Why we should teach evolution.
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Evolution's Bottom Line
By HOLDEN THORP
Chapel Hill, N.C.
THE usefulness of scientific theories, like those on gravity, relativity
and evolution, is to make predictions. When theories make practicable
foresight possible, they are widely accepted and used to make all of the
new things that we enjoy like global positioning systems, which rely on
the theories of relativity, and the satellites that make them possible,
which are placed in their orbits thanks to the good old theory of
gravity.
Creationists who oppose the teaching of evolution as the predominant
theory of biology contend that alternatives should be part of the
curriculum because evolution is "just a theory," but they never attack
mere theories of gravity and relativity in the same way. The
creationists took it on their intelligently designed chins recently from
a judge in Pennsylvania who found that teaching alternatives to
evolution amounted to the teaching of religion. They prevailed, however,
in Kansas, where the school board changed the definition of science to
accommodate the teaching of intelligent design.
Both sides say they are fighting for lofty goals and defending the
truth. But lost in all this truth-defending are more pragmatic issues
that have to do with the young people whose educations are at stake here
and this pesky fact: creationism has no commercial application.
Evolution does.
Since evolution has been the dominant theory of biology for more than a
century, it's a safe statement that all of the wonderful innovations in
medicine and agriculture that we derive from biological research stem
from the theory of evolution. Recent, exciting examples are humanized
antibodies like Remicade for inflammation and Herceptin for breast
cancer, both initially made in mice. Without our knowledge of the
evolution of mice and humans and their immune systems, we wouldn't have
such life-saving and life-improving technologies.
Another specific example is resistant bacterial infections, one of the
scariest threats to public health. The ones that are resistant to
antibiotics are more reproductively successful than their non-resistant
relatives and pass the new resistance genes on to more offspring. Just
as Darwin said 150 years ago.
The creationists have devised a tortuous work-around for this
phenomenon, which endorses natural selection and survival of the
fittest, but says that evolution doesn't explain the original
development of species. The problem is, there are hundreds of genes that
occur in both bacteria and humans. It's hard to see why a designer would
do it that way, since having the same genes in bacteria and humans makes
infections harder to treat: drugs that act on bacterial gene products
act on the human versions as well, so those drugs could kill both the
bacterium and the human host. Talk about throwing the baby out with the
bathwater.
So evolution has some pretty exciting applications (like food), and I'm
guessing most people would prefer antibiotics developed by someone who
knows the evolutionary relationship of humans and bacteria. What does
this mean for the young people who go to school in Kansas? Are we going
to close them out from working in the life sciences? And what about
companies in Kansas that want to attract scientists to work there? Will
Mom or Dad Scientist want to live somewhere where their children are
less likely to learn evolution?
One Kansas biology teacher, a past president of the National Association
of Biology Teachers, told Popular Science magazine that students from
Kansas now face tougher scrutiny when seeking admission to medical
schools. And companies seeking to innovate in the life sciences could
perhaps be excused for giving the Sunflower State a miss: one Web site
that lists companies looking for workers in biotechnology has more than
600 hiring scientists in California and more than 240 in Massachusetts.
Kansas has 11.
In his most recent State of the Union address, President Bush mentioned
our problems in science education and promised to focus on "keeping
America competitive" by increasing the budget for research and spending
money to get more science teachers. I hope he delivers, but we can't
keep America competitive if some states teach science that has no
commercial utility. Those smart youngsters in India and China whom you
keep hearing about are learning secular science, not biblical literalism.
The battle is about more than which truth is truthier, it's about who
will be allowed to innovate and where they will do it. Sequestering our
scientists in California and Massachusetts makes no sense. We need to
allow everyone to participate and increase the chance of finding the
innovations to improve society and compete globally.
Where science gets done is where wealth gets created, so places that
decide to put stickers on their textbooks or change the definition of
science have decided, perhaps unknowingly, not to go to the innovation
party of the future. Maybe that's fine for the grownups who'd rather
stay home, but it seems like a raw deal for the 14-year-old girl in
Topeka who might have gone on to find a cure for resistant infections if
only she had been taught evolution in high school.
Holden Thorp is chairman of the chemistry department at the University
of North Carolina.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/opinion/12Thorpe.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"
-Voltaire
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