nature.net
November 2005
No Links Missing
By Robert Anderson
On a windswept stretch of Interstate 10, between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, a forty-five-foot concrete sauropod overlooks the speeding cars. Behind it looms an even taller T. rex. Built by a former amusement park sculptor in the 1960s, these extraordinary examples of roadside kitsch are sized so that we’ll pull over and spend a few dollars. I always used to let my kids stop in the gift shop, alluringly located inside the belly of the Apatosaurus.
But no more. Creationists have bought the dinosaurs. The store’s pre-historic toys now carry a warning label: “Don’t swallow it! The fossil record does not support evolution.” And at its cute Web site for kids (cabazondinosaurs.com), they ask: “Is there a Designer? If a plane or car needs a designer, why would life need anything less?”
I was sad to lose the dino stop, but I realized the new owners had found the perfect outlet for their cause. If you’re going to attack a basic tenet of modern science, do it through tacky highway attractions. I’m sure the people at the National Center for Science Education (www.ncseweb.org) would agree. A clearinghouse for information to help educators and the public understand and counter the “intelligent design” movement, NCSE is not opposed to creationists espousing their pseudoscientific views, as long as they don’t carry out their threat to do so in public-school science classes. The center takes that well-funded threat seriously.
On its home page I was drawn to the news section that tracks the latest vic-tories and losses in the ongoing culture war. One story, from the Kansas newspaper Lawrence Journal-World, grabbed my attention because of the callout, “Standards debate harming Kansas’s reputation” (by the time you read this, it may no longer be on the home page but in the “News Room,” the site’s news archive). Click on “Story in the Lawrence Journal-World” to find University of Kansas provost David Shulenburger’s comment that the debate over how evolution is taught has made it “tougher to recruit faculty and top students.” I hope officials in other states read that one.
To find out how the controversy is playing out in your part of the country, click “News Room” on the bar near the top, and you will find an article archive you can search by state and year. The “Resources” page will answer many questions about how to defend science from fundamentalist attacks. Items include court decisions against teaching creationism as science and tips on testifying at local school board meetings. Or hit “Links” for an annotated list of sites relating to evolution.
One of the best Web sites for basic explanations of evolutionary concepts is run by the Museum of Paleontology of the University of California, Berkeley (www.ucmp.berkeley.edu). Click on “Understanding Evolution” and go to “Relevance of Evolution.” Here you will find specific examples of why the teaching of evolution is important: not only does it best explain the evidence; it is also the key to making informed decisions in many fields crucial to our nation’s future.
Before you argue with someone who insists there is no proof of evolution, return to the “Understanding Evolution” home page and click on “Evidence.” There you’ll find plenty of powerful examples. My favorite is an Aetiocetus skull, a 25-million-year-old intermediate ancestor of the whale, which refutes the creationist claim that transitional fossils don’t exist. This fossil skull, with its nostrils in the middle, is a halfway point: 50 million years ago, the nostrils of an earlier ancestor, a land-dwelling mammal, were at the tip of the snout; today the whale’s nostrils are at the top of the head. At the end of this section, “Evidence by Example” explores instances of evolution in progress.
The PBS site pbs.org/wgbh/evolution offers the remarkable “Evolution Library,” with hundreds of multimedia files, including videos, interviews, and interactive programs. At the Web site of the National Academy of Sciences (www.nationalacademies.org/evolution), five online publications designed especially for teachers are available. For those interested in debating the intelligent-design crowd, try talkdesign.org for critiques of their arguments. Finally, at this magazine’s own Web site, click on the special report “Intelligent Design?” Three scientists rebut three ID proponents. Published three years ago, it is even more relevant today. With a nod from the current U.S. president, creation “science”—in the guise of intelligent design—is poised to spread well beyond Kansas and roadside dinosaurs, diminishing the scientific reputation of an entire nation.
Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer living in Los Angeles.
Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2005