Is Science a Popularity Contest?
Thanks to McLeroy and his similarly unscientific colleagues on the state school board, Texas is only one board member’s vote away from passing the “strengths and weaknesses” commandment.
I’ve already noted how his supposed weaknesses in evolution, just as with gravity and relativity, are more about incompleteness than they are about being wrong.
The term weakness is another code word exploited by creationists to further their political agenda, appealing to people’s sense of fairness instead of grounding their criticism in science.
The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, for example, trumpets its 2003 Zogby poll of Texans to demonstrate how citizens are clamoring for “both sides” to be taught about how life came to be on earth.
In that poll, 75 percent of Texans agreed that “the state board of education should approve biology textbooks that teach Darwin’s theory of evolution, but also the scientific evidence against it.”
Only 16 percent believed the board “should approve biology textbooks that teach only Darwin’s theory of evolution and the scientific evidence that supports it”; 9 percent were unsure.
So by shrouding science under the cloak of popular opinion, the institute would have Texas’ school board mandate the “strengths and weaknesses” change to its science curriculum.
Too bad that scientific principles don’t depend on a popularity contest to be true. At one time, educated people believed Aristotle’s “law” that objects of different weight would fall at different speeds (i.e., a heavier object should fall faster than a lighter one). That was science for two thousand years. There’s a reason why a significant part of that span was known as the Dark Ages.
The scary part is that such “common sense” is still believed by a lot of people today — just like the majority of Americans who believe life on earth is only tens of thousands of years old rather than hundreds of millions.
Just the other day, I argued with a well educated friend about whether gravity acts equally on objects of different weight. He didn’t change his mind until I demonstrated with a light wooden pencil and a heavy stapler.
If only evolution were that easy to demonstrate. Unfortunately, the theory describes a process that operates too slowly and in too complex a fashion to show disbelievers.
The big problem with the methodology of the Zogby poll is the presumption in its question that the theory of evolution has weaknesses and that those weaknesses are better explained by creationism.
Chris Mooney of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry observes that the Zogby poll’s questions about teaching both evolution and the evidence against it subtly manipulated respondents:
The answer to the … question is a no-brainer for anyone who believes in open-mindedness, no matter what they think about evolution. … [It] presumes the existence of “scientific evidence” that contradicts Darwin’s theory, and thus automatically biases respondents towards the Intelligent Design perspective.
Imperiling Schools for Political Gain
Texas school board chairman McLeroy buys into that idea, describing the controversy as a debate between “two systems of science … you’ve got a creationist system and a naturalist system.”
Similarly, Zogby’s question that resulted in 84 percent approval of teaching the “scientific evidence that points to an intelligent design of life” presumes that such evidence actually exists. It doesn’t.
Unlike evolution, Intelligent Design lacks a framework that can stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny. And since when does God need to be dressed up as science for people to believe in Him? That’s why it’s called faith.
And it’s a perversion of that faith to manipulate Texas’ school system according to creationists’ political agenda. Is their faith so weak that they can’t rely on their churches to tend to their congregations’ spiritual hunger?
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, stands with the creationists, calling intelligent design “a valid scientific theory” that deserves to be taught in Texas schools. Perry named McLeroy to the school board. Shocker.
What kind of governor places political gain over the reputation of his state’s schools?
