Mushrooms of the 1920s Sprout Anew

There are these timeless moments in California. One came last week when the Rev. Louis Sheldon and entourage rolled into the Capitol to wage holy war on evolution. If it hadn’t been for the television cameras, you would have thought it was the 1920s.

What roused the Reverend and his Traditional Values Coalition was a short sentence buried in the proposed guidelines for teaching science in California. It goes thusly: “Like gravitation and electricity, evolution is a fact, and it is a theory.”

The framers of that sentence meant to convey a certain duality in the way evolution is regarded by scientists. First, evolution is a fact of life that can be observed everywhere, just like gravity. Viruses mutate, insects adapt to pesticides, and so on. Second, it’s a still-developing theory that attempts to explain how these changes take place.

If that sounds relatively innocent to you, clearly you are not familiar with the war over evolution. Years ago Aimee Semple McPherson would chase an imaginary scientist around her stage at the Four Square Church, waving a pitchfork at her phantom adversary until he renounced his evolution heresy. Now, in 1989, Sheldon intends to do the same with the State Board of Education.

Unless the board expunges that sentence from the guidelines, Sheldon says, it will be used by teachers to elevate evolution into a “religion de facto” within our schools. To the committee chairman responsible for the guidelines, Sheldon offers this advice: “Resign, be fired, or repent.”

This would all be funny if Sheldon were just a cultural dinosaur who blew into town from San Diego to pick up some cheap air time on the local news. In fact, he is much more than that. Although Sheldon and his friends lost one skirmish this week in Sacramento, they show signs of being capable of winning the war.

The lost battle took place before the very committee that wrote the offending guidelines. That group, headed by Elizabeth Stage of UC Berkeley, refused to back down and sent Sheldon shuffling off to a press conference where he waved a figurative pitchfork at his enemies.

What both Sheldon and the committee know is that the full board will soon review all decisions made by the committee. And it is with the board that Sheldon maintains his influence.

Just last month the board president, Francis Laufenberg, sent a letter to the committee that repeated many of Sheldon’s objections. The letter says the infamous sentence is “inconsistent” with the board’s policy and directs the committee to change its ways. It adds that the committee’s guidelines amount to an “advocacy statement for evolution.”

Advocacy statement? Does Laufenberg, by chance, share Sheldon’s view that evolution amounts to a belief system, a sort of religion with advocates and disciples, like high colonics or theosophy? Does Laufenberg know the difference between a belief system and science? The letter concludes with the remarkable assertion that its views are shared “unanimously” by the board.

This debate matters because, come this fall, the board’s policy will be translated into a decision on which textbooks to purchase. Since California and Texas are the only major states that order their textbooks on a statewide basis, they essentially control the national market. If evolution loses out here and in Texas, it will lose out across the country.

There’s an irony here. Once Texas was the place where creationist groups popped up like mushrooms in the night. Now, oddly, it’s California. In addition to Sheldon’s outfit, we’ve sprouted the National Assn. of Christian Education in Costa Mesa, the Institute for Freedom in Anaheim and, best of all, the Institute for Creation Science in San Diego, a think tank of sorts that spends much of its time trying to explain away dinosaur fossils.

No one seems to know why this switcheroo has occurred. But if you are wondering whether it’s truly important, whether the upcoming debate with these people means anything, picture this scene:

Sometime this fall a top Japanese educator pays an official visit to California. He knows that Japan is cranking out scientists and engineers at twice our rate, and he’s curious as to why. After all, California is the birthplace of the microchip, the home of aerospace and Silicon Valley. He wonders what he’s missed about California.

Then he turns on the television and sees a man railing at the state Board of Education. The man calls evolution a conspiracy to undermine moral fiber in America. He insists schools give equal time to the story of creation in Genesis, and says the whole dinosaur thing is a hoax perpetrated by scientists. The board members take this man very seriously, and some nod gravely in agreement.

The Japanese educator smiles to himself. Now he understands.