November Editorial

November Editorial Teach Evolution, Learn Science: We’re Ahead of Turkey, But Behind Iran. The experience of sequencing the human genome, and uncovering this most remarkable of all texts, was both a stunning scientific achievement and an occasion of worship. Collins F S “The Language of God” [1] Our discovery put an end to a debate as old as the human species: Does life have some magical, mystical essence, or is it, like any chemical reaction carried out in a science class, the product of normal physical and chemical processes? Is there something divine at the heart of a cell that brings it to life? The double helix answered that question with a definitive No. James D Watson “DNA: The Secret of Life” [2] It’s clear from these statements that the religious beliefs of any individual scientist have no bearing on the validity or significance of the work. With Watson as its founder and Collins its executor, the public Human Genome Project was fueled by the energy of agnostic and believer alike. But what about the larger society in which these attitudes compete: do national choices among one or another systems of belief influence the course of science and how it is taught? Ahead of Turkey, Behind Iran Nothing illustrates the influence of religious belief more than our nation’s recurrent battle over the teaching of Darwinian evolution. Small, but significant victories in Pennsylvania and Kansas have been countered by proposals in several other states, Ohio the most recent, to “teach the controversy”, as if intelligent design were a proposition that could explain microbial resistance to penicillin. Sad to say, while it’s hard to find a modern biologist who does not accept Theodosius Dobzhansky’s aphorism that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" [3] the bulk of Americans have trouble making sense of Darwin. A recent study published in Science [4] documents that fully one third of American adults believe that evolution is “absolutely false” while only 14 percent of adults acknowledge that evolution is “definitely true”. In Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and France over 80% of adults had no trouble accepting the facts of evolution, nor did 78% of Japanese. Indeed, of 33 countries surveyed as to their acceptance of evolution, the United States ended up as 32nd on the list. Turkey finished dead last, while Cyprus beat us by a whisker. Perhaps in response to the “intelligent design” movement, the percentage of U.S. adults accepting evolution has actually declined over the last 20 years. Supporting this notion, Miller et al found that ”the total effect of fundamentalist religious beliefs on attitudes toward evolution (using a standardized metric) was nearly twice as much in the United States as in the nine European countries.” They concluded that “individuals who hold a strong belief in a personal God and who pray frequently were significantly less likely to view evolution as probably or definitely true than adults with less conservative religious views.” [4] Thus, while Francis Collins may have resolved the conflict between scripture and evolution in his own mind, fundamentalism has separated Americans not only from Europe and Japan but from other parts of the globe. A bizarre editorial in Nature, effulgent with praise for the leader of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, contrasted his pro- science policies with those of Christian (read U.S.) attitudes towards evolution and stem- cell research: “One practical advantage for science in Muslim countries is the lack of direct interference of religious doctrine, such as exists in many Christian countries. There has never, for example, been a debate about darwinian (sic) evolution, and human embryonic stem-cell research is constrained by humanistic rather than religious ethics.”[5] A Hot-button Issue The split between our country and the rest of the world was brought home to me at Woods Hole this summer. Hundreds of FASEB buttons urging citizens to TEACH EVOLUTION, LEARN SCIENCE were snapped up eagerly by packs of students, post- docs and lab people from all over the United States. (They are available from FASEB’s website on evolutionary resources http://www.evolution.faseb.org/) But while folks from Maine to Mississippi knew what the fuss was about, many of the European scientists who work at Woods Hole each summer simply shook their heads. “Only in America…” mourned an Italian microscopist, “Poor America…” sighed a young German biochemist. They were assured that nowhere else in the world is the Scopes “monkey trial” replayed daily in the courts. And nowhere else in the world is a leader of modern science likely to argue that: You’ve got to accept who Christ was and what He said, or reject the whole thing... I do think that the historical record of Christ’s life on earth and his Resurrection is a very powerful one. [6] The success of the human genome project was guaranteed at a Washington press conference in June of 2000. From the podium, President Clinton told the world that human genome was “the language with which God created man” On one side of the president stood Francis Collins, leader of the NIH—or public—arm of the Human Genome Project. Collins listened to the president: by the summer of 2006, Collins’s book “The Language of God” [1] was right up there with Ann Coulter on the best-seller list. On Clinton’s other side in 2000 stood Craig Venter, head of Celera, the private company that set the pace of the quest. Venter had also paid attention to Clinton’s phrase: he protested that “the human genome is not the book of life, it is not the blueprint of humanity, it is not the language of God….”[7] The father of the project, Jim Watson, seated behind Clinton, Venter and Collins on the podium, had no immediate comment on the language, syntax or intentions of the deity. By the summer of 2006, Watson’s magisterial book “DNA: The Secret of Life”[2] had not appeared on any best-seller list. At the time, Sidney Brenner quipped that "President Clinton described the human genome as the language with which God created man. Perhaps now we can view the Bible as the language with which man created God."[8] Whether one holds with Collins or Venter, Watson or Brenner, we might suggest that modern experimental science is by definition, uni- and not multicultural. Scientists from many cultures and all sorts of religious belief work in a republic of reason, where each can claim "Civis Scientium sum.” The threat to that republic is not the personal belief of any one scientist, but the intrusion of organized belief into the practice or teaching of science itself. Sad to say, faith-based fear of science, as documented by Miller et al [4] in the case of evolution, has been around for a while. Darwin’s “American Cousin “: John William Draper John William Draper M.D. (1811-1882) Faith-based fear of science has a long history in America. As late as 1854, doctors in New York State were not permitted to dissect the human body in medical schools, a practice routine in Europe for centuries. Finally, a statute called “The Bone Bill” passed the legislature by a whisker, but only after a bitter public battle between proponents of medical science and defenders of “natural law.” The doctors pleaded that Vesalius’s great dissection atlas “De Humanis Corporis Fabrica” had been used as a manual by medical students in more enlightened parts of the world since 1543. But in 1854, Harper's Weekly argued the anti-dissection cause in phrases that sound very much like the Bush administration’s stand against stem cell research or Senator Sam Brownback on “intelligent design”: Science may prove ever so clearly that there is nothing there but carbon, oxygen, and lime... but all this can never eradicate the sentiment we are considering, and that is too deeply in our laws of thinking, our laws of speech, our most interior moral and religious emotions. [9] Interior moral and religious emotions yielded to medical science when antebellum Manhattan finally caught up with Renaissance Brussels. The doctors’ public campaign had carried the day: “Teach Anatomy, Learn Science” so to speak. The driving spirit behind the politics of the Bone Bill was John William Draper, founder and first president of New York University School of Medicine. [10] Draper sounded the tocsin for the progressive side in his 1874 “ The History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science,” a best-seller which went through twenty editions in English alone: The history of science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries. It is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers—the expansive force of the human intellect on one side and the compression arising from traditional faith and human interest on the other. As large a number of persons now live to seventy years as lived to forty, three hundred years ago. [11] We might note that mean longevity in the United States in 1840 was about 40 years. By the 1980’s, it was approaching 80 years.[12] That doubling of human longevity, as Draper would have been the first to argue, can hardly be credited to major increments in “our most interior moral and religious emotions.” Draper not only wrote a book that became the machine de guerre of free thought for the better part of a century, but as Professor of Chemistry at NYU, shared with Samuel F.B. Morse, Professor of Fine Arts at NYU, the honor of producing the first daguerreotype portraits by an American.

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