Barbara Forrest
Livingston Parish lies in southeastern Louisiana, near Lake
Ponchartrain. The parish seat is the town of Livingston, about 75
miles northwest of New Orleans.
In 1994 a religious organization called the Origins Resource
Association, based in New Orleans, began a campaign to force
creationist doctrines into science classes taught in the parish's
public schools. I led the opposition to that campaign, and my
strategy was to expose the falsity of the creationists'
"scientific" claims. Here is my account of what happened.
•
In May 1994, three members of the Origins Resource Association --
including the organization's president, Edward Boudreaux --
attended a meeting of the Livingston Parish chapter of the
Christian Coalition. According to an item on the agenda for that
meeting, the Coalition chapter was contemplating an effort to force
a change in the Livingston Parish School Board's "policy on the
teaching of evolution." That policy said that science teachers
would provide instruction about organic evolution, in accordance
with the State of Louisiana's recommended curriculum.
The Christian Coalition and the ORA evidently collaborated during
the ensuing months, and in March of 1995 they made two moves.
The ORA sent to the School Board a document titled Models of
Origins Curriculum Guide and began pressing the Board to
adopt it. At about the same time, the head of the Christian
Coalition chapter, John Gallman, delivered a 1,500-signature
petition that urged the Board to put "intelligent design" into
science classes as an alternative to the principle of organic
evolution
[see note 1, below]. (Significantly, Gallman did not
tell the Board that he was working for the Christian Coalition.)
The Creationists' Charlatanism
The ORA Curriculum Guide hadn't been written for Livingston Parish.
The ORA had compiled it, at least a year earlier, during a campaign
to promote creationism in the schools of Tangipahoa Parish, which
borders Livingston Parish on the east. The guide's
"Acknowledgements" [sic] page expressed thanks "to the Tangipahoa
Parish School Board for their interest and cooperation in the
development of this document." Strangely, though, the guide had
never been introduced into the Tangipahoa proceedings, and the ORA
had apparently dropped out of those proceedings shortly after they
began.
The Livingston Parish School Board turned the Curriculum Guide over
to the Parish's science curriculum committee (which comprised 25
science teachers) and charged the committee with examining the guide
and recommending whether it ought to be adopted. I soon got a copy
of it for myself and began to analyze it. I was assisted in this
effort by Nicole Berthelemy-Okazaki, a biologist who teaches in
Southeastern Louisiana University's Department of Biological
Sciences.
The cover of the Curriculum Guide showed the name of only one
author, Edward A. Boudreaux, but the "Acknowledgements" page cited
contributions by two other persons: Martha A. Hohensee and David A.
Prentice. As I would learn later, Hohensee was a special-education
teacher from Orleans Parish, and Prentice taught at a Bible college.
As far as content was concerned, the Curriculum Guide was
a testament to creationist incompetence and charlatanism. Its
only respectable passages had been plagiarized from curriculum
documents issued by the State of Louisiana, such as the state's
set of objectives for science education. All the material that
hadn't been plagiarized was hogwash, evidently intended to create
confusion and to introduce creationist slogans -- such as
"intelligent design," "initial complexity" and "a young Earth" --
into science classes
[note 2]. For example:
To illustrate what I mean by hogwash and the deliberate creation of
confusion, here are some items from the "Competency Performance
Objectives" in the Curriculum Guide:
- Objective 1 said that "The Student will be able to: Define
Origins in relation to science, history and belief." The first
"Suggested Activity" for achieving this objective was to "Discuss
belief as a consideration for which a scientific test can be
devised" -- which falsely insinuated that any and all personal
beliefs can be tested scientifically. In another "Suggested
Activity," the student was to ponder a "case example" in which a
paleontologist supposedly found a dinosaur bone and then published a
report saying that the dinosaur "had bad breath and a nasty
disposition"!
- Objective 8 introduced "initial complexity," along with the
meaningless, redundant phrase "initial primitiveness." The student
was expected to "Define initial primitiveness and initial
complexity in relation to expected direction of change," with the
help of two activities. The first was to locate "Initial
Primitiveness (I.P.) and Initial Complexity (I.C.)" on a "bar graph
or continuum," with no explanation of how this might be done or why
it would be relevant to anything. In the second activity, the
student would have to "Research and report on (1) Prigogine's model
of how order might arise in chaotic systems; (2) Second Law of
Thermodynamics and circumstances needed to temporarily override it."
This was plain chicanery. There are no circumstances that
"temporarily override" the second law, so the students were to be
sent on a wild-goose chase. And it was preposterous to ask young
students to read the abstruse publications of Ilya Prigogine, whose
scientific work had brought him a Nobel Prize in 1977. These two
"activities" obviously had no purpose but to leave the student
confused and bewildered.
- In Objective 14, the student was expected to discuss
mutations and DNA duplication, but there were two irrelevant
activities that involved vestigial organs: "Discuss the concept
of vestigial organs," and "Give students an equal number of
Wedersheim's list of leftover organs. Students research and
identify the function of organs on their list"
[note 3]. There
was no information about "Wedersheim" or where his list of organs
could be found, and these matters are still mysterious today.
Even with help from Berthelemy-Okazaki and from the National
Center for Science Education, I have not been able to discover
any reference to a "Wedersheim" in the biological literature.
- Objective 20 included an extraneous phrase which the
guide-writers had enclosed in brackets: "State reasons for the growing
popularity of cladistics and Neo-Darwinism [should be Punctuated
Equilibria]." What this meant was unclear. It might have meant
that the ORA intended to replace the term "Neo-Darwinism" with
"Punctuated Equilibria," believing that these two terms are
equivalent. (They are not.) An activity accompanying this
objective was to "Discuss Schindewolf's `Hopeful Monster'
mechanism." This was another indication of the ORA's incompetence.
The "hopeful monster" hypothesis was not the work of Otto
Schindewolf (an early-20th-century paleontologist). It had been put
forth by Richard Goldschmidt, a German-American zoologist, who
mentioned it in his book The Material Basis of Evolution, published
in 1941. It is not important today, and pretending that it
represents any current scientific thinking about evolution would
only cause students to become more confused.
- In Objective 21 the ORA promoted the creationists' claim that
Earth is only a few thousand years old. The student was expected to
"List evidence for an old earth and a young earth," as if the age of
Earth were an unresolved scientific issue. Where would "evidence"
for a young earth come from? The answer was provided in an
accompanying activity -- "View the filmstrip: `Geological
Formations: Young Or Old?' " Turning to the list of "References and
Resources" at the back of the Curriculum Guide, I found that this
filmstrip was a creationist production, distributed by the Creation
Filmstrip Center in Haviland, Kansas.
The "References and Resources" list was interesting in itself.
To achieve a look of legitimacy, it showed some titles of
scientific works (apparently lifted from state curriculum
guides). Mixed with these were the titles of various
creationist creations, including the books Of Pandas and
People: The Central Question of Biological Origins and
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
[note 4]. Another
creationist book was listed as How to Teach Origins,
although its full title is How To Teach Origins (Without
Interference from the ACLU). The ORA's writers had altered
the title, evidently hoping to downplay the legal ramifications
of their proposal. .
The Curriculum Guide also contained bizarre activities that were
irrelevant to any "objectives" or that seemed to have no purpose at
all. In one case, students would "Pour HCl or vinegar over clam
shells" and "Determine the pattern and direction of change." There
was no explanation of what this meant or what value it might have.
In another case, students would "Blow upward on a ping pong ball
with a hair dryer, then blow downward" -- which was supposed to help
the students achieve this objective: "Identify and relate I.P.'s Big
Bang and I.C.'s natural laws of science to the development of the
universe"!
I made the School Board aware of the fraudulence of the ORA
Curriculum Guide, which I described at Board meetings, and I
publicly challenged the credentials of the people who had put the
Curriculum Guide together. (I also informed the Board that John
Gallman was an agent of the Christian Coalition. I did this during
a Board meeting at which Gallman refused even to tell his name
until, at my urging, the Board required him to do so.) I hoped
that if I called attention to the guide's duplicity and sloppiness,
the Board would see that this document deserved to be consigned to
the trash without further ado. I did not succeed in this.
In June the creationists' campaign got a boost. Raiford Leader,
the curriculum supervisor for Livingston Parish's schools, invited
the creationists to develop lesson plans for two science courses.
The lesson plans were to be linked to two state-approved science
textbooks: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich's General Science (1989), which
was already in use in the parish's 9th-grade general-science course;
and Holt, Rinehart and Winston's Modern Biology (1989), which was
being used in the 10th-grade biology course.
Leader extended a similar invitation to me, but I refused to bite.
I could see nothing to be gained by such an exercise, and I already
had plenty to keep me busy. Nicole Berthelemy-Okazaki and I were
beginning to work on a formal critique of the Curriculum Guide, and
I also had a great many letters to write.
One of my letters went to Ilya Prigogine. I told him how the ORA
had tried to connect him to the notion that "circumstances" could
"temporarily override" the second law of thermodynamics.
In his reply Prigogine said, "Regarding the [Curriculum Guide]
prepared by the Origins Resource Association, I would like to note
in particular that my theories on the origin of order do not in any
way find an exception to the second law of thermodynamics. The
second law remains valid in all physical processes." (I mailed
copies of his reply, along with articles identifying him as a Nobel
laureate, to all the members of the School Board and all the members
of the science curriculum committee.)
Some of my other letters went to scientific organizations, to
individual scientists, or to national education organizations. I
told them what was going on in Livingston Parish, and I asked for
help in countering the creationists' campaign.
The education organizations were the School Science and Mathematics
Association, the National Science Teachers Association, the National
Association of Geology Teachers, and the American Association of
Physics Teachers. Only the first one responded, advising me to seek
help from the National Center for Science Education. The three
other associations didn't reply at all, to my great disappointment.
However, I did get results from the scientific community,
especially after one scientist to whom I had written alerted his
colleagues by using the PaleoNet Pages on the Internet.
Altogether, about two dozen scientific societies, individual
scientists, and individual science teachers sent letters to the
Board, urging that the ORA Curriculum Guide not be adopted.
An Old Creationist Trick
Early in August the creationists submitted the lesson plans that
Raiford Leader had invited them to write. The author of the lesson
plans was Charles Voss, who teaches electrical and computer
engineering at Louisiana State University (in Baton Rouge). The
School Board turned Voss's documents over to the same committee that
was evaluating the Curriculum Guide.
Both the 9th-grade and the 10th-grade plans incorporated the same
kinds of ridiculous, confusing material that had appeared in the
Curriculum Guide. For example, in one of his lesson plans for
10th-grade biology Voss gave a highly misleading passage about
mutations and chromosomal aberrations, then presented two
activities that were based on glaring misrepresentations. Here is
one of them, allegedly intended to "demonstrate what mutation
probability means":
Needed: 1 die and a sheet of graph paper.
Goal: Try to get from a point at 1,1 (species A) at the lower left
hand corner of the graph paper to the upper right hand corner
(species B). Instead of using the 1 to 1000 probability
evolutionists suggest use the die with a probability of 1 to 6. Let
1 represent a favorable mutation and advance one square towards
species B along any path. Any other number represents an
unfavorable mutation and means go back one square. Three successive
unfavorable mutations means go back to A since the organism is
probably dead.
QUESTIONS: Will we ever get species B?
If the odds were 1 to 1000, would this help us get species B?
Challenge the students to choose (a) macro evolution or (b) creation
by design to explain the diversity in living organisms. . . .
Voss was using an old creationist trick, aimed at convincing
children that there is virtually no chance that species can undergo
evolution -- virtually no chance that one species can give rise to
another. It is a trick because it presents a completely false model
of evolution and a completely false picture of how biologists view
the process of speciation. Students are led to believe that
biologists regard evolution as a process in which a particular
species (A) tries to turn itself into another particular species (B)
-- but this model has no scientific basis, has no standing in
biology, and is unrelated to anything that actually happens in
nature. No biologist holds that evolution has a preordained goal,
or that a species purposefully strives to become some other,
predetermined species.
As expected, Voss's 10th-grade lesson plans included some
references to the textbook Modern Biology. In one instance, Voss
directly attacked the book's author, Albert Towle. Commenting on
an activity given in Modern Biology, Voss wrote: "This
investigation is not good science as presented. . . . The data
seems [sic] manufactured. Any conclusions drawn from this
investigation are in error." When I saw this, I called Towle and
told him what the ORA was doing. Then I sent him a letter and some
copies of pages from Voss's lesson plans.
Towle sent a long, strongly worded response, which I copied and
distributed to the School Board and the science curriculum
committee. He denounced Voss's material, rejected any attempt to
associate Voss's lesson plans with Modern Biology, and cited a
dozen cases in which Voss had made false or misleading statements.
In mid-August, Berthelemy-Okazaki and I finished our written
critique of the Curriculum Guide. Again, I sent copies to all the
members of the School Board and all the members of the science
curriculum committee. The critique was 70 pages long. Most of it
consisted of our own analytical work, demonstrating that the guide
was loaded with false claims, scientific errors, and misleading
language. However, we also included some observations from Anne
Sinclair, a professor of science education in Southeastern Louisiana
University's Department of Teacher Education. Sinclair's comments
included these: "No teacher could teach by that guide. . . . The
objectives are not cited specifically in an observable or measurable
manner. . . . I would give the [Curriculum Guide] an F."
The Committee's Decision
On 26 September 1995 the science curriculum committee met to hear
comments from the public and to write a recommendation concerning
the Curriculum Guide. The people who addressed the committee
included three scientists from Louisiana State University: Gary
Byerly, chairman of the Department of Geology and Geophysics; Mark
Hafner, a zoologist who is the curator of LSU's Museum of Natural
Science; and Russ Chapman, a biologist who serves as an LSU
vice-chancellor.
Byerly stressed the fact that Earth is several billion years old,
cited some of the pertinent evidence, and made clear that there is
no scientific question about whether Earth is "old" or "young." He
also cited several misrepresentations in the Curriculum Guide.
Hafner told the committee: "If the children of Livingston Parish are
subjected to [the guide's] misinformation, we biologists at LSU,
Southeastern and other universities are certainly going to have a
mess to untangle when your children get to college." Chapman
commented on the high quality of the education that Livingston
Parish's schools have offered in recent years, and then he talked
about the status of the theory of evolution in the scientific
community. While there is debate about various aspects of
evolutionary processes, Chapman said, the principle of evolution is
a reality.
Boudreaux and Voss spoke too, with Boudreaux attempting to
undermine the evidence that evolution occurs. Voss was woefully
unprepared, and he was completely stumped when a member of the
committee pressed him to explain how "intelligent design" could be
tested scientifically.
After hearing from these and other speakers, the members of the
science curriculum committee retired to consider their
recommendation. They soundly rejected the Curriculum Guide, by a
vote of 23 to 2, and said that the Livingston Parish schools should
Reject creationism in the science curriculum and reject all words
and phrases that encompass creationism, intelligent design theory,
abrupt appearance theory, model of origins, scientific creationism,
initial complexity, and any other topics that confuse science and
religion. . . .
The Board's Subterfuge
That should have marked the end of the creationists' campaign, but
it didn't.
On 2 November, the Board's own curriculum committee, consisting of
four Board members, met to decide whether the Board should accept or
reject the science curriculum committee's recommendation. That
process was derailed, however, when a creationist member of the
committee, Ernest Carrier, moved instead that the recommendation
should be referred to the full Board. His motion succeeded.
The next meeting of the full Board was due to be held on 16
November. As that day approached, I alerted the American Civil
Liberties Union of Louisiana. The ACLU sent a letter to the Board,
promising to seek litigants for a lawsuit if the Board adopted the
ORA materials.
When the Board met on the 16th, Carrier again was able to prevent
any decision on the science curriculum committee's recommendation.
He introduced a substitute motion that called for a new policy to
govern classroom discussions of "origins": Science classes could
include "student initiated discussion" of "different theories
surrounding the study of the origins of life," if the teacher
considered this to be "a part of that day's teaching plan." This
motion was approved by a vote of 5 to 4. The issue of the ORA
materials was ignored, the science curriculum committee was snubbed,
and the ORA materials themselves faded into oblivion.
The Board's "origins" policy was a subterfuge, similar to the
policies by which some school districts have tried to inject
prayers (or other religious devotions) into school activities,
under the pretense that the prayers are "student-initiated." The
"origins" policy was designed to enable fundamentalist students,
prompted by fundamentalist parents, to bring biblical religion into
science classes.
That policy still stands, but it does not seem to have had the
effect that Ernest Carrier was hoping for. I have heard of only
one incident in which a student attempted to start a discussion of
creationism in a science class, and that attempt failed. The
teacher cut it off and proceeded with a lesson about evolution.
In the final analysis, the outcome of our battle with the ORA
creationists was mixed. We exposed the creationists as frauds, we
prevented the adoption of the ORA's Curriculum Guide and lesson
plans, and we thus prevented the formal establishment of religious
instruction in the science classrooms of Livingston Parish. Yet we
did not achieve the definitive victory that would have been ours if
the Board had explicitly rejected the ORA materials, instead of
dodging the issue and letting the ORA documents sink into limbo.
To the extent that we succeeded, we succeeded for two major
reasons. First, we didn't just rail at the creationists and call
them ignoramuses and charlatans. We showed that they were
ignoramuses and charlatans, and we accomplished this by doing
extensive homework, by producing written refutations of their
"science," and by providing these refutations directly to the
teachers on the science curriculum committee. Second, we sought
help from scientists. One teacher later said to me that the letter
from Prigogine had told him all that he needed to know about the
creationists and their Curriculum Guide.
I hope that this account of our experiences will be helpful to
others who must battle creationists to defend science education in
local school systems.
Editor's notes
- The term intelligent design is one of the code-phrases
that creationists have adopted to replace the word
creation. Other such phrases include sudden
appearance and abrupt appearance. The creationists
have shunned creation ever since a federal court declared
that the concept of creation is not science. To learn more about
this, see TTL, November-December 1995, page 8.
[return to text]
- The expression initial complexity reflects the
creationists' assertion that the life appeared on Earth abruptly,
in forms as complex as the organisms that exist today. The
phrase a young Earth refers to the fundamentalist belief
that Earth is only a few thousand years old. For information
about the origin of this belief, see "Wrong Again" in the
March-April issue of TTL, page 10. [return to text]
- Creationists reject and denounce the scientific view of
vestigial organs, because that view doesn't square with religious
beliefs about divine design. The creationists claim that no
vestigial organs exist, and they promote that claim by using
word-tricks. They pretend that "vestigial" means useless; then
they try to find or imagine some function for each organ that
scientists regard as vestigial; and then they assert that the
organ isn't vestigial because it isn't useless. This is absurd.
"Vestigial" does not mean useless, so the creationists'
assertions don't make any sense. The theory of evolution
recognizes that a vestigial organ may retain some function or may
even assume a new function, distinct from the one that it
originally performed. [return to text]
- Pandas, published in 1989, is a fake "biology" book
that creationists have been plugging for use in high schools.
(See TTL, March-April 1990, page 1, and TTL, July-
August 1994, page 12.) Evolution: A Theory in Crisis is a
pseudoscientific tract that creationists often cite to support
their religious doctrines. It is a protracted essay in
ignorance, and it has been resoundingly discredited by scientific
reviewers. See, for example, Michael Ruse's review in New
Scientist, 13 June 1985. [return to text]
Barbara Forrest is a professor of philosophy at Southeastern
Louisiana University (in Hammond), teaching in the Department of
History and Government. She has served on the board of directors
of the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana.
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