A Threat to ‘the Survival of Rationality’ Is Evolving Here

“Born-again” Christian John Peloza has sued the Capistrano Unified School District for $5 million, alleging that officials violated his constitutional rights by forcing him to teach evolution in his high school biology class. Peloza, who believes the biblical version of creation, previously sued his school’s newspaper over a student editorial that criticized him.

For many of us, Peloza’s grandstanding comes across as a mild form of entertainment. Everybody’s got a racket these days; Peloza’s happens to be a penchant for wanting to re-insert creationism into a public school classroom and then sue anyone who stands in his way.

But while it’s a hoot in some circles, at least one man is not amused.

He’s Francisco Ayala, a nationally recognized evolutionary biologist and a professor of biological sciences at UC Irvine. Ten years ago, Ayala was one of five scientists who testified against Arkansas’ requirement that creationism be taught as a competing scientific theory to “balance” the teaching of evolution.

A colleague at the time asked Ayala, then a UC Davis professor and president of the Society for the Study of Evolution, whether the prestigious National Academy of Sciences should get involved in the case.

“I remember putting it this way,” Ayala said in his UCI office Tuesday. “I said the issue is not evolution. It’s the survival of rationality. What do we teach children in our schools? Do we teach science? Are we allowed to teach superstition, or astrology rather than astronomy? Or creation as science?”

Ayala is no less concerned today.

Peloza’s action “distresses me, for various reasons,” Ayala said. “One of them is that there are still teachers trained in biology who would challenge that evolution has occurred. . . . I’m concerned that teachers of that kind are reflecting a degree of ignorance of basic science which makes it very difficult to conceive that we will have a successful society. We live in a society that is so technologically dependent . . . that when the degree of ignorance is so high, it explains why we are having the problems we are having.”

I asked Ayala why a teacher couldn’t tell students that not everyone accepts evolution, believing instead the biblical account. Ayala, who still teaches introductory biology at UCI, said he does just that.

But trying to debunk verifiable science can have serious repercussions, Ayala said.

In the Arkansas case, Ayala cited the eminent Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko, who persuaded Stalin and Khrushchev to reject orthodox genetics in the production of crops. “Agriculturally, they (the Soviet people) are still paying the price,” Ayala said. “Lysenko put them behind for 25 years in all matters of biology and agriculture.”

A former Roman Catholic priest, Ayala said Christians needn’t think that evolution and faith are incompatible.

Some people, he said, “feel that science is materialistic, atheistic, or in old times we’d say Marxist or communist. There is a prejudice, which I see in my students again and again. . . . They come to the university and see the overwhelming evidence and the articulation of the scientific case, and they feel they have to give up their religion. That seems to me very unfortunate because there is no reason for it. Why it’s there I don’t know. It’s a fear that presumably is a cultural condition that’s been around this country for a very long time.”

In the interest of forestalling the lawsuit, I suggest either of two reference points for John Peloza:

One is federal judge William Overton’s ruling in the Arkansas case of 1981. Overton threw out the state law, ruling that creation science “has no scientific merit or educational value.” The judge ruled that “since creation science is not science, the conclusion is inescapable that the only real effect of (the law) is the advancement of religion,” which violates the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of separation of church and state.

The U.S. Supreme Court later let Overton’s ruling stand.

The other reference point is “Inherit the Wind,” the dramatized version of the Tennessee “Monkey Trial” of 1925. In the 1960 movie version, Frederic March portrayed the William Jennings Bryan character as the defender of creationism, while Spencer Tracy played the Clarence Darrow character.

Early in the movie, the locals in the peaceful little town welcome March as a hero, riding in to save the town from the miscreant biology teacher who dared to teach evolution to his high school students. By movie’s end, the Bryan character’s zealotry has left even his supporters pitying him for his near-fanatical denunciation of science.

So if Peloza can’t get his hands on Judge Overton’s ruling, one would at least hope that he has a VCR and a membership at a local video store.