Smrt Lernins

Happy Darwin Day to one and all! Here’s a little bit about what Darwin Day means to me:

My county’s public school system (an otherwise well-thought-of system, high scores and all those things one uses to grade a public school system as “good”) has a somewhat ignoble history of dealing with the topic of evolution. Up through the ’90s, the county’s policy was to avoid the topic entirely, so as to avoid “compelling of any student to study the origin of human species,” a stunning example of the separation of church science and state. In 2001, the school system started looking for new science books and new approaches towards evolution (new approaches encouraged, I suspect, by my former biology teacher, Dr. Wesley McCoy, who has testified in favor of evolution at public hearings and federal court — it’s worth noting that Dr. McCoy, when I knew him at least, was also highly active in his church and involved in trying to bridge the gaps between the religious and scientific communities). When the religious community got wind of this shift towards the more scientifically-sound teaching of evolution, they responded with a protest signed by some 2,300 parents (a number which makes up only a small percentage of the parents of the 100,000+ students enrolled in Cobb County schools).

The county, in order to avoid a media mess over the change toward a more evolutionist science text (the horror!), decided the solution was to include this sticker in the new science texts:

This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

Approved by
Cobb County Board of Education
Thursday, March 28, 2002

I was lucky to have graduated five years (and my brother two years) prior to this incident, but it still struck a nerve. A small group of religious individuals had put pressure on a public school over the inclusion of secular scientific theory — and had won. To those with a decent understanding of science, “scientific theory” means an explanation based on observation, experimentation, and reasoning, especially one that has been tested and confirmed as a general principle helping to explain and predict natural phenomena. We understand that a “fact” is a single piece of quantifiable data and a “theory” is the means of correlating and interpreting multiple facts. To say that say “evolution is not a fact, but a theory,” is to say “a duck is not a wing, but a bird.” There’s a twisted degree of limited accuracy there (the wing is not the whole duck, nor is the duck nothing but a wing), but a fundamental lack of understanding of the relationship between evolutionary theory and the factual existence of evolution (the wing is one necessary component of the whole duck; the wing doesn’t exist without the duck). Evolution is a theory…that evolution itself exists is a fact. Trying to use the “just a theory, not a fact” argument to discount the scientific validity of evolution only demonstrates one’s lack of understanding of the basic principles of empirical evidence-based science and of current modern evolutionary synthesis. Or, as one writer put it, “Evolution isn’t just a theory; it’s triumphantly a theory!”

In 2004, plaintiffs Jeffrey Selman, Kathleen Chapman, Jeff Silver, Paul Mason, and terry Jackson, who all had children in the school system, brought suit claiming that the sticker violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. 2005, a judged ruled on the case (Selman v. Cobb County School District), finding that the stickers violated the Lemon test (which details the requirements for legislation concerning religion):

1. The government’s action must have a legitimate secular purpose;
2. The government’s action must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion; and
3. The government’s action must not result in an “excessive entanglement” of the government and religion.

The stickers failed the Lemon test because they gave the appearance that “the School Board [had] sided with the proponents of religious theories of origin in violation of the Establishment Clause.” The board’s choice of language — referring to evolution as “a theory, not a fact,” a well-known tactic of evolution-opponents, using “theory” in the colloquial sense to mean an opinion or guess — was ultimately the hill on which the battle was lost. Judge Cooper, who heard the case, wrote: “…the distinction of evolution as a theory rather than a fact is the distinction that religiously motivated individuals have specifically asked school boards to make in the most recent anti-evolution movement.”

The case was appealed and ultimately settled out of court in favor of the plaintiffs, at which time Cobb County School District state it would not order the placement of “any stickers, labels, stamps, inscriptions, or other warnings or disclaimers bearing language substantially similar to that used on the sticker that is the subject of this action.” No stickers getting in the way of children learning about evolution in public school…at least, not in Cobb County.

The National Center for Science Education, the ACLU, and Smrt Mama called this a win.

The full text of Selman v. Cobb County can be read at Talk Origins Archive, a “collection of articles and essays that explore the creationism/evolution controversy from a mainstream scientific perspective.” You can find a list of additional resources on teaching evolution to your pre-collegiate students here.