Woodward: Evolution In Texas

And if there is evolution in Texas, then, by golly, it's the biggest and best evolution anywhere.

But seriously.

Our state board of education voted this week not to require that teachers present the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories dealt with in the public school curriculum. Taken at face value, that would be a frighteningly anti-intellectual decree to hand down in connection with any subject. But if you know that the scientific theory being given special protection by the board's action is Darwin's theory of the origin of species by means of natural selection, then does the decree become reasonable -- or even more frightening?

That depends, I suppose, on whether you are an ideologically committed partisan on one side or the other. And make no mistake, there is partisan ideology on both sides.

Doesn't every scientific theory, no matter how safely ensconced within the velvet folds of intellectual orthodoxy, still have strengths and weaknesses? I was taught that it does, back in the 1960s, at a time when ideology had certainly taken over the humanities in public education but not yet the sciences. Didn't the Copernican theory kick the Ptolemaic theory's butt, based on the weaknesses of the latter? Didn't Einstein formulate his theory of general relativity by perceiving weaknesses in Newton's theory of gravitation? Isn't quantum mechanics a solution to the weaknesses of the atomic theory? Aren't cosmological careers being made today on the basis of weaknesses in the Big Bang theory, just as they once were made by Big Bangers on the basis of weaknesses in the steady state theory?

Well, we'll have no more of that in Texas. Truth may be relative, God may be dead, and what's good for General Motors may no longer be good for the country; but the one instance of ontological certitude remaining in this crazy world, by order of the Texas State Board of Education, is that the random occurrence of genetic variations tested in the crucible of procreative success is the mechanism that drives speciation at a macroevolutionary level. Credo ut intelligam.

I can be flippant because I have no dog in this fight. My wife and I are home schoolers, which means that we and our children are still free to assess the "strengths and weaknesses" of any intellectual theory we want. But I'm not unaware that a powerful coalition of bureaucrats, ideologues, and textbook salesmen would like to have it another way.