Steve Mirsky: Welcome to Scientific American's Science Talk posted on December 20, 2015. I'm Steve Mirsky. On this episode…
Nicholas Matzke: …but these other sorts of policies that don't mention intelligent design but they talk about critical analysis of evolution or they portray evolution as controversial, these started to propagate.
Mirsky: That's Nicholas Matzke. He's an evolutionary biologist currently on a fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra. Ten years ago he was with the National Center for Science Education, the NCSE, which found itself advising the plaintiff's legal team in the famous Kitzmiller v. Dover evolution case. December 20th is the 10th anniversary of the decision in that case by Judge John Jones. I'll talk to Nick about the trial for about 10 minutes and then we'll talk about the continuing efforts by the anti-evolution crowd after Dover to get creationism into public schools. Nick has a paper in the latest issue of Journal of Science about that subject done in a very clever way. We spoke by phone.
On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
Nick, can you give us the quick summary of what that trial was all about and how were you involved?
Matzke: Sure. So yeah, Kitzmiller v. Dover was a court case. It was actually filed in 2004, and the litigation went throughout 2005 and the trial was in October 2005, and the decision came down December 20, 2005. It was the first trial, and the first and so far only trial to judge the constitutionality of what's called intelligent design, or what I like to call intelligent design creationism, which I think is a more accurate term. Sometimes people call it ID. The trial was a school board in Pennsylvania had passed a policy requiring teachers to read a statement that endorsed intelligent design and referred students to this intelligent design textbook called Of Pandas and People, and this was going to be sort of required. The statement was going to be read to the high school biology students who were 14 and 15 years old throughout the Dover Area School District, which is in southern central Pennsylvania.
Their parents objected, and so a number of plaintiffs, led by Tammy Kitzmiller—but another 10 parents were involved—contacted the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Center for Science Education and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the legal groups filed a lawsuit that led to this case. So there was a six-week trial, there was a fair bit of drama but, in the end, the federal judge, who was actually a George W. Bush appointee—he was a Republican appointee—issued a very strong pro-science decision declaring that intelligent design was creationism relabeled, and that it wasn't science, and so it was unconstitutional to teach in a public school biology class.
Mirsky: Did he refer to the breathtaking inanity, to quote him?
Matzke: He did. He referred to the breathtaking inanity of the school board, because the school board, you know, every school board had legal insurance and they have an attorney who is their contracted attorney who they can consult for legal advice, and they had consulted theirs before this case, and the attorney had said, "Don't do this. You're not going to win the case." Actually, if you go against your attorney's advice and then you do get sued, then actually your insurance doesn't cover that, right? Because the whole point is that the lawyer is supposed to keep you out of trouble. So the school district got stuck with—it wasn't the full bill in the end because the ACLU and other attorneys gave them a break—but yeah, they ended up being liable for the legal costs of the case, which were significant because it ran for a whole year. So yeah, that was part of why the judge says in the decision the school board had this breathtaking inanity to carry this out.
You know, the school board, it was 2004 when they passed this, and that was right during the reelection of George W. Bush, and the conservative ascendancy was sort of the mentality that was going on then. There was this idea that, "Bush is going to get reelected, he's going to appoint a bunch of conservatives to the Supreme Court, so if we want to have a test case for intelligent design, now is the time to do it. The appeals will go up to the Supreme Court and we'll have a revolutionary ruling that will show that this stuff can be taught in the schools." The downstream logic involves bringing religion back to culture as if there isn't plenty of religion in culture already, but that was part of the idea, you know, sort of bringing God back into the public schools was part of the motivation.
Mirsky: We should say that the legal argument on the part of the plaintiffs was that this action by the school board was a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, in that what they were really foisting upon the children in public schools was a variation on a particular religious viewpoint.
Matzke: Yeah, that's exactly right, and the Constitution says that the government, the exact language is, well, it says Congress, but other amendments have applied this to all government, "Shall make no law respecting establishment of religion," which is a very strong statement. So that's the Establishment Clause, and there have been previous rulings about creationism, saying that it's unconstitutional. Anyone can hold that view if they want, it's a free country, but teaching it in a government school is what the debate is about, and so creationism had been ruled unconstitutional, and Judge Jones, in this decision, said, "Intelligent design is basically the same stuff as creationism," despite frequent and vocal denials from the intelligent design movement that what they were doing was creationism, right? That was kind of the whole point of intelligent design, was to avoid the word creationism. But, despite that, the judge said, "No, it's the same stuff. The Supreme Court has already ruled that this is unconstitutional to teach in a government school," and that's the same ruling that he came down with for intelligent design. So yeah, it was quite a strong ruling.
Mirsky: What was your role?
Matzke: Oh yeah, so my role, I had started working at NCSE, the National Center for Science Education, which is the nonprofit, it's really the only nonprofit devoted to defending science education in the U.S., especially from creationists' attempts to get stuff into schools, but also these days, they work on climate change, which is now another issue that is cropping up as being problematic for politicians in schools, and so I started working there in 2004. Everyone could tell that this issue was gaining a head of steam then, and so they were hiring more staff, and I got hired. Then, when the case got filed, I was sort of the new guy, plus I was sort of a specialist in intelligent design even then.
I had spent a lot of time arguing with them and writing articles about them and stuff, so I became kind of the research guy on the case, so I worked closely with the lawyers educating them about the science arguments that are involved, and also the history of creationism, and then I ended up doing a lot of the background research. There were two major areas. One was the cross-examination of Michael Behe, who is one of their leading science type guys, and then also the history of intelligent design and where did that phrase come from, and both of those things ended up being used in the court case. I didn't testify in the court case, I wasn't an official expert with a PhD—I have since gotten the PhD but I didn't have one then. Those were the two big areas, the cross-examination of Michael Behe and where did the term intelligent design come from.
Mirsky: I was at opening arguments. I always say to people, "If that trial had been a fight, the referee would have stopped it in the first round."
Matzke: Yeah, I remember some journalist said, "It's like a football game. It's 100to zero and it's still the first quarter." One thing that I discovered, and I didn't really know this ahead of time, but talk is cheap, right? So, if you have a movement, you can talk big if nobody is ever really challenging you, even if people are challenging you with arguments, if you don't listen to them, then you can just brush it off, it doesn't really matter. But, in a court case, you can't really do that. In a court case, there's sort of this constrained environment. You have an independent judge there who probably hasn't followed the issue at all in any substantive way, and so then these arguments about what is scientific authority, what is real expertise versus kind of fake expertise, do arguments really make sense or not, and does the evidence, do you really have the evidence or are you just talking like you have evidence, those things really become apparent in a court case, which actually surprised me.
People were skeptical of the ability of a judge in a court to deal with evidence but, actually, if you think about it, judges deal with evidence all the time, that's sort of what they do, and actually these days, many legal cases have complex scientific content because there are medical malpractice suits, there are environmental damage cases, and so judges are actually pretty good these days at dealing with technical science. It takes a lot of work, you have to have lawyers that have learned the relevant topics, and they have to be able to interact with experts, and interact with technical evidence and publications and things like that. For me, it was kind of a positive experience because a lot of people are very negative about the legal system, and there's a lot of legitimate critiques, but I found in this case things actually worked like they're supposed to work.
Mirsky: Okay, so the past is prologue, and that was 10 years ago, and today we're talking on the 17th of December, in the evening my time it's the 18th, and in the afternoon your time in Australia. Today, you had a paper come out in the journal Science, a very prestigious journal, and it is a fascinating, and, if I can say, hilarious paper. Why don't you say what you did and what your paper found?
Matzke: Sure. So this paper started because I had been working at NCSE back from 2004 to 2007. There wasn't just the Kitzmiller case going on then. There were proposals back then for bills, either intelligent design bills or various kinds of critical analysis of "evolution" bills that had been proposed in state legislatures even back then. After the Kitzmiller case, intelligent design kind of died out as a legal strategy. I mean the proponents are still around, but it was pretty clear no school board was going to touch it with a 10-foot pole after that decision and the damages that the school board had to pay. But these other sorts of policies that don't mention intelligent design but they talk about critical analysis of evolution, or they portray evolution as controversial. These started to propagate, and so it was on my radar back then.
After I worked at NCSE, I went to graduate school, I went to Berkeley and got a PhD I studied phylogenetics, which is the study of phylogenies. Phylogenies are the evolutionary trees showing the relationships of different species through common ancestry. So I learned a lot about that, and then I went off to do a postdoc in Tennessee, and, in Tennessee, they ended up passing one of these bills in 2012, and there wasn't a ton I could do about it since I only moved there in 2013, but it kind of stuck in my craw. I was like, "_____ knowing that the whole state…"—you know, here I am studying evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, which is a pretty major research institution, and yet the legislature has passed this bill that says evolution is controversial, so it just sort of stuck in my craw.
But, over the years, I had kept in touch with NCSE people, and we had always talked about, you know, we were like, "These bills, they look like they're just being copied and modified. We should do a phylogeny at some point, do an evolutionary analysis of them," and it became clear this year that there were enough of these bills to do a phylogeny, because NCSE had been accumulating them year after year, so it had gotten up to being about 60 bills. It was also clear that, "Hey, the 10th anniversary of Kitzmiller v. Dover is coming up, and science journals are going to want some kind of update on what's been going on, and if we're going to do that, we might as well just mix in the phylogeny with that so we can show how these policies have evolved, how the anti-evolution policies have evolved through time."
So I dropped everything back in July and August, and, for about a month, crashed through this analysis where I took all those bills, lined up all the texts, coded all the characteristics, all the variations between these texts, and then ran them through the standard phylogenetic analyses that we use for DNA, we use them for dinosaurs, they get used to study virus evolution. Those same programs can be used on texts that have been copied and modified. So that's basically how this paper came about.
Mirsky: So what did you actually uncover when you did this laborious text analysis?
Matzke: Ah, so there's a couple main results that are sort of the technical results of this, because I mean part of the point was, yeah, "Ha-ha, creationism evolves," which I think it's a useful point to make, but there were some technical results, which is how strong is the signal of common ancestry when you have something—with animal species, we know they have common ancestry, that's been immensely well established. But if you have a collection of textural documents, you don't know starting out how much of that is due to copying and modification, and how much of it is due to independent composition by different writers, and things like that.
Mirsky: Again, these are bills in various legislatures around the country.
Matzke: Yeah, exactly. So every legislative session in every state, which is either every year or every two years, hundreds of bills get proposed on all sorts of topics, each one of those gets published, and these days they all go online when they're published, so the publication just means the bill has been introduced by somebody. So you have that text, and it has a date on it. So NCSE has a database. It's online actually. If you Google Creationism Legislation Database, you'll see this database of all these bills that have been proposed, and sometimes passed through the years. So I took those, and yeah, you take those texts, and yeah, you do this kind of exhaustive analysis where you line up all the characteristics and say, "Does it have this word? Does it not have this word? Does it use this phrase? Does it not use this phrase?"
Those are just characteristics that when a text is copied, those characteristics get copied, and, on occasion, they get modified. By tracing which bills share these variants, you can tell what the copying history is. So that was the basic method for doing it. The first big test was how strong is that signal of common ancestry, and basically you can compare it to a null hypothesis. You know in physics they talk about how many sigmas above the random noise are you to get a signal? We can do the same thing with phylogenetics, and in this case, it was about 12 sigmas above the null was what the signal of common ancestry was, so that's pretty strong evidence for copying.
Mirsky: Right. I mean usually five sigmas is the test, right?
Matzke: Yeah, yeah, usually, because if it's 1 sigma, the chance of it being a chance result could be one in three, and if it's 2 sigmas, it might one in 20, but year, if it's 5 sigmas, then it's pretty clearly not a chance result, and if it's 12, then you're a long ways from a chance result. So that kind of justified the basic approach that this really does look like a descent with modification in the sense of text where the texts are being copied and modified, which is really all Darwin's descent with modification is, right? Like genomes get copied every generation. The DNA gets copied and it gets very slowly modified, and that's how you infer the evolutionary history. So yeah, it's interesting how the same logic can be used in these two different cases.
Yeah, and so once I had that dataset, then that's the fun part. You get to run it through all the standard phylogenic analyses, so one thing was to do that, you know, what's the sigma for rejection the null hypothesis. Another one that I did is we can do an analysis with dates in the tree, so you don't just get a tree that sort of shows the relationships on which things are closer to each other, you actually get an estimate of what time did the copying events happen, which bills were copied from which other bills, and what the probabilities are of those. So I identified about six cases where a certain bill was identified with a greater than 90 percent probability to be the direct ancestor of another bill. I mean anyone can look at texts and say, "Oh, these texts are sort of similar, they probably share some kind of copying history," but with these phylogenic analyses, with the newest methods, you can say, "There's a 93 percent chance that this 2005 Alabama anti-evolution bill was copied from this particular 2004 Alabama bill."
So I think that's kind of a useful quantitative result that was part of the reason I think Science was interested in this, because it kind of went beyond just making the generic statement that creationism evolves and gives you kind of a detailed estimate of the history of what the copying was. Just from looking at the text, without—we could try and go interviewing all these conservative, fundamentalist legislators to ask them if they even remember what they did back in 2005–2006, but it's interesting that using the evolutionary tools, we can reconstruct how these anti-evolution policies evolve.
Mirsky: What is that actually telling us? Does that mean that there's a small band of people who have contacts around the country and they're all kind of cribbing each other's work to try to figure out how to modify it enough so that it gets through?
Matzke: I think that's a good way to describe it. In each state that has these problems coming up, there's usually one legislator or a couple legislators that propose these bills every year, and sometimes they copy their own bill, but very often they start off by copying some other state's bill. Actually, the most popular ones to copy, the first wave of this was kind of a bunch of bills in Alabama, and then a number of states copied the 2005 Alabama bill. Then, there was an event in 2006 in Louisiana where a school board had a policy that actually got passed, and in 2008, the legislators in Alabama copied that policy from the school district in Louisiana, and then they combined it with text from the Alabama policies and produced this new sort of species of anti-evolution bill, and then that bill from 2008 Louisiana has been copied around. One version got passed in Tennessee in 2012, and then there's been various versions since then.
One thing that you can see in the phylogeny, which is online, is that 2008 bill that combined that text from those previous two versions, it introduced this sort of strange feature of instead of just depicting evolution as controversial, which is what the bills originally did, I'm paraphrasing but it says, "Teachers are encouraged to critically analyze evolution, the origins of life, human cloning, and global warming." That's kind of the four topics that they do. So now, instead of just having evolution subjected to critical analysis, we have these other topics, including climate change, and that change was introduced—well, it was introduced in 2006 in the _____ School District in Louisiana. It got passed statewide in Louisiana in 2008, and it's been passed in Tennessee, so now there's 11 million citizens in two states that are subjected to this policy. That's the new strategy that even the Discovery Institute has adopted now, and their new model bill, has those four topics.
So one remark I make in the paper is that anti-evolutionism has kind of broken out of its traditional boundaries a little bit, and now this same kind of anti-science rhetoric is being applied to climate change, for instance. Human cloning is in there. Human cloning isn't exactly scientific controversy. It's sort of a legal controversy or a moral controversy, except everyone actually agrees that human cloning probably isn't a great idea, so it's not even really a controversy, but I think they throw it in there to just sort of muddy the waters a little bit. So anyway, with the phylogenic analysis, we can tell when did these steps happen and how influential are they are on future anti-evolution legislation, which I think is a useful result.
Mirsky: You mentioned the Discovery Institute. We should explain what that is.
Matzke: Oh, right, yeah. So the Discovery Institute, they're a think tank in Seattle. But they're the leading group promoting intelligent design, and several of their experts were in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case in 2005, were Discovery Institute fellows. Several other experts from Discovery Institute backed out of that case for complex reasons that people disagree on. But since then, they now claim they never wanted intelligent design to be taught in public schools, or they never wanted a policy to mandate it. I think that their history is revisionist and incorrect. There's clear evidence that they did want that to happen back in the 1990s. But, once it became clear it was a legal loser, they dropped that idea, and so they've been promoting what they originally called academic freedom acts. With that Louisiana bill, they started to be called science education acts. Now, right after I did this analysis, I saw there's a new Discovery Institute policy that attacks these four topics, and that looks like that's going to be their main strategy in the future, is to try and link evolution to global warming and these other topics as being controversial, and trying to get policies passed that do that depiction in government schools.
Mirsky: So the key idea is that they try to get this legislation written, and they try to get it passed, and you don't mention the words creationism or intelligent design. But, without mentioning those words, you try to cast doubt on the scientific validity of evolution and these other subjects.
Matzke: Yeah, that's exactly what they're going for, and it's quite frustrating as a science education advocate or a person who watches the issue, because the one virtue, I guess you could say, of the older policies was that at least it was clear what they were doing when it was creationism or intelligent design, right? That's kind of a positive suggestion. In the political or the media arena or in a court, you can make an assessment, "Is that a religious view or not? What's the history of it?" In this case where they don't mention those words and they just have this kind of critical analysis or teach the controversy strategy, it becomes more difficult, because the people who haven't heard of this issue at all, if you just ask a guy in the street, "Shouldn't we analyze different sides of these issues?" it just sounds fair. It's a very appealing, sort of common sense strategy.
Only if you're familiar with this history of how these strategies have been rejected in court and then trimmed down, and then rejected in court and trimmed down again, and then often there's not just court cases but the sorts of threats of lawsuits will sometimes influence these policies, also. When you know that history and you look at the people who have been sponsoring these bills, it becomes very clear that this new critical analysis strategy, teach-the-controversy strategy is the same old junk just with a new label in an attempt to be vague enough to avoid court scrutiny. So yeah, that was part of the point of this analysis. People had discussed how this was going on, but if you can sort of show it in a phylogeny and show how these strategies mutate through time, you're able to popularize this fact, this sort of historical fact a little bit better, and it puts people on their guard a little bit. So I think those are useful things that come out of this paper, also.
Mirsky: I can leave you the last word there, unless there's something else that I didn't bring up that you want to mention.
Matzke: Oh sure. Well, I mean I think there's a few important takeaway points that it would be worth people hearing about. One is really the importance of the National Center for Science Education. I couldn't have done this research without them being there every day keeping track of what bills are being proposed, where did they come from, who were the sponsors, and what the language is, so that requires there to be a permanent presence. Any nonprofit is always kind of—in the nonprofit world, the statement about non-profits is that you have to make a profit to be a successful nonprofit, and that just means nonprofits require they have staff they have to pay, health insurance and salaries. So anyone who is not already a member of the National Center for Science Education should look them up and should consider donating or becoming a member, getting their newsletter, and following the issue, because they're just a very important group to have.
The second takeaway is that creationism evolves, and sometimes those new strategies succeed, so I think a lot of people, it might not have been on their radar that we have two states that have a statewide policy that requires, or doesn't require but it encourages teachers to critically analyze, to introduce sort of false criticisms of evolution and global warming, science, and also, more explicitly, it tries to prevent administrators from doing anything about it if they have a teacher that's doing this kind of thing. So it's kind of a wink–wink/nod–nod strategy. Because we know there's a certain proportion of biology teachers even today that are still creationists and would really love to teach some anti-evolutionism, even if they feel required to teach evolution from the science standards that are passed in a particular state, they would love to introduce some creationism.
Often, they don't care if they get to use the word creationism or not; they just want to introduce some of these long lists of bogus arguments that the creationist movement has produced. Really, creationism and intelligent design, they never had a lot of positive content anyway, you know, 99 percent of what intelligent design was about was just sort of floating these—you know, if you're in the field, quite bizarre and wrong criticisms of evolutionary theory based on misunderstandings, and there's thousands of these at this point, but they're popular.
Usually, these criticisms, they're good enough to make sense if you're not educated in the topic, and so the kind of thing that in a college classroom or a graduate school class, they wouldn't be credible, but in a high school class with 14-year-olds, they could be pretty influential. So it's worth alerting people to the fact that these bills exist, and alerting people to how these strategies change through time so that you can be aware if it comes up in your state what's going on, follow the issue, get involved, contact the National Center for Science Education.
Then, the third takeaway I think is just we have this interesting science. It's interesting to think about how can we apply evolutionary methods to new topics, so things like legislation means, right? This kind of study is called a “phylomemeic” study, which means the phylogeny of a meme, and a meme is a cultural object, so it will be interesting to see how far we can push this analogy. I think that could be some interesting science there in the future. So those are my takeaway points.
Mirsky: The two states again in which the legislation is currently in effect are?
Matzke: Right. The states of Louisiana and Tennessee, which not coincidentally are two states that have had problems with evolution since the 1920s. The Scopes Monkey Trial was in Tennessee—in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925—so these issues go way back. But those are exactly the states that are most vulnerable to these kinds of policies.
Mirsky: When you say they've had trouble with evolution, you don't mean that they're not evolving, you mean they're having trouble with evolution in the schools.
Matzke: Yeah. Yeah, they've had trouble with evolution in the education system, yeah. They may also have—I mean there have been some cases where if a doctor or a farmer or someone is uneducated on evolutionary issues, it creates some risks because we know that organisms are adapting right now, so we know diseases can adapt to be drug-resistant if you don't follow the right policies about use of antibiotics, for example. The same thing can happen with pests and pesticides and herbicides and invasive weeds. So yeah, it's actually the case that it could be problematic. But yeah, the main point is that certain states politically have a long tradition of, first, attempting to ban evolution, that was what happened in the 1920s, and then creation science, which was Louisiana in 1981 passed a creation science bill that got overturned by the Supreme Court. But those are the states that have had these issues, and neighboring states that have had these issues for a long time.
Mirsky: That's it for this episode. Get your science news at our Web site, www.scientificamerican.com, where you can also check out the video of Jimmy Kimmel attempting to run on a surface with minimal friction. It doesn't go well. Remember, when trying to run, friction is your friend. Follow us on Twitter, where you get a tweet whenever a new item hits the website. Our Twitter name is @sciam. For Scientific American's Science Talk, I'm Steve Mirsky. Thanks for clicking on us.
