to evolution. For that reason only, it is worth perusing. (See box on page 23.)
In 1999, the Oklahoma board followed Alabama's lead, directing that the identical disclaimer be printed in the front matter of every textbook. Most publishers reluctantly expressed their willingness to go along with this rule; a few preferred that their books not be used. However, the attorney general issued an opinion to the effect that the board had exceeded its legal authority, and no action has been taken. Similar proposals in other states have stalled at various stages of the legislative or administrative process.
Three states -- Mississippi, Tennessee, and West Virginia -- have adopted the view that, if you completely ignore evolution the creationist politicians will leave you alone, and that if you completely ignore evolution you can teach science anyway. Mississippi and Tennessee allow a smidgen of evolution to creep into geology; West Virginia into cosmology. None of these states, of course, countenances the use of the E-word. One example will suffice; the text box on page 22 shows everything the Tennessee standards have to say about anything approximating evolution.
Kansas is a special case, unique in the extremity of its exclusion of evolution from statewide science standards. As already noted, many states either avoid or skirt discussion of biological evolution, or avoid the use of the E-word in the biological context. Kansas, however, avoids all discussion of the age of the earth or the universe, or any other topics touching on the history of the earth or universe. In addition, young-earth creationist jargon has been injected into the standards. To give just two examples of many:
- Natural selection can maintain or deplete genetic variation but does not add new information to the genetic code.
- Using examples of microevolution [emphasis added], such as Darwin's finches or the peppered moths of Manchester ...30
The gross subversion of the Kansas standards is especially regrettable because the original document submitted for Board approval was compiled over a year by a distinguished committee of twenty-seven teachers, scientists, and other experts, and was a fine basis for science education. A substitute written under the auspices of a young-earth creationist organization was so outrageous that it was not adopted. Instead, the Board took the committee draft and expurgated it, removing all references to biological evolution, the age of the universe, and anything that could be construed as undergirding a universe more than a few thousand years old (such as radioactive dating.) As noted above, creationist jargon was inserted as well. Further examples of the distortions introduced are given in Standards 2000. A word-by-word analysis of the deletions, additions, and changes made to the committee document by the Board of Education is available on the Internet.31
Five of the ten seats on the Kansas Board of Education were up for reelection in the state primary election of 1 August 2000. The election was remarkable for the interest it generated on the Republican side;32 one creationist candidate spent $90,000 and her successful opponent spent $36,000 -- sums unheard of in school-board elections. The results of that election were such that, regardless of the outcome of the November general election, the majority on the state board will change from 6-4 in favor of creationism to somewhere between 8-2 and 6-4 in favor of a scientific approach. As the election hinged almost exclusively on the issue raised by the published science standards, it is likely that a very considerable improvement will occur when the Board meets in January 2001. Should the Board decide to return to the version submitted by the drafting committee, Kansas's grade will rise from F-minus to the A that the committee draft would warrant.
Table 4. Scoring Summary for Treatment of Evolution
Guide to Table 4
Table 5. State Report Cards on the Treatment of Evolution
Further Analysis
The good news is that thirty-one states have satisfactory-to-excellent treatments of evolution. But only nine of these thirty-one states treat human evolution explicitly and another nine by implication; the rest do not cover human evolution at all.
The other nineteen states are in the less-than-satisfactory ranks. These states do an unsatisfactory to dreadful job of teaching evolution -- in most cases to the point of making it difficult or impossible to teach the sciences properly. Ten of the nineteen cripple their treatment of evolution through sedulous avoidance of the E-word, one state uses the word only once, and one state hides it. Of these twelve states, eight attempt to teach something of evolution, but do a poor to awful job of dealing with the subject. So do all but one of the seven remaining states that receive less-than-satisfactory grades but do mention the word evolution.
Of the nineteen states receiving unsatisfactory grades, three ignore the topic of biological evolution altogether, though they may touch on geological or cosmological evolution in a minor way. One state, Kansas, not only shuns biological evolution, it also deletes all references, direct or indirect, to the age of the earth or the universe, including even radioactive decay.
As the map of Figure 1 shows, many of the poorly performing states are in the Southeast. But not all. A perusal of the map also makes clear that evolution is poorly handled by states in other parts of the country as well. Moreover, North Carolina's and South Carolina's standards are among the very best, while Louisiana's and Texas's are satisfactory if unremarkable. Good science is not simply a geographical issue. This is an important point because it is a snobbish as well as damaging misconception to shrug one's shoulders and write off the inhabitants of this or that region as incorrigible or ineducable.
Grades for Science Standards as a Whole
To what extent is the quality of the treatment of evolution correlated with the overall quality of science standards? The third column of Table 5 (on pp. 14-15) summarizes the more comprehensive evaluations made in Standards 2000. The detailed breakdown of states' overall science grades from Standards 2000 can be found in Appendix D.
Simple quantitative comparison of the two columns would lead to misleadingly strong correlations, since the quality of evolution treatments was factored into the overall evaluations. Nevertheless, it is interesting to scrutinize the cases in which there is a substantial variation (i.e., more than one letter-grade difference) between the two sets of ratings. There are seven such cases: Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan, Montana, New Mexico, and Ohio.
Hawaii, Michigan, and Montana received the poor grade of D for their science standards in Standards 2000 for the same general reason: They were too brief or sketchy to be helpful guides in curriculum planning or the kindred activities for which standards are supposed to provide a basis. In spite of this shortcoming (which could readily be remedied in all three cases) the treatment of evolution was adequate to good, as discussed above.
Colorado received its overall D mainly on the basis of its poor treatment of the physical sciences; the life sciences fared much better.
Ohio's (B) very detailed (albeit voluntary) standards deliberately dodge the historical sciences, treating them in the most cursory manner and avoiding the E-word. The treatment of the physical sciences, however, is quite good. Like Ohio, Illinois (B) dodges biological evolution and avoids the word, but treats the other historical sciences adequately.
New Mexico's (F) standards suffered in the Standards 2000 rating on account of their poor overall organization. Evolution had originally been omitted. This omission engendered strong reaction. Consequently, at the time of the Standards 2000 evaluation, the life sciences had emerged considerably strengthened, especially with respect to evolution. Unfortunately, the overall organization and general vagueness of the standards remain to be remedied.
Conclusions
The American public-education system is based on the concept of local control with limited oversight from the state. This arises in part from an American view of democracy and in part from an early history of widely separated schools that were mostly quite remote from state capitals. However, today in most of the country we can see a strong public consensus for quality control at the state level, and all states have a variety of mechanisms for accomplishing this. Quality control is exercised not only through curriculum standards and the newly popular statewide examinations, but also through such traditional processes as teacher certification, class size rules, compulsory education laws, and so forth. The fact that state subventions are important in the financing of school districts is, of course, a significant factor in undergirding a modicum of control. One may thus characterize American public-school governance as a modified diffuse democracy.
Democratic decisions are made by majority rule. Citizens vote with equal voice on the basis of their opinions, regardless of what those opinions are or how strongly founded in fact they may be. We believe, of course, that a well-educated electorate is an essential basis for workable democracy, and this has always been a cardinal argument for public education. But democracy cannot permeate all aspects of every social institution. It is certainly not consistent with the education process itself. Education cannot be democratic because the teacher directly supervises the progress of the students, using his or her superior knowledge and adhering to standards imposed from levels above the classroom. It is not a matter of student consensus that the Declaration of Independence dates from 1776, or that Marbury v. Madison was the first significant application of the theory on whose basis the Supreme Court determines the constitutionality of laws, or that the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal.
Science is not democratic, either. In a democratic society, citizens who do not like the existing state of affairs can change it. This has happened often. (Consider, for example, the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Prohibition Amendment, and the repeal of that amendment.) But nature is not so flexible. We may find Newton's second law of motion contrary to common sense because it links acceleration, rather than velocity, to applied force. But we cannot change this; what we can do is learn how to manipulate it. We may believe it an insult to human dignity that the earth is not at the center of the universe but we cannot move it there. We may find moral or esthetic objections to the manner in which natural history unfolds but we cannot command nature to take another course.
Science is also undemocratic in the social sense that those who do not have the scientist's special knowledge, skills, and experience cannot have equal voice in achieving a scientific consensus concerning a class of phenomena.47The public school has no authority to impose opinions on its students. But it has the duty to explain to them the consensus of scientists on any particular issue, and the methodology by which scientists proceed to discover new knowledge and merge it into that consensus.48
Biological evolution is just one of the most important of many broad issues on which substantially all working scientists agree. There may be a few persons with scientific credentials who disagree, but they do not contribute to the progress that is the hallmark of science. Analogously, on a smaller and perhaps more digestible scale, there are a few scientists who do not believe that the human immunodeficiency virus is the cause of AIDS, but they have contributed nothing to the development of the antiviral drugs that have so greatly improved the prognosis for patients over the past decade or so. It is not simply that these dissenters are wrong, because wrong answers can sometimes stimulate controversy that helps lead to correct answers. Rather, as the physicist Wolfgang Pauli liked to say, they are not even wrong. That is, their arguments are useless and even detrimental to the pursuit of further knowledge.
This being the case, the publication and maintenance of scientifically accurate curriculum standards is a vital quality-control function of the states. Given the far-reaching ramifications of evolution in the life sciences -- to say nothing of the other historical sciences -- a complete and proper exposition of evolution is an essential constituent of state science standards. Short-changing, distorting, or omitting evolution indeed harms the teaching of the life sciences. Further, it makes it difficult for the student to come to a clear understanding of how science works. No one disputes, of course, the importance of teaching scientific literacy to the coming generation of citizens.
As primatologist Andrew J. Petto has put it, "The real objectives in science education ... are to have students learn why scientists accept evolution as the explanation for the diversity and history of life, and to understand why all the life sciences are built on this theoretical foundation. To accomplish this, we must help our students master complicated information so that they can appreciate the wonder and grandeur of this view of life, and can use this foundation for their future roles as scientifically literate citizens. It does not advance science education to waste time on non-issues."49
Given this state of affairs, a school district -- or a state -- cannot argue that it is a simple matter of democracy to advocate a scientifically unacceptable opinion because a majority or vocal minority of citizens holds that opinion. One can understand the desire of parents to raise their children to think as they do. But if the parents' belief is based on poor understanding of the content and methods of science, it is well if they hope and expect that their children will understand science better than they do. In doing so, parents will provide the means to expose the children to expertise beyond their own. Indeed, that is why most parents want to send their children to school.
About two-thirds of the states today have science standards that are consistent with this educational philosophy and teach their students accordingly. Americans owe it to the students in the other third to raise their standards to the same level. Poor education, wherever it may be, affects us all.
Appendix A: Two Model Treatments of
Evolution: Excerpts From the California
and North Carolina Science Standards
|
1. California Note: Items marked with an asterisk are optional and are intended for advanced students.50 Grade 2 Life Sciences
Earth Sciences
Grade 3 Life Sciences
Earth Sciences
Grade 6 Focus on Earth Science
Grade 7 Focus on Life Science Evolution
Earth and Life History (Earth Science)
|