Two separate arguments

The change in the Texas Board of Education's directive on evolution that I reported on last week says that science teachers must teach "all sides" of the debate. The change isn't as harmless as I might have implied. Consider this scenario from a story by Bob Garfield and the NPR program On the Media. According to Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, if a teacher bashes evolution, a student will naturally ask, if evolution is wrong, what did happen? The teacher can respond, go read Genesis. Another scenario by Christine Castillo Comer, the former Texas Education Agency's director of science. If a teacher has to consider "all sides" a student can bring anything into the classroom and declare it must be considered. A confident teacher can at least say, "That's not science." But a teacher with a hostile administrator may succumb to pressure.

As part of the story Garfield talked to Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute (they "discover" ways to legally bash evolution in public schools and were behind the Dover, PA Intelligent Design trial). Luskin claims there really is scientific controversy surrounding evolution. Garfield accuses him of cherry-picking his supporters. Luskin responds by saying there would be a lot more supporters if scientists didn't feel they would lose their jobs if they voiced a dissent of evolution. That made me think of the well-used Fundie tactic -- we're being persecuted for our beliefs! Garfield followed that by talking to Christine Comer (mentioned above) who was persecuted, but not over dissent of evolution. She lost her job at TEA because she showed the tiniest wavering away from creationism.

Juli Berwald is a writes and edits science textbooks in Austin. She attended the TBE's hearings and offered her own testimony:

I wouldn't want students to read fiction in a history book and try to determine which part of their text is historical fact. Why would you want students to read non-scientific ideas in a science book?

Yes, there are holes -- open questions -- in evolution, though they don't collapse the whole subject into a heap of rubble. There is too much other evidence for that. These questions are about gaps in the fossil record and the "sudden" (in geologic time) explosion of species in the Cambrian era. However, Intelligent Designers pounce on those holes to "prove" evolution is flawed.

In her article for Wired Science Berwald muses that the two sides are having two completely different arguments.

What makes this debate so heated? In the hearing room, when creationists bring up weaknesses in evolution, scientists are baffled. When evolutionists say that nothing in biology makes sense without evolution, creationists are baffled.

Science is about explaining the how of the natural world: how the universe began, how life originated, how the diversity of species occurred. Scientists feel no need for their work to answer why the universe exists, why we are here. For scientists, those are questions better left to philosophy, religion and after-work hours.

Perhaps creationists find theories that only answer how to be completely unsatisfactory. Maybe for creationists, any theory that doesn't answer why contains weaknesses.

Scientists are fighting to preserve their ability to answer how unimpeded by why. Creationists are fighting to have answers to why, unthreatened by answers to how.