Scientists Urge Teachers Not to Take Sides : Guides Offered on Beginning of Man
An organization of 2,500 scientists who are Christians are advising the nation’s public schoolteachers to shun ideological absolutes about human origins and discuss the matter “with accuracy and openness.”
The American Scientific Affiliation is distributing a 48-page manual, “Teaching Science in a Climate of Controversy,” to about 40,000 biology teachers across the country, advising them to guard against unsubstantiated conclusions and deal more frankly with unresolved questions and problems.
The manual generally defends basic evolutionary concepts but cites qualifications, weaknesses and limitations, saying these factors tend to be ignored “in the heat of the debate and much popular writing.”
This leaves “the erroneous impression that all creationists are united against all evolutionists,” the manual says. It adds, however, that the differences arise “where the scientific data are inconclusive.”
In regard, for instance, to a particular absence of transitional fossils between species, the book says: “It is time for a more balanced account of the evidence for macro-evolution at the level of general education. After all, coping with unsolved problems is what science is all about.”
‘No Consensus’
The booklet was prepared by the affiliation’s Committee for Integrity in Science Education, headed by biologist David Price of Springville, Calif., and approved by a panel of consultants. It details extensive evidence for the theory of evolution, saying that most scientists defend it as an important biological concept, but it also says that calling the theory “fact” is unjustified.
“At present no consensus exists as to how evolution occurred,” the booklet says. The theory is built “only by extrapolation from small-scale evidence (and by reasoning that ‘it must have happened’).”
The booklet also says most scientists agree that “creation science,” which claims the Earth is only a few thousand years old, lacks a sound theoretical basis. Some creation scientists, however, do not hold the view that the earth is only a few thousand years old.
The affiliation, with offices in Ipswich, Mass., includes “theistic evolutionists,” those who see evolution as how God works, and some “creation scientists,” who maintain complex life forms appeared in abrupt stages.
“A broad middle ground exists in which creation and evolution are not seen as antagonists,” the booklet says. “With that middle ground in mind, a teacher need not ‘take sides’ at all.”
‘Evidence Counts’
Biochemist Walter R. Hearn of Berkeley, Calif., who edited the booklet with wide consultation, says “a lot of teachers have said it’s been very helpful. Before, they’ve only had these polemical attacks or defenses of evolution.”
“We’ve tried not to take sides, but just weigh the evidence,” Hearn said in a telephone interview. “In science, evidence is what counts.”
In the present atmosphere, he added, “it’s hard to say anything that somebody won’t disagree with. People on both sides claim too much.”
The booklet cites numerous uncertainties and continuing changes in evolution theory and also the occasional fraud seeking to provide “missing links,” such as the Piltdown man.
“The classic missing link--the last ancestor common to both apes and humans--is still missing,” the booklet says, citing abandonment of earlier claims that the ape-like form Ramapithecus of 9 million to 14 million years ago led to the human being.
Yet “somehow the creature found its way into many textbooks” as a definite human ancestor, despite serious doubts raised about it from the first, the booklet says.
It says that the National Academy of Sciences, in a 1984 booklet prepared for teachers, “ignores the current situation in anthropology in contending the ‘missing links’ that troubled Darwin . . . are no longer missing.”
This is “dogmatic rather than tentative,” and “in science, tentative conclusions should be stated in tentative form,” the booklet says.
The booklet also says that researchers now warn against past assumptions that the first cell life resulted from random chemical processes and that it now “must be considered highly improbable”: “At this stage in our scientific knowledge, it would be irresponsible to give students the impression that ‘life arose by chance.’ Scientists do not know how life arose.”
Teachers are told that “it is unnecessary, and in many circumstances unwise, for a teacher to ‘take sides’ in class on the religious issue of Creator versus no-creator.”
In light of the controversy over the subject, with all its explosive political, educational, religious and legal implications, teachers are advised: “Science must be taught without omitting important points, overstating its claims or distorting the truth.”
“Advocates of extreme positions tend to paint a win-or-lose, either-or picture . . . ,” the booklet says. “Yet between those extremes lies that broad middle ground where real science can coexist with real faith in God.”
