Museums take up evolution challenge on Yahoo! News

In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released last week, 53 percent of adults surveyed said "God created humans in their present form exactly the way the Bible describes it." Thirty-one percent said humans evolved from other species with God's guidance and 12 percent said humans evolved without divine intervention. Although Gallup specified the Bible for the first time in this poll, the results closely paralleled those in polls taken over the last 20 years, in which nearly half of all Americans consistently agreed that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so."

Museums take up evolution challenge
By Lisa Anderson Tribune national correspondent
Sun Oct 16, 9:40 AM ET

Natural history museums around the country are mounting new exhibits they hope will succeed where high school biology classes have faltered: convincing Americans that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is a rigorously tested cornerstone of modern science.

At Chicago's Field Museum, curators call their upcoming effort "Evolving Planet." The University of Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln calls its program "Explore Evolution." And here at the American Museum of Natural History, the exhibit that opens next month is called simply "Darwin."

Numerous battles in school districts around the country and a landmark federal case unfolding in Pennsylvania, however, make one point clear: When Darwin's widely accepted scientific explanation of human development collides with widely held religious belief about mankind's divine origins, nothing is simple.

Even the word "evolution" is charged. Some religions, including Catholicism, consider evolution essentially compatible with religious belief. But many people consider it hostile to faith because it posits that all life on Earth--including humans--shares common ancestry and developed through the mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection over some 4 billion years.

In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released last week, 53 percent of adults surveyed said "God created humans in their present form exactly the way the Bible describes it." Thirty-one percent said humans evolved from other species with God's guidance and 12 percent said humans evolved without divine intervention. Although Gallup specified the Bible for the first time in this poll, the results closely paralleled those in polls taken over the last 20 years, in which nearly half of all Americans consistently agreed that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so."

`Change through time'

"In the past, we took the word `evolution' out of our exhibits and said `change through time.' We did that because we didn't want to incite anything," said Ellen Censky, professor of zoology and director of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

"But I think we have to use that word and say this is what science tells us. If they're not teaching it in schools and we're not doing it, where are they going to get it?" asked Censky.

The Oklahoma museum is one of six university-affiliated institutions installing permanent exhibits of "Explore Evolution" under a $2.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Accompanied by a Web site and curriculum material for science teachers, the exhibit focuses on seven current research projects that apply evolutionary theory in ways that affect daily life, from the study of the evolution of HIV/AIDS to genetic ties between humans and chimpanzees.

"I don't think most scientists consider it a huge part of their job to try to help the public understand scientific issues," said Judy Diamond, professor and curator of the Nebraska state museum. Diamond developed the "Explore Evolution" project that also is being used by museums in Minnesota, Kansas, Texas and Michigan.

"I think everyone is realizing that we need to be doing a great deal more. We just haven't made the effort to communicate evolution to people in terms they can understand. Evolution is exciting," Diamond said.

Evolution does get people excited, but not always because of the thrill of scientific discovery. In Kansas, fistfights have all but broken out over the state school board's imminent decision to expand the definition of science to include the supernatural. In Dover, Pa., pro-evolution teachers say they've been denounced as "atheists" and worse on the streets of their once tightknit little town. And in Chicago, when the Field Museum presented an exhibit on human evolution in 2000, a letter arrived "from North Carolina--one page, single spaced, very tightly reasoned--and the last line was `as a result, you will burn in hell,'" said John McCarter Jr., the museum's president and chief executive officer.

Natural history museums must address the lack of public understanding of evolution as part of their public and scientific purpose, said McCarter, sporting a purple tie printed with dinosaurs. As he put it: "If we don't, who else will?"

Increasingly, evolution has become a sensitive subject, gingerly treated by high school science educators. According to a March survey by the National Science Teachers Association, 31 percent of teachers said they felt pressured by parents and students, not administrators, "to include creationism, intelligent design, or other non-scientific alternatives to evolution in their science classrooms." And 30 percent said they felt "pushed to de-emphasize or omit evolution or evolution-related topics from their curriculum."

Credible challenge denied

The majority of scientists deny there is any credible challenge to evolution. They emphasize that scientific theory is not a wild guess, but a hypothesis subjected to careful testing and observation over time. They point to a thoroughly documented geological and radiometric dating of the Earth's age and to almost daily developments in genetics and molecular and cell biology that affirm aspects of Darwin's 1859 "The Origin of Species."

But the strength of long-standing religious belief about the divine origins of man, in a country where more than a quarter of the citizens self-identify as evangelical Christians, is considerable.

"One of the big misunderstandings, I think, is that a lot of people have stopped realizing that science is a secular activity," said Lance Grande, vice president and head of collections and research at the Field Museum. Field's $17 million, 20,000-square foot, "Evolving Planet" exhibit is slated to open on March 10, 2006.

Rarely seen elsewhere in the developed world, this conflation of science and religion is marked in the U.S., where polls consistently show that more than half of all Americans believe that both evolution and creationism should be taught in public school science classes.

Some partly attribute this to the fact that evolution didn't figure prominently in U.S. textbooks until after Russia's 1957 launch of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, a feat that exposed America's scientific vulnerability and prompted massive funding of scientific education and research.

However, a Gallup survey of U.S. teenagers in March indicated that 43 percent believe God guided human evolution over millions of years, 38 percent subscribe to creationism and 18 percent believe that humans evolved with no help from God.

Such strong religious beliefs about human origins recently made headlines when President Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record) (R-Ariz.) publicly supported the teaching of both evolution and intelligent design, which posits that some complexities of life, yet unexplained by evolution, are best attributed to an unnamed and unseen intelligent designer.

Sometimes derided as "creationism lite," intelligent design is on trial in the federal case Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District in Harrisburg, where the defense is expected to open its case this week. Parents of Dover students sued the district and school board over a requirement that 9th-grade biology students be informed of intelligent design as a scientific alternative to evolution. Such a requirement, the parents contend, is religiously motivated, thus violating the constitutional separation of church and state, and breaches the Supreme Court's ban on teaching creationism in public schools.

Attorneys for the school insist that intelligent design, or ID, is a scientific theory, but expert witnesses for the plaintiffs agreed with scientists such as Field's Grande, saying that a theory that cannot be observed or tested is not science.

Fewer going into sciences

"We look at things. This is a specimen-based research institution. So, probably more than any other institution, we're invested in evolutionary studies," Grande said. "There are plenty of other venues in the world for people who want to come up with divine explanations. But that's not our job, that's not what we do. And there are fewer and fewer places that do what we do today."

And compared with students in countries such as China and India, there are fewer and fewer Americans going into the sciences, mathematics and engineering, said McCarter. "Our kids are getting turned off by science in very large numbers."

In such large numbers, in fact, that the National Academies, America's top science advisers, issued a report last week warning the nation to sharpen its scientific competitive edge before it's too late. Urging an annual $10 billion investment in scientific research and education, the report said, "in a world where advanced knowledge is widespread and low-cost labor readily available, U.S. advantages in the marketplace and in science and technology have begun to erode."

Said Robert Gropp, director of public policy at the American Institute of Biological Sciences, "I think every business leader that wants to be competitive in the coming years should be quite concerned about this ID movement."

"In many ways, I blame science itself in that we have done a terrible job of explaining what science is," said Leonard Krishtalka, director of the Kansas Museum and Biodiversity Research Center at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

"I would imagine to non-scientists a lot of science and technology sounds like so much magic," he said. "Is it any surprise that so many people are choosing one kind of magic over another kind of magic?"

In an effort to deepen visitors' understanding of evolution, the Field Museum has designed "Evolving Planet" to showcase dinosaurs without allowing them to overshadow everything else. In past evolution exhibits, McCarter said, people "whipped through the origin of life, and everything before the dinosaurs, to go look at the dinosaurs. And by the time they got done looking at the dinosaurs, they were so tired that they whipped out."

This time, he said, "we're using the dinosaurs as kind of the marquee to draw them in and saying, this is a very complicated story, which you've got to dig into over a long period of time."

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