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                 'CREATION SCIENCE ' IS AN OXYMORON
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                                       By Stephen Jay Gould


         Science, above all, is a methodology for aquiring testable knowledge
    about the natural world - "the art of the soluble," in Sir Peter Medawar's
    apt phrase.  It is not, and cannot be, a compendium of certain knowledge.
    If the venacular word FACT has any currency in science, it can only be
    defined as "confirmed to so high a degree that it would be perverse to
    withhold provisional assent."   By this definition, evolution - the
    observation that all organisms are connected by unbroken ties of
    genealogy - is as much a fact as anything discovered by science - as well
    confirmed as Copernicus's claim that the Earth moves around the sun.
    Evolutionary biologists argue intensely about mechanisms of evolutionary
    change - and such meaty debates are the soul of exciting science, the
    chief sign of its good health - but we all accept the fundamental fact
    of genealogical connection.
         As a methodology of research, science adopts as its cardinal
    postulate - proved fruitful by its enormous success since the time of
    Galileo, Newton, and Descartes - the commitment to explain empirical
    phenomena by reference to invariant laws of nature and to avoid appeals
    to the miraculous, defined as suspension of those laws, for particular
    events.  The notion of "abrupt appearance" - the origin of complex
    somethings from previous nothings - resides in this domain of miracle and
    is not part of science.  Punctuated equilibrium, catastrophic theories
    of mass extinction, hopeful monsters, and a variety of hypotheses about
    rapid rates of change in continuous sequences - not about unintelligible
    abrupt appearances - are part of scientific debate and bear no relationship
    to the nonscientific notion of abrupt appearance, despite pernicious and
    wishful attempts by many creationists to distort such claims and misquote
    and half-quote to their alien purposes.  Punctuated equilibrium, in
    particular, is a claim that evolutionary trends have a geometry that
    resembles a climb up a staircase, rather tthan a slide up an inclined
    plane.  It is, in other words, an alternative theory about the nature
    of intermediate stages in evolutionary trends, not, as creationists
    have claimed, a denial of those stages.
         As a tern, CREATION SCIENCE is an oxymoron - a self-contradictory
    and meaningless phrase - a whitewash for a specific, particular, and
    minority religious view in America, biblical literalism.
         As a religious idea, it differs sharply from the tenets of most
    other faiths - from the enormously lengthy cycles of repetition in
    Hindu thought, from the usual interpretation of origins in my own
    Jewish faith, and the allegorical readings of the Bible accepted by
    Catholics since the time of St. Augustine.  Biblical literalism, like
    all notions in the diverse array of faiths professed by Americans,
    belongs in the homes and churches - not in legislatively mandated
    curricula of science courses in public schools.
         It is particularly tragic that public understanding of science should
    be so threatened just when science has become so central and crucial in all
    our lives.  This battle is for science itself, not only for the right
    of teachers to teach a fact of nature unimpeded by state commands.  How
    can Americans hope to understand the nature of science if a partisan and
    minority religious doctrine, completely outside the norms and procedures
    of science, be taught as science, against the conscience and convictions
    of trained teachers, in the nation's schools.

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             Stephan Jay Gould is with the Museum of Comparative Zoology at
             Harvard University, where he teaches biology, geology, and the
             history of science.   He is considered by many to be the leading
             authority in Evolutionary Science and has made numerous
             appearances on PBS' NOVA series.
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                               Skeptical Inquirer
                               Vol. XI, no. 2 / Winter 1986-87
                               ppgs 152-153
                               Retyped by the Jester



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                  STATUTE ATTACKS ALL THE SCIENCES

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                                                  by Murray Gell-Mann

        It is most important that the U.S. Supreme Court affirm the decision
    of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which threw out a
    Louisiana statute mandating the teaching of "creation science."  That
    statute would require that in the public schools of Louisiana the
    teaching of certain parts of science (which concern "origins" and thus
    appear to conflict with the claims of particular religious sects) would
    be selected for special pejorative treatment and would have to be
    "balanced" by the teaching of something called "creation science."  It
    is shown in our brief that this expression can mean only one thing, namely
    a pseudoscience based on the literal interpretation of certain Bible
    stories and preaching that the universe and the earth are both young
    (thousands instead of billions of years old), that animals and plants
    were created in immutable "kinds," that fossils are to be explained by
    a universal Noachian Flood, and so forth.
         I should like to emphasize that the portion of science that is
    attacked by the statute is far more extensive than many people realize,
    embracing very important parts of physics, chemistry, astronomy, and
    geology as well as many of the central ideas of biology and anthropology.
    In particular, the notion of reducing the age of the earth by a factor of
    nearly a million, and that of the visible expanding universe by an even
    larger factor, conflicts in the most basic way with numerous robust
    conclusions of physical science.   For example, fundamental and
    well-established principles of nuclear physics are challenged, for no
    sound reason, when "creation scientists" attack the validity of the
    radioactive clocks that provide the most reliable methods used to date
    the earth.
         If the kind of requirement envisaged by the statute is imposed
    on our public schools, the graduates may be ill-equipped to deal with
    problems of health, agriculture, industrial production, environmental
    quality, and national defense, and our republic is in grave danger.
         It has often happened that science has had to defend itself
    against the DARK FORCES OF IGNORANCE AND SUPERSTITION.  The action by
    the Louisiana legislature recalls in some ways the situation in the
    Soviet Union under Stalin and his immediate successors, when the
    authorities interfered with the teaching of biology and promoted
    the pseudoscientific doctrine of Lysenko, with adverse effects on
    agriculture as well as on teaching and research.
         All scientific conclusions are subject to revision if new
    discoveries or new convincing arguments arise.  When there are serious
    competing hypotheses, they are discussed and compared in scientific
    papers in refereed journals, in serious textbooks, in seminars, and
    in science classes.  By contrast, "creation scientists" who are
    members of the Creation Research Society have to subscribe to a
    statement of belief in the literal truth of Bible stories.
         The Louisiana statute represents an attempt by a legislature to
    force entry into science classrooms on behalf of a particular kind
    of fundamentalist religion dressed up as science.

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               Murray Gell-Mann is Robert A. Millikan Professor of Physics,
               California Institute of Technology, and winner of the Nobel
               Prize in Physics in 1969 and is considered one of the Great
               Minds of Modern Science.

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                              Skeptical Inquirer
                              Vol. XI No. 2 / Winter 1986-87
                              ppgs. 156 - 157
                              Typed by The Jester

