John T. Scopes Redux

We have Holocaust deniers (historical revisionists) and now we have Evolution deniers. Toward the end of my gig at the Collegium Excellens, a hometown boy joined the faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences. This guy came from a moderately prominent family in the community and he earned a Ph.D. at Stanford! However, he scuffled along without a real job until he joined our tattered ranks. I always wondered, Why the hell would a guy with a Stanford Ph.D. wind up teaching at our place? Soon after he arrived, he helped found a fundamentalist Bible study group on campus. Later, he rose to become the chair of the department. I will bet dollars to doughnuts that this guy couldn't get a job anywhere else because he's a Creationist or an Intelligent Design advocate. He's in the right place, though. Lots of flat-earth folks at the Collegium. The beat goes on: the U.S. keeps losing ground in science education achievement to the rest of the world. If this is (fair & balanced) inerrancy, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes
By Cornelia Dean

Dr. John Frandsen, a retired zoologist, was at a dinner for teachers in Birmingham, Ala., recently when he met a young woman who had just begun work as a biology teacher in a small school district in the state. Their conversation turned to evolution.

"She confided that she simply ignored evolution because she knew she'd get in trouble with the principal if word got about that she was teaching it," he recalled. "She told me other teachers were doing the same thing."

Though the teaching of evolution makes the news when officials propose, as they did in Georgia, that evolution disclaimers be affixed to science textbooks, or that creationism be taught along with evolution in biology classes, stories like the one Dr. Frandsen tells are more common.

In districts around the country, even when evolution is in the curriculum it may not be in the classroom, according to researchers who follow the issue.

Teaching guides and textbooks may meet the approval of biologists, but superintendents or principals discourage teachers from discussing it. Or teachers themselves avoid the topic, fearing protests from fundamentalists in their communities.

"The most common remark I've heard from teachers was that the chapter on evolution was assigned as reading but that virtually no discussion in class was taken," said Dr. John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, an evangelical Christian and a member of Alabama's curriculum review board who advocates the teaching of evolution. Teachers are afraid to raise the issue, he said in an e-mail message, and they are afraid to discuss the issue in public.

Dr. Frandsen, former chairman of the committee on science and public policy of the Alabama Academy of Science, said in an interview that this fear made it impossible to say precisely how many teachers avoid the topic.

"You're not going to hear about it," he said. "And for political reasons nobody will do a survey among randomly selected public school children and parents to ask just what is being taught in science classes."

But he said he believed the practice of avoiding the topic was widespread, particularly in districts where many people adhere to fundamentalist faiths.

"You can imagine how difficult it would be to teach evolution as the standards prescribe in ever so many little towns, not only in Alabama but in the rest of the South, the Midwest - all over," Dr. Frandsen said.

Dr. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, said she heard "all the time" from teachers who did not teach evolution "because it's just too much trouble."

"Or their principals tell them, 'We just don't have time to teach everything so let's leave out the things that will cause us problems,' " she said.

Sometimes, Dr. Scott said, parents will ask that their children be allowed to "opt out" of any discussion of evolution and principals lean on teachers to agree.

Even where evolution is taught, teachers may be hesitant to give it full weight. Ron Bier, a biology teacher at Oberlin High School in Oberlin, Ohio, said that evolution underlies many of the central ideas of biology and that it is crucial for students to understand it. But he avoids controversy, he said, by teaching it not as "a unit," but by introducing the concept here and there throughout the year. "I put out my little bits and pieces wherever I can," he said.

He noted that his high school, in a college town, has many students whose parents are professors who have no problem with the teaching of evolution. But many other students come from families that may not accept the idea, he said, "and that holds me back to some extent."

"I don't force things," Mr. Bier added. "I don't argue with students about it."

In this, he is typical of many science teachers, according to a report by the Fordham Foundation, which studies educational issues and backs programs like charter schools and vouchers.

Some teachers avoid the subject altogether, Dr. Lawrence S. Lerner, a physicist and historian of science, wrote in the report. Others give it very short shrift or discuss it without using "the E word," relying instead on what Dr. Lerner characterized as incorrect or misleading phrases, like "change over time."

Dr. Gerald Wheeler, a physicist who heads the National Science Teachers Association, said many members of his organization "fly under the radar" of fundamentalists by introducing evolution as controversial, which scientifically it is not, or by noting that many people do not accept it, caveats not normally offered for other parts of the science curriculum.

Dr. Wheeler said the science teachers' organization hears "constantly" from science teachers who want the organization's backing. "What they are asking for is 'Can you support me?' " he said, and the help they seek "is more political; it's not pedagogical."

There is no credible scientific challenge to the idea that all living things evolved from common ancestors, that evolution on earth has been going on for billions of years and that evolution can be and has been tested and confirmed by the methods of science. But in a 2001 survey, the National Science Foundation found that only 53 percent of Americans agreed with the statement "human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals."

And this was good news to the foundation. It was the first time one of its regular surveys showed a majority of Americans had accepted the idea. According to the foundation report, polls consistently show that a plurality of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago, and about two-thirds believe that this belief should be taught along with evolution in public schools.

These findings set the United States apart from all other industrialized nations, said Dr. Jon Miller, director of the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University, who has studied public attitudes toward science. Americans, he said, have been evenly divided for years on the question of evolution, with about 45 percent accepting it, 45 percent rejecting it and the rest undecided.

In other industrialized countries, Dr. Miller said, 80 percent or more typically accept evolution, most of the others say they are not sure and very few people reject the idea outright.

"In Japan, something like 96 percent accept evolution," he said. Even in socially conservative, predominantly Catholic countries like Poland, perhaps 75 percent of people surveyed accept evolution, he said. "It has not been a Catholic issue or an Asian issue," he said.

Indeed, two popes, Pius XII in 1950 and John Paul II in 1996, have endorsed the idea that evolution and religion can coexist. "I have yet to meet a Catholic school teacher who skips evolution," Dr. Scott said.

Dr. Gerald D. Skoog, a former dean of the College of Education at Texas Tech University and a former president of the science teachers' organization, said that in some classrooms, the teaching of evolution was hampered by the beliefs of the teachers themselves, who are creationists or supporters of the teaching of creationism.

"Data from various studies in various states over an extended period of time indicate that about one-third of biology teachers support the teaching of creationism or 'intelligent design,' " Dr. Skoog said.

Advocates for the teaching of evolution provide teachers or school officials who are challenged on it with information to help them make the case that evolution is completely accepted as a bedrock idea of science. Organizations like the science teachers' association, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science provide position papers and other information on the subject. The National Association of Biology Teachers devoted a two-day meeting to the subject last summer, Dr. Skoog said.

Other advocates of teaching evolution are making the case that a person can believe both in God and the scientific method. "People have been told by some evangelical Christians and by some scientists, that you have to choose." Dr. Scott said. "That is just wrong."

While plenty of scientists reject religion - the eminent evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins famously likens it to a disease - many others do not. In fact, when a researcher from the University of Georgia surveyed scientists' attitudes toward religion several years ago, he found their positions virtually unchanged from an identical survey in the early years of the 20th century. About 40 percent of scientists said not just that they believed in God, but in a God who communicates with people and to whom one may pray "in expectation of receiving an answer."

Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, said he thought the great variety of religious groups in the United States led to competition for congregants. This marketplace environment, he said, contributes to the politicization of issues like evolution among religious groups.

He said the teaching of evolution was portrayed not as scientific instruction but as "an assault of the secular elite on the values of God-fearing people." As a result, he said, politicians don't want to touch it. "Everybody discovers the wisdom of federalism here very quickly," he said. "Leave it at the state or the local level."

But several experts say scientists are feeling increasing pressure to make their case, in part, Dr. Miller said, because scriptural literalists are moving beyond evolution to challenge the teaching of geology and physics on issues like the age of the earth and the origin of the universe.

"They have now decided the Big Bang has to be wrong," he said. "There are now a lot of people who are insisting that that be called only a theory without evidence and so on, and now the physicists are getting mad about this."

Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company

How Shocking!

Sam Cooke sang, during my adolescence, the following:

Don't know much biology
Don't know much about science book
Don't know much about the French I took

But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you love me too
What a wonderful world this would be

Don't know much geography
Don't know much trigonometry
Don't know much about algebra
Don't know what a slide rule is for

But I know that one and one is two
And if this one could be with you
What a wonderful this would be

I don't claim to be an "A" student
But I'm trying to be
Maybe my being an "A" student baby
I can win your love for me

Don't know much about history
Don't know much biology
Don't know much about science book
Don't know much about the French I took

But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you love me too
What a wonderful world this would be

But I know that one and one is two
And if this one could be with you
What a wonderful this would be

Ol' Sam should have added, Don't know much about energy to his litany of ignorance. It's electricity, stupid! Forget oil. Forget the Saudis. If this is a (fair & balanced) epiphany, so be it.


[x Slate]
The Art of Energy: The future will not be painted in oil
By Peter Huber and Mark Mills

The past, present, and future of our energy economy are on display at the Museum of Modern Art. Don't look for a barrel of crude; admire, instead, what curator Terence Riley describes as "a remarkably beautiful object, half metal, half composite, that goes together in this crazy way that only a computer could understand." A mere 4 feet long, this relatively small but stupendously powerful exemplar of indigenous American craft is a fan blade from a jet engine that powers a Boeing 777. The unnamed artists who created it work for General Electric, the corporate Medici of the modern turbine.

Oil is not the dominant fuel of our modern economy. Oil supplies about 40 percent of the raw energy we use, and we use it mainly in our cars. Coal, uranium, gas, and hydroelectric power supply the other 60 percent or so. And by far the most important use of this not-oil fuel is to produce high-speed streams of hot gas that spin much larger versions of the blade on display at MoMA in New York. The blades spin the shafts that turn the generators that power our homes and offices.

And electricity—not oil—defines the fast-expanding center of our energy economy today. About 60 percent of our GDP now comes from industries and services that run on electricity. All the fastest growth sectors of the economy—information technology and telecom, most notably—depend entirely on electricity. More than 85 percent of the growth in U.S. energy demand since 1980 has been met by electricity.

The electrification of our economy is accelerating. In factories and refineries, electrically powered microwave ovens, lasers, welders, dryers are steadily displacing gas-fired ovens—because these new tools are far more precise and ultimately cheaper. This will move about 15 percent of our energy economy into the electrical sector over the next 20 years.

Even more significantly, the car is now being transformed into a sort of giant electrical appliance. Hybrid cars propelled by onboard, gasoline-fired electrical generators are indeed coming. Not for their fuel efficiency, or because they run cleaner—though they are efficient, and they do run clean. But because the new electrical drive trains that carmakers can now build offer much better performance, lower cost, and less weight. Five to 10 years from now—sooner than you think—you'll be driving around in a sort of two-ton Cuisinart.

It won't run more than about five miles on its onboard batteries—that's why it will still have a gasoline engine. But its batteries will take it about that far—a hefty onboard battery pack is essential to provide bursts of power for acceleration. As our city streets begin to fill up with these monster appliances, people will begin topping off their batteries from the grid. The vast majority of trips are under five miles. Cars spend most of their day parked. And the grid—fired by much more efficient power plants that burn much cheaper fuels—can recharge a hybrid car's battery for between one-third and one-tenth of the cost of power generated by the car's onboard gasoline-fired generator. Within a decade, we could readily be shifting a quarter or more of a typical driver's most fuel-hungry miles from the gas tank to the grid, very little of which is lighted by oil.

Now, back to art. Blades like the one on display at MoMA cost a lot. America currently spends about $400 billion a year on raw fuel—make that $500 billion if oil stays at $50 per barrel, which it won't. But we spend at least $500 billion a year on blades, furnaces, generators, car engines, motors, light bulbs, lasers—all the things that we use to transform, refine, and purify energy as we dig it out of the ground, and turn heat into motion, and motion into electricity, and electricity into laser light, and so forth.

The upshot: We are far less sensitive to the cost of raw fuel than we used to be, when the art-to-fuel ratio was a lot lower. Raw fuel accounts for about one-third of coal-fired power—which is to say, half of all our electricity—and only one-tenth of our nuclear electricity. Fuel costs represent under 20 percent of the typical cost of driving—not because gas is cheap, but because we spend so much more turning the exploding gasoline into a safe, comfortable ride. And you hardly think about raw-fuel costs at all when you check in for laser surgery and use half-cent-per-kilowatt-hour coal in an industrial boiler to create the $200 light of an ytterbium laser.

We are thus witnessing the economic twilight of fuel. America burns enough fuel to release 100 quadrillion BTUs of raw thermal energy every year. That's a gargantuan amount, and it keeps rising geometrically. Yet year by year, the cost of all those quads grows less and less important in our modern economy. The quality and cost of the engineering hardware matters far more.

If the future favored by the greens ever comes to pass, the art will count for everything. The 130 turbines GE is building for America's first offshore wind park five miles off Cape Cod will have 150-foot blades, mounted on towers rising 400 feet above the water. The wind is free and will blow forever; the art will account for the entire cost of the power. But that doesn't mean that wind is the way to go. Modern engineering art isn't cheap, conventional fuels still are, and wind is only one among many alternatives.

Indeed, for all our worrying about energy—or perhaps because of it—we humans have proved fantastically clever at plucking it from our surroundings. For the two centuries of industrial history now behind us, the technologies we have used to find, extract, or capture energy from our environment have certainly improved much faster than the horizon of supply has receded.

However bad it may be for the planet, the planet itself won't put a stop to this any time soon. Humanity currently consumes roughly 60 billion barrels of oil or its energy equivalent (referred to as BBOE, for billion barrels of oil equivalent) every year, about half of that as oil itself and half from other fuels. But the planet offers us, within quite easy reach, about 30,000 BBOE of coal and 2 million BBOE of oil shale. The winds of Nantucket Sound are powered by a tiny fraction of the 1 million BBOE of solar energy that reach the surface of the Earth every year. And the waters of the sound itself, and the oceans beyond, contain 2 trillion BBOE worth of deuterium, the fuel that lights the sun.

We think up new ways to use energy as fast as we think of new ways to find and seize it. Powered by much smaller blades but much richer fuel, a half-dozen jumbo jets in flight consume high-grade energy about as fast as the 130 turbines off Cape Cod will eventually generate it. We now build remarkably efficient solar cells out of silicon, but we build silicon microprocessors, too, and much faster; overall, the digital silicon currently consumes far more electricity than the solar silicon generates. In 1831, Michael Faraday, the great English physicist who discovered how to transform motion into electricity, demonstrated the phenomenon to William Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. "But, after all," Gladstone remarked, "what good is it?" To which Faraday could only reply, "Why, sir, one day you will tax it." With energy, that's always the safest bet: Demand materializes, and supplies do, too.

It's foolish to suppose that existing wells won't run dry—they will. But it's equally foolish to suppose that the tools we use to pump, strip, sift, seize, and separate energy from our surroundings can't improve and adapt as fast, or faster, than they have since 1765, when James Watt perfected a coal-fired steam engine … to facilitate the mining of more coal. For all practical purposes, energy supplies are determined not by the planet but by how ingenious we humans are at finding and seizing the energy we crave. And these days our engineers are so very clever, their handiwork is on display in one of the finest art museums in the country.

Peter Huber, a fellow of the Manhattan Institute, and Mark Mills, of Digital Power Capital, are co-authors of The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run out of Energy.

Copyright © 2005 Slate Magazine