The politics of exploration

Ars book reviews typically focus on works for the general public that we consider significant and insightful. But today we're making an exception: the work in question is meant for school children, and it's an atrociously bad book. So why review it? Because, unfortunately, it may well turn out to be very significant. The leading lights of the Intelligent Design Movement, the Discovery Institute, have written this textbook on evolution, and they are doing everything they can to make sure it gets into schools.

In response to a column I wrote a few months back, one of the authors of the text, called Explore Evolution, kindly sent me a copy. What follows is not a comprehensive examination of the information contained in the text (which would require more text than EE itself), but rather a summary of the history and politics that make the book significant, and my own perspective as a biologist on how that context produced a text that's wildly inappropriate for use in a science classroom.

This doesn't mean that I won't mention the scientific evidence that's referenced in EE, but I generally won't delve into it in extensive detail. For the most part, extensive details aren't actually essential to understanding the problems with EE. So, with that caveat, we'll do as the Discovery Institute has, and start with the politics.

The strategy for exploration

The Discovery Institute, as indicated by its wedge document, wishes to eliminate science's focus on natural causes. The group views this focus as the source of society's increasing materialism, which makes it anathema in the belief system of Discovery's members. Stephen C. Meyer, the lead author of EE, heads the Discovery Institute and is mentioned by name in the wedge document, as is coauthor Paul Nelson.

Evolution has been singled out for special ire by Discovery, as it provides an explanation for the origin of humanity based solely on natural processes. Although the ID movement has not developed a research program or even proposed a scientific formulation of its ideas, it has gotten a surprising amount of traction with its attack on the science of evolution. Tapping into a rich vein of American thought that dates back roughly a century, the group's members have used popular books and appearances in the press to argue that the scientific theory of evolution is on the verge of abandonment, having been pushed to its most recent "inevitable" collapse by new molecular evidence.





Judge John Jones' Dover ruling

caused some states to back off of ID.

More significantly, however, Discovery Institute fellows have been attempting to have their arguments against evolution incorporated into the US public school system. They testified in favor of education standards in Ohio and Kansas that targeted evolution for special criticism—Kansas' standards went even further and eliminated reference to science's search for natural causes. In the wake of the Dover case, however, both states have reversed these policies, leaving Discovery without a foot in the door of the US education system.

EE appears to be part of a strategy to change that. In June, Louisiana became the first state to enact a law specifically enabling the use of supplemental materials for the critical evaluation of evolution; similar legislation has been introduced in several other states. EE appears to have been intelligently designed to be the sort of supplemental text that's appropriate under the Louisiana legislation, and so it's likely to be making an appearance in classrooms there. But EE may appear in other states, as the approval process for supplementary material is often far less strict than that governing textbooks.

Inquiry-based nonlearning

That said, Discovery faces at least one very significant challenge in its anti-evolution campaign: evolution is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community because the evidence for it is extensive and comprehensive. Taking on that evidence runs the risk of simply emphasizing its significance, so EE maneuvers its way around this roadblock by using (and abusing) an approach to teaching called inquiry-based learning (IBL).

IBL avoids the rote memorization endemic in past science classes by having a teacher guide students through a limited version of the scientific process. Students are given a question or problem, provided with the opportunity to obtain information and data relevant to that problem, and then guided through the process of analyzing that information and reaching conclusions based on it. This isn't an "anything goes" approach to science education, though—teachers and lesson plans play an extremely important role in ensuring the students obtain accurate and relevant information and adhere to the rules of logic when drawing conclusions based on it. After all, it's not a good educational method if students come out of it deciding that the force of gravity is random or unmeasurable.





Trained professionals can lead

students through IBL exercises.

EE gives its authors the chance to determine what information is relevant for students in order to apply IBL to evolution, taking the teachers and professional educators out of the equation. It neatly dodges the issue of the vast evidence that has led to the acceptance of evolution by the scientific community; the book's introduction says that the students will see that in their normal textbooks anyway, so EE's authors can simply present an abbreviated version of mainstream science.

Perhaps more significantly, it omits the entire process of assisting students in reaching a conclusion. It divides evolution into a series of topics that are discussed separately. Each topic includes a case for standard science, a reply to it, and then a further discussion area, where it switches back and forth between the two. The text assiduously avoids suggesting that any conclusion can be reached at all. At best, it could be described as a partial implementation of IBL, if it weren't for the atrocious presentation of scientific information it contains (more, much more, on that below).

Divide and conquer

There are two obvious tactical reasons for the book's omission of any explicit conclusions about the "debate." The first reason is simply that the authors know precisely the sort of conclusions they'd like everyone to reach: some variation of the creationism that has been deemed legally intolerable by the courts. But they're also undoubtedly aware of survey results that indicate that well over 10 percent of US teachers "teach creationism as a 'valid scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species.'" By avoiding any conclusions, EE will allow those teachers to lead their students into precisely those conclusions that the book's authors desire, all while providing them, and the Discovery Institute, with plausible deniability.

But the "divide and conquer" approach has a third feature that may also have been precisely what the authors intended. As the book switches back and forth between perspectives and quickly changes topics, what gets completely lost is the internal consistency—the consilience—among the different lines of evidence. The molecular, cladistic, and fossil evidence agree on the derivation of whales, birds, tetrapods, and other evolutionary transitions. But EE presents them separately, attacking each in isolation.

One of science's great strengths is the ability to create a coherent understanding from disparate lines of evidence. One of the hardest tasks faced by science teachers is to weave the lines of evidence together for students, so that they can appreciate just how many phenomena a major theory ties together. By attacking these lines of evidence separately, EE's authors make it easier to claim that the fact that any one of them supports evolution was just a lucky fluke (and they do precisely that). This makes the hardest job of a teacher that much harder, and it makes a mockery of the use of IBL in the sciences.