The latest battle in the schools
is over science.
-The State Board of Education debates
a controversial subject: climate change.
And a growing skepticism has seeped
into the classroom,
reviving attacks on one of the most
well-established principles of biology,
evolution.
-I've never had a teacher say that
evolution is 100 percent
scientifically valid.
-The great danger of the anti-evolution
movement is that it will turn us into a
nation of scientific know-nothings.
Zack Kopplin had just finished his
freshman year in high school in 2008
when he heard that Louisiana was
considering a new law allowing science
teachers to bring in materials questioning
the validity of widely accepted theories
ranging from evolution to climate change.
-It’s marketed as promoting critical
thinking and who wouldn’t want to critique
science?
The problem is, in many things,
there isn’t a both sides.
There’s the truth and not the truth.
I was 14 and I think
it just hit me at formative time
where it was, sort of, simple
right and wrong, like, evolution is real.
We shouldn’t be teaching
bad science to our students.
But it’s not going to pass.
And then it passed.
-A Baton Rouge high schooler is leading
the fight to repeal the Louisiana Science
Education Act.
-Louisiana has an
anti-science reputation.
Some of the world’s most esteemed
scientists put their weight behind
Kopplin’s repeal effort.
-Maybe I shouldn't be saying this
but you can very easily
find Nobel Laureates' emails.
And so I just emailed them.
I wanted 10 Nobel Laureates,
and we ultimately got up to, like,
78, I think.
And at that point I just sort of—I stopped
because it’s, like, my point is proven.
Kopplin also suspected
that the bill was being used to teach
creationism in the science classroom,
something prohibited by the Constitution.
He didn’t have to look far for evidence.
-In one email, the school had PDF’ed
a copy of the law
and had relabeled it with their own label
as the Louisiana Creationism Law.
Another science teacher sent the principal
an email inviting him to come sit in
while she taught the
creation point of view
using supplemental materials
like the Book of Genesis
to debunk evolution.
Georgia Purdom, a molecular biologist
and biblical creationist,
sees nothing wrong with that.
-I am a scientist,
and I have looked at the science,
and I see that it confirms God’s word.
But I would also then like to be able to
teach evolution,
what the evolutionists believe,
and then the problems with that.
Because there can only be one truth.
They both cannot be true.
-A lot of the politicians
were either creationists or
didn’t want to kick the beehive
that was upsetting the creationists.
-I've got no problem if the school board,
the local school board says, we want to
teach our kids about creationism.
Let's teach them about intelligent design.
I think teach them the best science.
Let them -- give them the tools
where they can make up their own mind.
-We tried to repeal the law
five times total.
And the politicians
were just not having it no matter
how much evidence we brought them.
The Louisiana Science Education Act
was a victory for skeptics of evolution
whose last major win had occurred
83 years before.
-Scopes, Dayton, Tennessee high school
teacher, is to be tried for teaching
evolution of man from monkeys
despite a Tennessee law
forbidding instruction in this doctrine.
In the 1920s, it was illegal in some
states' public schools to teach evolution,
which holds that all living things
share a common ancestry.
It took a Tennessee jury
less than 10 minutes
to convict John T. Scopes of this crime.
But by 1968, the Supreme Court
had struck down these laws,
saying they violated
the separation of church and state.
In the decades that followed,
courts repeatedly blocked laws attempting
— first — to teach the story of Genesis
alongside evolution
and then, a refashioned concept called
intelligent design.
-It is a theory which contends that life
is so complex, a supernatural
being had to have been involved.
Supporters say intelligent design
is grounded in science.
But a federal judge today
resoundingly rejected that claim.
-Around the country,
attempts to teach intelligent design and
to label it as such pretty much dried up,
they pretty much ended.
So, yet another approach was required,
and one of the most creative of those,
in my opinion,
was the Louisiana Science Education Act.
The act was based on a model bill
fashioned by the Discovery Institute,
a think tank that helped popularize
intelligent design.
-We think that the evidence
leads first to intelligence.
And then from there, there is
a second question,
which is the identity of the designer.
The Institute,
which produces its own textbooks,
videos and study guides,
says the intention of the legislation is
to give students the ability to critically
analyze a host of scientific issues
that the schools are teaching as settled.
-Often the theories that are presented
as solid are not as solid
as they're presented.
-One reason why the public
ends up being very interested,
in whether it be climate change
or evolution is that these
happen to be areas where often
scientific claims
are mixed in with a lot of other claims.
To the Institute,
the teaching of evolution
is a case in point.
-When you discover that
at the foundation of life,
you’ve got something that’s functioning
exactly like digital code.
We live in an information age
where we know what it takes to generate
digital code, namely programmers.
I think we’re looking at a very compelling
evidence of design
in the history of life.
Neo-Darwinism, the standard textbook
theory that all students learn in
high school and college biology textbooks,
is increasingly obsolete.
-There’s nothing left of the theory.
It’s not a small hole,
the whole thing's gone.
That view puts the Discovery Institute
at odds with all major
scientific organizations, including
the National Academy of Sciences,
which point out that advances
in scientific understanding have actually
bolstered the theory of evolution.
But while 98 percent of American
scientists accept the theory
of evolution as true,
more than a third of the American public
does not.
Georgia Purdom curates exhibits
at two biblical museums
in northern Kentucky,
which attracted about a million visitors
last year.
The Ark Encounter describes how Noah saved
all the world’s creatures
from the biblical flood,
including the dinosaurs,
while the Creation Museum leads visitors
through the story of Genesis
and points out perceived problems
with evolution.
-I mean, if we're teaching our kids they're
nothing more than the result of
undirected, random processes over time,
that they evolve from some sort of
ape-like creature,
that they are an animal,
how do you expect them to act?
Supporters of Louisiana’s
Science Education Act
say it is not designed to bring religion
into the public schools.
And they point out that it also covers
other scientific topics,
like human cloning and global warming.
Miller says
there’s an important reason why.
-The First Amendment protects you
against imposition of religious ideas
in the public schools.
It doesn't protect you
against the introduction of stupid ideas.
The First Amendment
provides no protection
if a school board or a district
or an individual teacher
decides to teach frankly anti-science
critiques of climate change
or just about anything else,
because if they're not doing it
for a religious motivation,
the First Amendment protection against the
establishment of religion doesn't apply.
The Discovery Institute
doesn’t dispute that their model bill
is intended to avoid legal challenges.
-We think that it’s actually helping a lot
of school boards and teachers because
it's giving people a place where they can
securely address issues without creating
a big legal challenge
and a big public spectacle.
-What has happened in many states around
the country
is that evolution has become one
of a series of issues,
and the others include, of course,
climate science but also
issues of fertility, conception,
stem cell research and so forth,
which, in the views of many,
amount to a cultural attack.
As these laws advance,
we may bring up a generation of students
who have been taught,
as a matter of course,
that the scientific method
and the scientific community
is not to be trusted.
-My teacher, instead of saying that we
would have a lesson on evolution,
she said that we would just have an
in-class debate where you
could present your views on evolution.
Amanda Watson, of Bossier City, Louisiana,
saw the impact firsthand
in her science class.
-She went on a whole spiel about how
there's different perspectives on
evolution and we don’t necessarily have to
consider it scientifically valid.
There were a couple of kids
who believed that the earth
was 6,000 years old
because that’s kind of the
religious perspective around here.
Watson added that, in some ways,
the treatment of climate change at her
school fared even worse.
She says it was never brought up at all.
-And my generation
is going to be the one that has to
kind of deal with the consequences of it
"-Good evening Ms. DeVos.
Welcome to the committee.
When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos
was questioned by the Senate,
she echoed language used by
the Discovery Institute.
-And I support the teaching of
great science and especially science
that allows students to
exercise critical thinking.
Louisiana is no longer alone.
Since 2008, five other states
have enacted legislation making it easier
to call into question scientific theories
like evolution or climate change
in the classroom.
Over the last two years,
ten others have tried.
-Lots of different states have considered
various versions of this.
And I’d say, overall,
one of the benefits of these bills
is not the bills themselves. It’s airing
the public discussion
where the community gets to discuss,
well, what is science?
Why is it important?
-We have seen a greater number of
measures introduced in state legislatures
around the country
designed to sneak anti-scientific
ideas into the science classroom.
Objections to evolution,
complaints about climate science are
really weapons of disbelief that are used
to disqualify
the authority of science in general.