Digging up Darwin in Ohio: Without Holding Your Nose

By Richard J. Rolwing

During the year 2002 the Ohio State School board revised its recommendations for teaching science in all twelve grades. Many scientists wanted evolution taught. For six months newspapers carried news stories about books and debates, letters to editors from all directions, interviews sith teachers and writers, and long editorials. The author records most of these and reflects upon all sides critically. He comments within and upon them. Ohio dug up Darwin. Rolwing holds his nose, not at the corpse, but over the reasons given for both burying him and for digging him up. Bad history, bad science, bad philosophy, bad theology, bad politics, bad pedagogy, and bad faith raised quite a bad stink.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 27, 2003
• ISBN: 9781462809721

Richard J. Rolwing

Richard J. Rolwing, a retired theologian, taught philosophy, world religions, Christianity, and politics at small colleges and large universities. He was a supermarket manager, arbitrator, insurance agent, mortgage broker, stockbroker, registered financial planner, and executive VP for several corporations, which drilled oil/gas wells, marketed business equipment internationally, and bought and operated a gold mine in California. He has rehabbed dozens of homes all over his city, spoken before business groups all over his state, and lectured before professional groups all over the nation. He has published four volumes on the philosophy behind the US Constitution. A recent work was Digging Up Darwin in Ohio Without Holding Your Nose.

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Copyright © 2003 by Richard J. Rolwing.

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Contents

DIGGING UP DARWIN

IN OHIO

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

DIGGING UP DARWIN

IN OHIO

Few people have the time or ability to read a serious full length work on the theory of biological evolution. But the topic comes up continually in different ways. Today, the theory of Neo-Darwinism relies on a good many sciences, and it has always had implications for philosophy and theology. All of these issues meet and wrestle in education and public schools.

This work includes newspaper editorials and letters to editors, news stories, columns, quotations, nearly all of which come from the Columbus Dispatch in the spring of 2002. We attach bits of information, extended comments and discussions, with criticisms of all sides.

Controversy abounds. When different attitudes, agendas, and intellectual backgrounds, when different sciences, philosophies, and theologies, when different politics, pedagogies, and terminologies, are all thrown into one pot, no fire is needed for that pot to quickly begin boiling. It can make for fascinating reading, easily followed, and seldom too taxing for anyone.

1) Dear Editor, 12/27/01

A Dec. 11 Dispatch article reported on the state Board of Education’s adoption of new academic standards in English and math. Dispatch staff reporter Catherine Candisky was prophetic when she wrote, "Public hearings on the Ohio standards for science and social studies will be held by the state board and Department of Education next year; those are expected to be more controversial as they could touch on such topics as the theory of evolution.

I am a member of the state writing team that has been working on the new science standards since June. Professionally, I am a research scientist with a doctoral degree who has worked in private industry for nearly 30 years. Thus I know from experience something about how science inquiry should be carried out.

Origins science is a general term that refers to the study of the origin, development and diversity of life on Earth. Most of the draft science standards are OK, but those in the area of origins science will be quite troublesome to many Ohioans. Unfortunately, the draft standards regarding origins are one-sided in support of Darwinian evolution.

Now don’t get me wrong—evolutionary theory should be taught. It’s just that intelligent design, the principal scientific alternative to Darwinism, should also be included in the curriculum. Design theory investigates, based on scientific evidence, whether some features of living organisms may be designed by some form of intelligence.

The origins standards are so one-sided that a network of concerned citizens and organizations has been formed to work for reasonable standards in controversial areas such as origins science. More information on this group, Science Excellence for All Ohioans, can be found at www.sciohio.org.

Teaching evolution while censoring the main alternative is not good science. If critical thinking is to be practiced in the classroom, origins science would be a good place to start.

Robert Lattimer

2)    Comment: In recent years many books and articles have both criticized and defended the theory of biological evolution. Many leave the suspicion that the general theory is not purely scientific but is also quite philosophical. And beyond that, most arguments over the theory itself continually have the Bible and theology in the background even when not mentioned.

3)    Dear Editor, Feb 20, 01

Steve Abrams, of the Kansas State Board of Education, claims that he was not espousing any religious doctrine in questioning the teaching of evolution in elementary and secondary schools. He argued repeatedly that evolution is a flawed theory—not good science.

But Steve was avoiding the obvious. The theory of biological evolution to explain the origin, variety, and history of biological species is the only game in town, no matter how poor a game it is.

Until the 19 th century the big picture came from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Most had always read the first nine chapters of the book of Genesis as if it were simply ordinary history writing, and interpreted it as a revealed report on everything’s historical beginnings, even though St. Augustine already in the 5th century knew better.

Many of those who insist that the universe and its contents are created, as did Uncle Sam’s Founders, now see early Genesis as a mythical story asserting that metaphysical fact. How the universe came to be and in what form it began, Genesis does not pretend to be reporting. At any rate, if the author did mean to describe it in its phases, it could not have been a report, a historical record. It could only have been a divine or angelic dictation, since not even Adam was there at the beginning, nor did the story about him include the Creator’s dictating earlier events to him.

But most Jews and Christians were naively blind to this literary insight for over 2000 years. Consequently evolutionists are the only ones trying to dig up the facts, even if their shovels are shallow and their motives often muddy.

While thinking Christians needed no theory of evolution to reach that insight into the literary genre of those first chapters of Genesis, some theory of scientific responsibility is needed to provide insight to evolutionists. They could come to acknowledge the enormous overreaching of their existing theories, the vast undersupply of empirical facts supporting them, and their often pitifully illogical arguments connecting the facts to their theories.

And some theory of moral maturity is necessary also. So many shame their science by their adolescent screams that anyone who criticizes their arguments is a religious fanatic and a scientific idiot. Many of them need to evolve more, too.

Richard J. Rolwing, Reynoldsburg, Ohio

4)    Dear Editor, ll/01/01

"Because the Dispatch gives Ohio State University biology professor Steve Rissing completely free rein, his biweekly column exemplifies the worst of modern scientific pontificating.

He presumes that science is a wisdom that oversees all other knowledge, so he continually escapes from his zoo and roams all over the intellectual landscape. His columns are full of political shoulds, legal shoulds, educational shoulds, technological shoulds, ethical shoulds, and even religious shoulds.

But as a biologist, he is not trained in, or for, any of those areas. In fact, no shoulds can even be found in science.

No knowledge discoverable by any science, other than ethics, includes any kind of should, may, or should not beyond the purely pragmatic: If you want heat, light a fire.

On any witness stand, nine-tenths of his testimony would be stricken. Too bad that none of his Dispatch supervisors ever read his material while awake. Pompous octopi such as Rissing give scientists a bad name.

Richard J. Rolwing, Reynoldsburg

5)    Dear Editor, Columbus Dispatch, 1/2/02

Dr. Robert Lattimer is wrong when he claims that keeping intelligent design out of Ohio’s new science standards is censorship (12/27/01). As a member of the Ohio Academy of Science focus group that recently reviewed the [state board’s] life-science standards, let me explain the exclusion of intelligent design. It is not science, in spite of Lattimer’s claim that is the principal scientific alternative to Darwinism.

For intelligent design to be science, its proponents must state testable ideas about how it works and conduct experiments or make systematic observations to test their hypotheses. If the data support the hypotheses, then you have a science. Proponents of intelligent design have never done this.

Scientists normally write or tell people about the hypothesis they tested, the methods they used to test it and the data they collected supporting or rejecting their hypothesis. The way intelligent design works, as practiced by proponents such as Michael Behe, is to look at part of a plant or animal and say,

I don’t know how this could have evolved naturally; therefore, a supernatural creator must have made it.

But notice that Behe has not demonstrated the action of a supernatural creator. All he has done is admit he can’t figure it out. Although proponents claim censorship, Behe has written a book, Darwin’s Black Box, which is available at many local bookstores and online. How is that censorship?

Intelligent design is excluded from the life-science standards for the same reason geo-centrism, the belief the sun circles the Earth, is excluded from the standards: it is not science. Geocentrists also think their beliefs should be taught in schools, also claim they are being censored by mainstream scientists and also have Web pages. Just because a group has a Web page doesn’t means its contents are scientific or correct.

Steve Edinger, Physiology lab instructor, Dept. of Biological Sciences, Ohio University, Athens

6) Dear Editor, 1/2/02

Steve Edinger, biologist from Ohio U., may be right (1/2/02) that the Intelligent Design argument/conclusion is not purely scientific, but he does not restrict his own arguments about biology or science in general to what he calls the purely scientific.

If his description of science in his second paragraph is true and adequate, then his following judgment is not scientific: that some argument/conclusion is, or is not, science, that it either is, or is not, this or that (hard or soft) particular science. No science discovers what is or is not science.

Neither were the standards he applies and the definitions he uses obtained and justified by the scientific method. The scientific method never discovered the scientific method.

No science discovers itself or defines itself. It is almost silly to speak about what science is. Science in general does not exist. Only particular sciences do. Only philosophy can ask and answer the question of what any particular science is, how it differs from all other sciences, and how they each and all differ from mathematics, poetry, history, law, religion, and whatever.

No scientist as a scientist knows anything beyond his science. No biologist as a biologist knows any astronomy or nuclear physics. He has to be more than a biologist, has to know more than all three of those sciences to recognize and distinguish them.

No one, including scientists, can think without presupposing some philosophy(‘s basic positions). And of all the sciences today, biology is the one of the least justified in assuming the Puritanical Pose.

Richard Rolwing, Reynoldsburg, Ohio

7) Dear Editor, 1/15/02

I am continually disappointed when the people who teach our children have such glaring lapses in reasoning. Steve Edinger … displayed this twice in his (1/2/02) letter. He stated that the concept of intelligent design is an untestable hypothesis, but evolution is testable.

Let me make a simple hypothesis: A mechanical pencil is designed by an intelligent designer.

Test: Determine if this device ever originates, without intervention, from plastic, iron and graphite.

I would bet as many dollars as Edinger desires that he or I will never find an exception to this hypothesis. This is a repeatable experiment.

Conclusion: Mechanical pencils are intelligently designed.

This is Edinger’s hypothesis: The single cell of an amoeba develops without intelligence as a result of random events some time in history.

Test: One experiment that without intervention converts carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and so on into an amoeba.

Edinger needs to be honest and admit it just has never been demonstrated. Now, I’ll grant you it happened, but as a scientist, please repeat the experiment. I, for one, have never seen it repeated.

Conclusion: Random events do not create an amoeba.

The second glaring flaw in Edinger’s thinking is his conclusion that Robert Lattimer made the assumption that only God could have done it. Lattimer didn’t say that at all. Lattimer said it must have been designed; he didn’t say who the designer was.

True science would pursue this question and not stop at an untestable conclusion that evolution is the only mechanism for this event. I want to know how the amoeba came to be.

Robert Garbe, Canal Winchester.

8) It is difficult, David Berlinski, says, in Commentary, to take entirely seriously a theory (biological evolution) in which both rape and altruism are successfully explained as tactics of survival … The scientific community regards itself as a uniquely self-aware collective, one whose members are prepared, even eager, to subject their most cherished assumptions to a veritable firestorm of critical analysis. Yet the same community warms to the view that general criticisms made of various scientific disciplines, especially when they are severe, are not Very helpful.’ Not helpful, as in not needed; not needed, as in not wanted. There is plainly a fissure here between two self-conceptions, the one open and confident, the other narrow and defensive. To put it another way: in science, as in politics, large and general principles are often upheld precisely to the extent that they are believed in … I am simply not persuaded that Darwin’s theory is true. Or even plausible. I remain where, I suspect, most of us find ourselves. I regard Darwin’s theories and various theories of design as inadequate. I have no replacement for either. It is quite true that an appeal to the divine is no longer in fashion. The decline of religious faith is a complex and disturbing topic, but the facts are what they are; sophisticated men and women rejoice in their atheism, prepared to believe in nothing and simultaneously prepared to believe in anything. Those who concur with Richard Dawkins that Darwin has made atheism intellectually respectable have often demonstrated a degree of credulity that would embarrass a seminarian. How else might one explain currently fashionable doctrines of evolutionary psychology, a field so richly preposterous that, in reading its literature, only a man born with a petrified diaphragm, to quote H.L. Mencken, could fail to laugh out loud." (Feb/02) First Things

9)    Comment on the above: Both rape and altruism are tactics of survival? consider SSAD, same-sex-attraction-disorder. How does evolutionary theory, which purports to explain all forms of life, explain it? In what way could it possibly promote survival of the species? If evolution is its explanation, then natural selection must have jumped its tracks somewhere along the line.

10)    David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values says,

Most of what we do in life, we do because we believe—we have accepted on faith—what others have told us. If we tried to restrict our activities or (even more) our ideas to those areas untouched by faith—for example, those areas in which we had personally conducted empirically conclusive research—few of us would ever put on a pair of shoes or take a drink of water, much less try out more complex procedures, such as getting married, figuring out right from wrong, or helping to reduce child poverty. Human beings by definition are faith-based" creatures.

The important question, then, is not whether we believe, but what we believe. If the term faith-based currently so much in vogue, ends up reinforcing the popular but deeply flawed notion that there is a natural split between faith and reason, and that the world is divided between those who have faith’ in something and those who do not, then it may be time for an emergency meeting of the Conceptual Frameworkers Union." First Things, 2/02.

11)    After the Bush administration responded to the 9/11 attack with a series of security actions that could restrict some of our liberties temporarily, it received much criticism. Customarily such criticisms greatly concern me. Yet I noticed within myself a disinterest in reading or listening to much of the criticism. It was not simply that I thought a temporary need for safety in near war could justify some restrictions on ordinary liberties. Nor am I generally unconcerned about the growth of government’s powers to intrude into our lives. It was that I noticed most of the criticism was coming from opponents of the Bush administration. They have an attitude. It is their job to be critical of rivals. However justified they believe their critical attitude is, their motive led me to question their wisdom and prudence, their balance.

Somewhat similarly, many of the most outspoken proponents of the theory of biological evolution, including all the subtheories on which it depends or which depend upon it, have an attitude they often reveal spontaneously under pressure of debate. It is the attitude expressed by the famous French cynic Voltaire in his motto Destroy the Infamy, where Infamy meant Christianity—i.e., the whole system, God, revelation, authority, law, sin, salvation, the bible, the church, the hierarchy, the clergy, the churches, their schools,—in other words, the source of all guilts (and not the bearers of divine forgiveness). It is that system, which they apparently feel so oppressive, from which they seek deliverance and liberation. And they think Darwinism disproves it all in one fell swoop. So in this case, their obvious motivation has inspired an interest in my reading and listening to evolutionary theorists.

12) Dear Editor, Jan 23, 02

How does a lawyer from Kansas City get unfettered access to the Ohio Board of Education to disrupt the process of writing science standards?

John Calvert presented the board with a legal opinion that has never been tested in court about teaching intelligent design in our schools. Intelligent design, or ID, is an alleged scientific proposition that has never warranted publication in scientific literature. Objections from scholars in attendance were not allowed. This is not democracy in action.

While seeking to undermine high-quality science education, ID proponents and other creationists trivialize the U.S. Constitution and often hijack the Bible, thereby doing a disservice to their own religions as well as to education. ID should stand for insidious deception, as it is a disguise for creationism, meant to sneak particular religious views into our science classrooms.

Hopefully Ohioans are too savvy to allow such political chicanery to damage sound educational standards for our school children.

Ohio’s science standards team has made great strides toward improving the basis for science curricula and should be allowed to continue without interference from certain members of the board. Board members who wish to play politics with solid science education should learn a lesson from their counterparts in Kansas who were voted out of office, and ought not to bother to seek reelection.

Jeffrey K. McKee, associate professor, Dept. of Anthropology, OSU, Columbus.

13) Dear Editor, January 23,02

The letter by Jeffrey McKee, an OSU anthropologist, instructed us about what is science and what is not. ID is not, he says, and should stand for Insidious Deception.

Actually, anthropology itself, for most of its history, was not accepted as a science. It became acceptable only as a soft science, distinct from the hard sciences.

Which science is it that determines whether some (other) area of study is a science? Which science is it that determines one science as hard and another as soft?

Of whom should we ask those questions? Editors of science publications? Innumerable researchers complain that editors reject submissions outside prevailing orthodoxies.

Distinguishing between different types of propositions, or types of knowing or theorizing, in terms of content, is simply not a judgement of any known science.

ID is about biology, and may be about more than biology.

But no sane person could deny that theories of biological evolution are about more than biology.

Why else would scientists who promote the theory continually pontificate outside the boundaries of any science, as Jeffrey McKee does?

Richard Rolwing, Reynoldsburg, Ohio

14) Columbus Dispatch Editorial, Jan 22

SCIENCE AND RELIGION Creationism doesn’t belong in biology class

[1]    Once again, the debate over science and creationism is occupying members of the State Board of Education, whose duties include setting standards for the body of knowledge Ohio school children should be required to know.

[2]    The board shouldn’t be involved in this debate.

[3]    The schools face too many challenges and graduate too many students who are unprepared to succeed in a technologically complex world for Ohio to have the luxury of arguing about whether religious beliefs should be taught as science.

[4]    The main reason the debate should end is that science and religion are entirely separate. They do not belong in the same debate or classroom, for that matter.

[5]    Science is a method for learning about the world by gathering facts and making conclusions based on those facts—conclusions that can be tested and, if they don’t hold up, discarded.

[6]    Religion, on the other hand, concerns itself with matters of faith and human spirit, and posits the existence of supernatural powers beyond the scope of scientific inquiry.

[7]    Another reason this debate should end is a practical one. As Ohio competes with other states for eminence in scientific and technological pursuits, the last thing the state needs is to subject itself to ridicule as Kansas did when it banned the teaching of evolution in public schools.

[8]    Now, creationism is back on the table. The State Board is in the midst of adopting guidelines for science curriculum in schools. A draft proposal by a 45-member panel of professionals appointed by the Department of Education has recommend that evolution be taught as the explanation for life on earth.

[9]    But some members of the board, which is partly elected and partly appointed by the governor, apparently think that religion should be taught along with science.

[10]    Michael Cochran, an elected member who represents Franklin County and the western half of Pickaway County, put the creationism ball in play again when he asked the professional panel to come back with an alternative plan that includes creationism.

[11]    Several hundred years ago, it was heresy in the Christian world to suggest that science had any answers that differed from those given by the church.

[12]    But Western civilization has progressed since Galileo was branded a heretic for observing that the sun has spots and for daring to adopt a radical new theory that Earth is not at the center of the universe.

[13]    Science and religion are less at odds today. Creationism even adopts the language of science, suggesting similarities where none