World News Korner

Scientist and former White House Senior Policy Analyst gets to the heart of the debate over evolution.

Courtesy of HuffPo:

Religion is the only explanation for why evolution creates such a fuss in our society. We do not see people getting exercised about Quantum Mechanics, String Theory or the Theory of Relativity. But mention evolution and you invoke an immediate and visceral reaction. Local school boards are elected, rejected and then re-elected solely on this issue. No other scientific discovery is so deeply embedded into the fabric of American politics.

Evolution is one of the most successful, thoroughly documented scientific discoveries in human history. We can see evolution in a Petri dish. Evolution has been validated across multiple fields of anthropology, geology, genetics, embryology, bacteriology, virology, and biogeography. Evolution is a fact, an undeniable, proven fact, as certain as the existence of atoms. Only some of the details of the mechanisms of evolution remain to be elucidated. Cancer is a fact, though not all the mechanisms leading to malignancy are understood. Theory does not imply uncertainty; instead, theory means a grand idea, such as General Relativity or Evolution; well-established principles that encompass and explain a broad range of phenomena.

However, more than 75 years after the trial of State of Tennessee v John Scopes and despite incredible advances in biology, many public school boards strive to eliminate the teaching of evolution from the curriculum.

The debate about intelligent design in public schools is a uniquely American phenomenon, a quirk of our history and culture. Beyond the theocracies of the Middle East, religion permeates American politics in a way not found anywhere else in the world. No other developed country, east or west, is host to a serious political movement dedicated to the destruction of secularism, with evolution exhibit number one.

We have to go all the way back to Italy in 1614 to find another example of a powerful political machine dedicated to the suppression of a broad scientific truth with deep implications for human understanding. That is the year in which Galileo's observations of the earth orbiting the sun were first denounced as a threat to the established authority of the Catholic Church, which claimed Galileo's doctrine to be false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture. We have regressed four centuries. Intelligent design is nothing but a transparent fig leaf for creationism, a child of that dark era in the 1600s. Comparing creationism or intelligent design to evolution is no different than insisting that we teach today that the sun actually orbits the earth as an alternative theory to modern astronomy. Only in the United States are such discredited views taken seriously by a large portion of the citizenry. We can and should do better. Intelligent design has no place in a science classroom -- and it does not in any western country outside these United States.

Jeff Schweitzer also discusses the arguments used against climate change and vaccinations, and finds that the root cause is a faith based denial of evidence.

Here is how he sums up:

Steeped in this wasteland of scientific illiteracy we march ever further toward a theocracy; a secular society cannot stand without deference to fact. We are in danger of becoming the Iran of the West, or a bad copy of the former Soviet Union. Under the communist dictatorship children were taught that Stalin was a hero and that capitalism was a great evil, or that Russia invented the telephone and airplane, with no regard to the truth. We are about to make the same mistake in twisting history to indoctrinate our children with stories about god and gravity.

As religiosity has ascended in American life, policy debates have become faith-based rather than being anchored in logic. Support for a policy position becomes unmoved by contradictory facts because proponents simply "believe" the position to be correct even in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Just as there is no way to determine relative validity between religions, or to diminish faith with facts, as soon as logic is removed from policy debates, competing positions are no longer evaluated based on relative merit, but are supported as inherently right, immune to any reasonable counter arguments. This slide away from secular debate leads increasingly to polarization, greater animosity and a loss of civility because the only way to support a position is simply to assert supremacy as loudly as possible. We are reduced to childlike tantrums of "I'm right, you're wrong, I win." Without logic, there is no common basis for discussion, and no way to mediate disputes. The death of secularism is the death of civility, and nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the debate about teaching science in schools free from religion. Our international ranking suffers because we have not yet learned this lesson. Slovenia has.

Religion is relatively innocuous when it is kept within the walls of synagogues, temples, and church buildings. But when it is introduced into education, politics, and used to determine guidelines for women's health, it can be a destructive force in this country. Often with the religious cherry picking, and misunderstanding, portions of the Bible which are then used to discriminate against women, oppress gays, and to challenge science and public education.

I know that there are many who take great solace in their faith, but for the rest of us religion has become something which shackles this country in place and keeps it from moving forward to compete with the other countries of the world, and to maintain our place in the technological and scientific community that we once dominated.

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