How Anti-Evolution Policies Evolve

Evolution by natural selection isn’t a matter of debate, at least among the scientific community. But policymakers and advocates in state legislatures and school districts across the country aren’t so convinced, and they’re advancing anti-evolution policies.

Since 1920, proponents of creationism, a literal interpretation of the biblical account of the origin of the universe and all life within it, have sought to tune out evolution in science classrooms in public schools.

A new study by Australian National University researcher Nick Matzke shows how the tactics of anti-evolution advocates evolved even in the wake of repeated decisions by U.S. courts have repeatedly ruled against their cause.

In 1968, in the case of Epperson v. Arkansas, the Supreme Court first ruled that teaching creationism in public schools is a violation of the First Amendment because it endorsed a religious viewpoint. Two decades later, in the case of Edwards v. Aguillard, the court determined that creationism could not be taught as an alternative to evolution, as required by a law passed in Louisiana.

Again in 2005, the justices decided in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District that public schools couldn’t require a curriculum that taught intelligent design, a rebranded version of creationism, as a competing scientific theory with evolution.

The study, published in the journal Science, shows how creationists have entered a new phase in their advocacy efforts by pushing through policies and laws on the district and state level that encourage teachers to promote anti-evolutionism. Matzke refers to these efforts as “stealth creationism,” because they hide their religious motivations by “strategic vagueness” in an attempt to pass legal muster.

Matzke conducted a phylogenetic analysis, a technique used in the study of evolution, to flesh out and diagram the relationships among different anti-evolution policies beginning in 2004, a year before the Kitzmiller verdict, through the present.

This analysis revealed how text was copied and modified, otherwise known as “descent with modification,” in 65 separate bills to shift tactics away from a stance of promoting “academic freedom,” i.e. teaching intelligent design, and toward “science education acts.”

These acts encourage but don’t require teachers to provide a critical perspective in their instruction of not only evolution but also other scientific topics like climate change.

Read more at Discovery News