This is a meticulous account of the 90-year debate over the teaching of evolution in Florida’s public schools, and it is full of high drama and raw emotion. It is populated by dozens upon dozens of passionate culture warriors on both sides of the divisive issue. But unless you are a dedicated student of this strand of intellectual history, or a longtime resident of Florida’s Gulf Coast counties around Tampa, you are unlikely to have heard of a single one of them.
Consider the Reverend Clarence Winslow. In 1971, Winslow was a 64-year-old retired minister from the First Church of the Nazarene in Clearwater when he launched a protracted and largely unsuccessful campaign to banish Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution from public school classrooms. From then on, he was one of the leading creationist activists in the state, preaching that the schools’ abandonment of the Bible amounted to official atheism, undermining traditional Christian values and harming Florida’s children.
Or consider Raymond Shelton, the superintendent of schools in Hillsborough County from 1967 to 1989. Shelton staunchly defended the constitutional separation of church and state, an unpopular view among his conservative and devout neighbors. He believed that the teaching of faith-based theories of human origins violated this legal principle, and he tried his best to take a stand against preaching supernatural beliefs in the schools. He also tried, mostly in vain, to enlighten Floridians about the scientific method and natural laws.
There is a reason why Winslow and Shelton—and the dozens of other important figures in this drama—are not household names. These church leaders and educators fought (and still fight) their battles in obscurity, volunteering their evenings in school board meetings in dreary auditoriums, waiting for their 20 minutes at the microphone, tirelessly arguing and preaching their beliefs. Brandon Haught has pored over volumes of minutes of these often-tedious meetings, spanning decades, documenting the strategies of this cast of unknowns.
The creationists have been, by far, the more dogged troops: aggressive, relentless, strategic. They really had to be, since they were fighting an uphill battle against the foundational principles of science and the encroachment of the modern world. Haught (who volunteers for the anti-creationist Florida Citizens for Science) is as even-handed as he can be in telling his story, but there is no way around the creationists’ hypocrisy and weak arguments. The examples are legion, but I will focus on two main points.
The Florida debate dates back to 1915, when William Jennings Bryan took up residence in the state. The politician would later be famous for his arguments in Tennessee’s Scopes trial, but he began honing his anti-Darwin rhetoric in Bible classes and public lectures. From the start, creationists focused on the word “theory.” Once they accepted that actually preaching the Bible in the schools was illegal, they switched their strategy to an attack on evolution, arguing that it was unproven—“just a theory.” They wanted evolution to be taught (if at all) as “theory, not fact.” Even Raymond Shelton conceded that Darwinian evolution should be taught only as theory.
But this wording, and the strategy it represents, reveal a misunderstanding of scientific theory, either intentional or unintentional. Scientists do not use the word theory in the everyday sense of the word to mean an unproven or speculative idea. To the contrary, a formal scientific theory is (according to the National Academy of Sciences) a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is “supported by a vast body of evidence.” In other words, a theory—including the theory of evolution—is more proven than unproven. The NAS compares evolutionary theory to heliocentric theory (the idea that the Earth orbits the sun) or cell theory (the idea that living things are made of cells). These ideas are not guesses, and they are not going to be upended.
This is a crucial idea in this enduring debate, and it is not well understood, even by educated citizens. Which leads directly to a second point of misunderstanding: Throughout Haught’s account of the Florida debate, creationists have argued for a “two-model” approach to the teaching of human origins. That is, they have tried to slip their version of Christianity—not Judaism or Islam or Buddhism or any other of the world’s many religions—into the classroom by maintaining that evolution is merely one explanation for where we came from. The other, on at least equal footing, is the biblical creation story—Genesis, Adam and Eve, and so forth—which should therefore get equal time.
This is a fallacious argument: It is junk science, bad intellectual discourse, and bad journalism to assume that issues all have two sides of equal value and merit. The well-established theory of evolution, with a vast amount of evidence to back it up, is not just one side in a debate. It is the cornerstone of all biology—including all medicine, all drugs, and other cures—and precludes the biblical creation story. Of course, people are free to believe in any story they want, but they cannot claim equal footing in the world of science.
Yet the two-model argument has been part of a larger strategy by creationists to co-opt science and its vocabulary for nonscientific ends. What they really wanted was to have the schools be an extension of the church, where students would continue to be immersed in Christian beliefs and traditional values. But when they lost this battle in the courts, they regrouped, trying to use the scientific ideas of proof and certainty against evolution.
Some of the action in Going Ape takes place in Tallahassee, where state education officials and lawmakers use such rhetoric on behalf of religious agendas. Haught devotes considerable space to the efforts of state senator Ronda Storms, a former English teacher from Hillsborough County whose 2008 Academic Freedom Bill was far from what its title suggests. The stated purpose of the bill was to protect teachers and students from “discipline” or “discrimination” for discussing the “full range” of scientific views of evolution. In fact, the bill was intended to use the guise of academic freedom to protect teachers who preach the biblical story of creation in public schools. Similarly, creationists have argued that students should not only be permitted but encouraged to think critically—when “thinking critically” really means learning religious beliefs alongside, or in place of, real science.
Despite these scientific and academic charades, creationists continued to show their colors in the trenches when they argued for this or that textbook or law or resolution or standard, all intended to insinuate religious beliefs into local school curriculum. There were small victories, many of them; but over the long haul, there have been many more small defeats. It’s almost a refrain: The effort fizzled, or was tabled, or died in committee, or disappeared unceremoniously. Local attempts failed on their merits, and, in the end, all these small failures add up to a big victory for scientific thinking in Florida and beyond.
And yet, as Brandon Haught warns, this victory is tenuous and most likely temporary. Creationist warriors always resurface, with new names and vocabularies and tactics. It’s unlikely we’ve seen the last of them.
Wray Herbert, a science writer in Washington, is the author of On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits.
