According to Lawrence S. Lerner, an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy
at California State university, commenting in Nature for September 21, the teaching
of biology and its evolutionary processes in the natural world ranks as unsatisfactory
in one third of the states in the United States. Lerner maintains that biological
evolution is “one of the most important of many broad issues on which almost
all working scientists agree.”
Why the teaching of science in American schools should be so different from
elsewhere in the civilised world is not clear, but the arguments are really
over religion and politics, not over science at all. The religious interpretation
of natural phenomena is characteristic of areas with a substantial population
of Protestant evangelicals, and has had a great influence on the teaching of
science. Moreover, opposition to the idea of evolution has come from the political
far left, which is still represented to a small extent in the US after it has
virtually disappeared in post-Stalinist Europe.
The anti-evolutionists tend to object, first, to the assumption that the evolutionary
process has taken place over millions of years, second, to the argument that
living things are descended from common ancestors, and third, that evolution
must be regarded as a process of nature, susceptible to scientific investigation
and requiring no supernatural intervention. Much of the objection stems from
a belief that humans are in a unique and privileged position, and not subject
to forces which affect lower creatures in the scale of living things. For the
scientist, this is difficult if not impossible to defend as a logical point
of view.