Some notes for an opinion piece entitled “Why Americans Don’t Believe in Evolution”

Scientists are not, as a rule, known for their love of paradoxes, which perhaps explains why they have been largely ignorant of their strange role in American culture. On the one hand they are given enormous sums of money in grants and for popular science books; on the other, the details of their craft, of how scientific questions are posed and answered, are treated with stony indifference. Scientists have grown used to being fed and ignored, and this may go a long ways toward explaining why so many have reacted so vehemently to the sudden insistence, by a sizeable part of the population, that one of their theories is wrong.

Of course, it is not just any theory that happens to be under attack, but one that is inexorably tied to the larger issue of what human nature is.

That issue has inarguable political implications, so it is not entirely fair for

The most obvious reason not to fear evolution is that it is probably true. It is the most scientific explanation we have of the origin of life, in that it is based on

The recent political tension over the origins of life and the universe are only the latest manifestation of a much longer-standing argument over human nature. The theory of evolution has long been perceived as the centerpiece of materialist ideologies, and many people who are justifiably worried about what those ideologies conclude about liberty, the individual, and human life, may be inclined to support alternatives. Whether that dispute should be fought politically is one question, but we should first ask whether evolution is really a threat at all.

but there is one paradox that many of them are forced to acknowledge, which is the curious role that science plays in American culture. On the one hand, scientists themselves enjoy a deep respect. Funding for research is generous, and scientists who can write for a general audience are enormously popular. But science, considered as a discipline, is so poorly valued that few make any effort to understand how it works. What passes for science education even up to the university levels is rarely more than an exercise in memorization, with the result that if anyone retains any interest in science after school it is only, to judge from the fare on the various science cable channels, for the most sensational bits of nature and the latest advances in technology.

This is an exceedingly strange trait in a nation known for its technical

The result is that scientists occupy a

I hasten to point out that Americans are not by any means technically dull

that science education below the undergraduate level is desultory at best, and popular interest rarely extends beyond sensationalist nature documentaries and shows about re-engineered motorcycles. Americans consume an enormous amount of health care and ask their doctors about every new drug on the market, but are profoundly uninformed about the basic facts surrounding even the most contentious issues like stem cell research. It should be clear that this attitude is not the result of a lack of technical aptitude or a lack of effort on the part of writers about science

The recent arguments over the origins of life and the universe are only the latest manifestation of a much longer-standing argument over human nature. The ascendency of Intelligent Design is only perplexing when viewed apart from a larger cultural context in which serious disagreements about what is and is not human continue to divide.