Evolution via natural selection is the great unifying idea of biology, so explaining it to students is part of a day’s work for Jerry Coyne, who teaches in the University of Chicago’s department of ecology and evolution. Coyne also spends a good amount of time speaking to nonstudents–the Alaska Bar Association, North Shore businesspeople, and the Graham School of General Studies, to name a few–on the overwhelming evidence that life developed pretty much as Darwin says, not as the Bible says. Coyne’s colleagues in other disciplines don’t have to go around explaining that matter really is made up of atoms, or that the earth really is round and travels around the sun. But many Americans haven’t even heard the evidence for evolution. Coyne reports that his students at the U. of C. “have barely been exposed to Darwin.”
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This kind of public education doesn’t pay well, doesn’t advance Coyne’s professional research into the mechanisms of speciation, doesn’t get him tenure (because he’s already got it), and exposes him to abuse from creationists, but he feels it needs to be done: according to research published in Science last August, only about 40 percent of Americans agree that “human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals,” a percentage similar to the ones found in Turkey and Latvia. By contrast, 70 to 80 percent of Icelanders and Swedes and French people get it. A June Gallup poll conducted in the U.S. (pollingreport.com/science.htm) reported a 53-44 proevolution split among its respondents, but those who believed it was “definitely true” trailed those who believed it was “definitely false” by 18 to 28 percent.
When Coyne tried to treat ID as a serious hypothesis in a 2005 New Republic article, he found himself posing hard questions to its advocates: What “intelligent designer” would have devised the nonfunctional and inflammation-prone human appendix? What intelligent designer would have given human embryos a temporary coat of fur in the seventh month of pregnancy, just like the ones our primate relatives get and keep? What intelligent designer would have created transitional organisms–between fish and amphibians, dinosaurs and birds, reptiles and mammals, land mammals and whales–that occur in the fossil record exactly when they would have appeared in the course of evolution driven by natural selection among random mutations? ID advocate Behe has a response to uestions like these: “Features that strike us as odd in a design might have been placed there by the designer for a reason–for artistic reasons, to show off, for some as-yet-undetectable practical purpose, or for some unguessable reason–or they might not.” But as Coyne points out, this amounts to declaring intellectual bankruptcy: if no imaginable evidence would contradict ID theory, it’s not a scientific theory at all. (By contrast, it’s easy to imagine evidence that would contradict Darwinism, such as fossil evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time.)
