Cover Story: Monkey business

Over the course of four days last month, Marjorie Rogers could be found on the 17th floor of the Richard B. Russell Federal Building, in the courtroom of Judge Clarence Cooper. She sat a few rows behind the defense attorneys, on one of the pine benches installed for the public. She usually sat alone, and with each witness who testified, she took extensive notes on a legal pad. When she heard something she disagreed with, which was often, she bit her lip and shook her head.

Although she is an attorney, Rogers was in Cooper’s courtroom on a personal matter. Two years earlier, she had led a petition drive opposed to the biology textbooks that the Cobb County school board was poised to adopt. Rogers is a six-day creationist, and she believes Darwin’s theory of evolution is fatally flawed. Presented with the signatures of 2,300 like-minded Cobb residents, the school board pasted a sticker in each book, reminding students that evolution is a “theory, not a fact” and should be “critically considered.”

As it happened, Rogers was the first witness called in last month’s trial over the constitutionality of the stickers. Rogers was in the awkward position of being a witness for the plaintiff; with each response she gave to Michael Manely, the Marietta attorney representing the ACLU and the five parents who sued to remove the labels, she was helping to build his case that the stickers violate the separation of church and state.

Manely needed to show that more than just being a sop to creationist parents in the Cobb County district, the stickers were a thinly veiled reference to the divine. On the stand, Rogers repeated that she wanted other theories about the origin of life — as long as they were grounded in science — to be taught in schools. “Could one of those theories be creationism?” Manely asked.

“It could be,” Rogers said.

“Intelligent design?”

“It could be.”

When she was finally excused, she took her seat back on the wooden benches. To a friend, she whispered, “Well, that was a singularly unpleasant experience.”

Judge Cooper’s decision in the case is expected any day now. And although it won’t be binding on the rest of the country, or even outside Cobb County, the decision could have profound implications nationwide in the ongoing battle by fundamentalist Christians to replace — or at least augment — scientific theories about evolution with ideas based on little more than faith.

The Scopes trial of 1925, which pitted Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan, did little to settle the question of evolution being taught in public schools. Indeed, evolutionists actually lost that trial, and laws against teaching evolution remained on the books of many states well into the 1960s. Even today, crusades to restrict its teaching seem to pop up, mushroom-like, throughout the country.

In a small town in Wisconsin this fall, the school board unanimously voted to allow “various theories/models of origins” to be taught in science classes. In a rural district in Pennsylvania, the school board has gone so far as to require that students learn alternative theories to evolution. And in Georgia earlier this year, the state education superintendent, Kathy Cox, proposed striking the word “evolution” from the state curriculum, only to reverse herself days later after a firestorm of controversy erupted.

Cobb County has had an equally schizophrenic approach to evolution. For years, teachers opted to just ignore the topic altogether. In one case, pages covering the origin of Earth were deleted by the publisher, at the request of the district.

By 2002, though, things seemed to have settled down. Evolution had become part of the Cobb County science curriculum. Then Marjorie Rogers learned the district was looking to buy new textbooks. She decided to check things out.

Rogers is 52. She and her husband live with their two sons in a sprawling house they built not long ago off Burnt Hickory Road in north Cobb County. She remembers when this part of Cobb was mostly farmland. “You used to have to pack a lunch to come out here,” she says with a laugh.

Today, the county is home to 650,000 people, more than twice its population 25 years ago. With that expansion has come the obvious problems — most notably overdevelopment and traffic. Barrett Parkway, just a few hundred yards from Rogers’ front door, is a clogged artery of cars and SUVs lurching west from I-75 every evening.

Cobb’s explosive growth has cut into its white majority, but only slightly into its rampant conservatism. This is the county that has elected congressmen such as Newt Gingrich, Bob Barr, and the late Larry McDonald, who, at the time the passenger jet he was in was shot down by Soviet warplanes in 1983, was head of the John Birch Society. In 1993, Cobb County commissioners passed a resolution declaring that gay lifestyles were “incompatible” with community standards. The resulting uproar forced Olympic organizers to re-route the path of the Olympic torch around Cobb County three years later.

The past few decades have, Rogers says, “brought in a diverse crowd. Which is a good thing. As long as they don’t call us stupid.”

Rogers and I are talking in her living room, sitting beneath high ceilings with exposed beams. Stenciled above the windows that overlook the kitchen table is an excerpt from a passage in Galatians, which says that the “fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”

Rogers was born in Charleston to a Navy family and moved to Cobb in 1967. She studied journalism at the University of Georgia, got a law degree, and now practices civil law in Marietta.

Rogers doesn’t recall learning much about evolution when she was in Cobb schools. “I was not a star science student by any stretch,” she says. “I did the minimum amount and squeaked by.”

But about 10 years ago, her interest in evolution was piqued when she watched Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. She started reading about evolution. One book was called Icons of Evolution, written in 2000 by molecular biologist Jonathan Wells. The book attacked 10 of the traditional evolution lessons — the “icons” — taught in science classrooms. Wells is a follower of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and has written that Moon “chose” him to enter a Ph.D. program after Wells devoted his life to “destroying Darwinism.” Icons of Evolution is one of the results.

Besides being a Moonie, Wells is also senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that is on the vanguard of the intelligent design movement. His book has become holy writ for intelligent design adherents, who argue that life is too complex to be the result of random evolution, and so therefore must be the work of a higher power — a “designer.”

Intelligent design is essentially creationism buffed up with a scientific sheen. Both seek to derail Darwinism. Both make their case not in traditional scientific journals, but to politicians and the general public. There are some differences. For instance, intelligent design advocates usually don’t quibble with the notion that the world is about 4.5 billion years old, while strict creationists believe it’s closer to 6,000 years old. But the intelligent design movement has, by and large, given a patina of scientific credibility to creationists eager to take their beliefs from the church to the classroom. Wells’ book, for example, provided Rogers with ready-made talking points — points that also happen to dovetail with her own beliefs.

One example she brings up is homology. Scientists — that is, the vast majority who accept Darwinian evolution — define a homologous structure as one that is shared by two different organisms and derived from a common ancestor. For instance, embryonic birds and reptiles are nourished by a yolk. That yolk is contained within a sac, which is protected by an eggshell. As it turns out, human embryos also form a yolk sac early on, even though it remains empty, since our nourishment is received from our mothers. Evidence for a common ancestor? Most scientists think so, but Rogers would say no. She decries textbooks that compare homologous structures in humans, horses and other creatures.

“They line them all up and show the skeletal structure of these critters and they say, ‘See how remarkably similar these are? That must mean they come from a common ancestor,’” Rogers says. Her eyes widen. “I mean, y’know, what? It could also be evidence of a prototype.”

Rogers calls these holes in the evolutionary argument “science’s dirty little secret. Some of the stuff I’ve been reading, it’s all about the money.” To rock the evolutionary boat, she says, would endanger the grants scientists get or their tenure at universities.

So when it came time for Cobb County to phase in a new round of science textbooks in 2002, Rogers was eager to chime in. She didn’t like what she saw.

“One of the books talked about kneecaps, and said if they’d been designed, the designer would have done a better job at it,” Rogers says. “That’s obviously a reference to a creator. And it’s a derogatory, snide comment about a creator. Some kind of backhanded slap.”

She complained, but, she says now, “I got the distinct impression I was not being heard.” She went home, and with a friend drafted a petition. The petition was rather wordy, but basically it said: Science materials should clearly distinguish facts from theories when it comes to evolution, and if they don’t, they should be clarified within the text by amended statements, as well as supplemental material that presents “all theories and presumptions regarding these facts that are currently accepted by members of the scientific community.” Finally, the petition called for a statement placed “prominently” at the beginning of the text which would warn students that some of the information within was “not factual but rather theory.”

The school board would vote on the textbooks within two weeks, so Rogers had to move fast. At NorthStar, a Southern Baptist church in Kennesaw where she was a congregant, she gathered signatures between services. She encouraged others to make copies of the petition, and to circulate it among their own friends and acquaintances. By the school board meeting in March 2002, Rogers’ pyramid-scheme approach to petitioning had garnered 2,300 signatures.

“I was blown away,” she says.

She probably shouldn’t have been. Polls consistently show the majority of Americans reject Darwinism. Last month, CBS News polled 885 people and found that more than half believe God created humans in their present form. And if humans did evolve, 27 percent say God guided the process. But perhaps most telling, two out of three polled thought schools should teach creationism alongside evolution. And of the evangelical Christians surveyed, 60 percent thought evolution should be thrown out of school curricula and replaced with creationism.

Looked at in that light, finding 2,300 people in one of the most conservative counties in the nation is like finding Republicans at a NASCAR race.

Ernest Easley, senior pastor of the 9,000-strong Roswell Street Baptist Church, succinctly reflects a prevailing sentiment: “If I had a preference,” he says, “I would put in a lot of information on creationism and mention in passing the theory of evolution.”

The problem is, courts have repeatedly ruled that creationism cannot be taught in public schools because doing so would violate the separation between church and state. And although intelligent design never mentions God by name, the fact that it posits a creator is, in essence, a religious argument. And religion is based on faith, which scientific tools cannot measure.

In any case, the Cobb County school board, being a political body, did what political bodies so often do when presented with hot-headed constituents: It caved. But only to a degree.

It didn’t amend the books. It didn’t send them back to the publisher to be rewritten. It didn’t order that alternative theories of evolution be taught in class. What it did do was agree that stickers should be placed in the books, inside the front covers. This is what the stickers said:

“This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.”

This sounds innocuous enough. After all, isn’t evolution a theory? Well, yes, it is, in the same way that gravity is a theory, and the notion that microorganisms cause disease is a theory. In the parlance of science, theories are not hunches. “Theories are at a higher level than facts,” testified Kenneth Miller, a Brown University biology professor who is co-author of one of the Cobb science books that has been labeled. “They tie principles together. They are supported with facts — not different from facts.”

Of course, not every school board member was eager to disavow more than a century of scientific scholarship, even if it had the unfortunate label of “theory.” Laura Searcy, a pediatric nurse and school board member who could remember years ago when her own children came home from Cobb County schools with the pages on evolution torn out, testified in court last month that “evolution is the basis of biological science.”

Nevertheless, she voted for the sticker, testifying that when a constituency such as the Rogers faction has such “deep values and principle-based objections, you find a way to respect that without compromising the scientific education.”

In other words, the sticker was intended as a happy medium. OK, maybe not a happy one. Rogers herself was disappointed with the sticker. “The sticker does not make me happy,” she says. Her goal is accurate textbooks. More specifically, accurate as she defines it — with the “flaws” of evolution theory taught alongside the theory itself. The sticker, she says, tells students to “consider the material critically, but it doesn’t give them anything to look at.”

Rogers wasn’t the only one dissatisfied with the sticker. So was Jeff Selman.

If you were to stage a drama about a battle over the right to teach evolution in a conservative Southern county, central casting could do no better than send you Jeff Selman to play the role of the aggrieved newcomer shocked by what’s going on around him.

Selman is a 58-year-old computer programmer, but looks 10 years younger. He, his wife, their 10-year-old son, William, and a cat with sinus problems live in a quiet subdivision off Route 120 in east Cobb County, just west of Roswell.

Selman has lived in Georgia for 12 years, but grew up in the Bronx — a fact that is evident the minute he opens his mouth. When, after 90 minutes, my tape finally ran out, he said, “You shoulda brought more! Didn’t you know who you’d be talking to?”

On the stand last month, Selman recalled his reaction to the sticker: “It doesn’t say God, it doesn’t say the Bible, but it’s religious. If you pluck the feathers off a duck, it’s still a duck.”

To Selman, any explanation for evolution that is not Darwinian is, by definition, religious, and thus shouldn’t be allowed in a public classroom.

Indeed, such is the intensity of the debate in Cobb County that Selman feels obligated to preface any discussion of the stickers by reminding his interlocutor that he’s Jewish. Otherwise, he fears, people will think he’s an atheist. (“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” he says.) By proclaiming his religion, he believes, he derails any charge that he’s not a man of faith. The sticker, he testified, “usurps my position as a parent to my child. His faith is my responsibility — not the school’s.”

As his cat snorts nearby, Selman talks about what moved him to sue. Before learning of the stickers, he says, “I was sleepwalking through my democracy. We assume everything that’s pertinent to our democracy has been solved already. Well, it hasn’t been, apparently, because people keep bringing it back.”

After seeing the stickers, he decided to call the ACLU.

He recalls the conversation.

” ‘Why do you wanna do this?’ they ask me.

” ‘Because I live in America. And I wanna be free. And I don’t like theocracy and this is the first place theocracy starts, in the schools. They indoctrinate children and they grow up thinking it’s a good thing, and it isn’t!’ “

Selman explains that his sense of justice was honed at a young age. “My parents raised me to not tolerate injustice. I had relatives living in a cave for two years hiding from the Nazis. My father fought in the Philippines.”

Selman doesn’t believe evolution is an unbridgeable gap between science and evolution.

“Didn’t God create Adam out of mud from a river? Isn’t that the primordial ooze that you talk about that started evolution? Where’s the disconnect here? We just describe it differently.”

He gestures toward William, who’s practicing juggling near the TV.

“This Orthodox rabbi was teaching him about seven-day creation a few weeks ago. We just finished Yom Kippur. It’s the new year. You start with the Torah at the beginning. Where’s the beginning? Creation! It’s the story of how Jews believe the world started.

“And this is where evolution opponents make their mistake. ‘Cause they don’t wanna learn. They just wanna poke holes in things further along the line. Evolution is not how life started on this planet. Evolution is how it continued once it got here.”

To Selman, intelligent design is a dressed-up term for creationism, plain and simple. The subject gets him so worked up, he talks about it like it’s an incorrigible child sitting next to him on the couch.

“You’re not a theory! You’re not even a hypothesis! You’re a statement! You’re an assertion that through probability and statistics you’ve invented. So I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to see this spin.”

Aside from a few threatening phone calls, reaction from Cobb residents has been positive to the lawsuit, he says. People whisper their thanks to him.

“I’m not doing this to defend science,” Selman says. “I’m defending America.”

The Discovery Institute compares “materialistic science” to a tree. Only by attacking the trunk will the tree fall. Thus, the institute has come up with what it calls a “wedge strategy,” designed to topple what more than a century of rigorous science has built up. Intelligent design theory “promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”

Part of the wedge strategy, besides putting out books like Icons of Evolution, is to attract publicity. In that regard, the institute’s success has been stunning. Its followers are imbued with the zeal of the evangelizer.

“They’re justified by Jesus,” says Charles Gallagher, a sociologist at Georgia State University. “They believe they’re getting points to get into the kingdom of heaven by making this stand. It’s myopic righteousness. It’s like they’re saying, ‘If not for us holding back the hordes of Philistines, we’ll slide into an atheistic society, a Sodom and Gomorrah.’ “

Like everyone else I spoke to for this story, Gallagher was quick to point out that he’s religious — in this case, Roman Catholic. “You have to show your bona fides,” he says. “It’s the tyranny of the minority.

“It’s a form of American Talibanism. Unless you want to live in a theocracy, we have to be ever vigilant about having them push their agendas down the majority’s throat.”

As it turns out, this isn’t the first time stickers have appeared in Georgia science textbooks. A decade ago, Clayton County found itself with what Hal Banke, a former science teacher there, describes as a “fundamentalist” school board. In 1996, the board voted to adopt a disclaimer cribbed from one in Alabama. The sticker went on for 13 sentences, finally wrapping things up by reminding students to “Study hard and keep an open mind. Evolution is only one of many theories of life’s origins. Someday, you may contribute to the theories of how living things appeared on Earth.” One of the disclaimer’s true gems, though, was of the “tree falling in a forest with nobody around” variety. “No human was present when life first appeared on Earth. Therefore, any statement about life’s origins should be considered as theory, not fact.”

“That really burned me,” says Banke, who now lectures at Clayton College & State University. “To say that we can’t know anything because no human was present at a certain time negates our whole scientific process, our inductive process, looking back at the past. It also goes to the point that some people believe you can’t trust anything you can’t see with your eyes.”

Banke says that students quickly grew to ignore the sticker, which supposedly is an argument for their overall harmlessness. But a spokesman for the National Center for Science Education worries that if Judge Cooper allows the Cobb evolution disclaimers to remain, they’ll start popping up all over. The end result would be a chilling effect on evolution instruction.

“Those particular students will not be as well-prepared as those students who get a high-quality biology education,” say Nick Matzke, the spokesman. “Biotech companies need people who are well-educated in biology. This happened in Kansas in 2000 when they removed evolution from state standards. Biotech companies were hesitant to move there. Medical schools had trouble attracting faculty.”

That same year, in fact, Wes McCoy, a biology teacher at North Cobb High School and chair of the school’s science department, gave a talk to fellow educators titled, “We’re Not in Kansas, but We Might Be Soon.” He’s not thrilled he was prescient. He worries now what the reputation is of Georgia students when they apply to college. “I go to conferences and people make a lot of Georgia jokes. They ask me about grits and possums. The sticker was another way to tarnish our students.” In fact, McCoy is all for discussing creationism, only he believes it belongs in a religion class, not in a science class.

I asked Matzke about a petition cited often by intelligent design advocates, which contains the signatures of a couple hundred scientists throughout the country skeptical of Darwinism.

“Those lists are a sham,” he says. “They do not represent the scientific community accurately. If you look carefully, they hardly have any biologists on the lists. They’re made up of people whose expertise is in other fields. Most of the people on that list are outright creationists.”

In 2003, Matzke’s group released its own list of scientists who signed a statement endorsing evolution. The statement called it “pedagogically irresponsible for pseudoscience, including but not limited to intelligent design, to be introduced into the science curricula of the public schools.”

There was one catch. To sign the list, your first name must be Steve (or Stephanie). By limiting it to just Steves or Stephanies — named for the late scientist Stephen Jay Gould — the list is the National Center for Science Education’s tongue-in-cheek counterpoint to the list bandied about by the intelligent design movement. Even by restricting its list to Steves, the Center has found more evolution adherents than intelligent design can find doubters of any name. Last week, Project Steve was 516 names and growing.

And what finally happened to the stickers in Clayton County back in 1996? It looked like the issue was headed to court, until Banke realized there were school board elections that fall.

“A teacher at my school told me, ‘Well, the teacher organization has endorsed candidates running against all the people involved in this. Why don’t you get involved with us?’

“So that’s what happened. I got involved in a political solution rather than a legal one. We went out and by the end of the fall election, we had four new school board members and had replaced the chairman who was the main instigator of the stickers.”

So is there hope for Cobb County? Could it, well, evolve? Manely, the Marietta attorney who fought the stickers, says evolution is already happening.

“We were tickled to see that in the 19 precincts in Marietta, 11 went for Kerry,” he says. “Cobb County’s general demographics are changing. The old guard will be forced out. There’s no choice about it. There will come a saturation point where the folks that are uncomfortable with diversity will flee to further outreaches. And this will become a Democratic stronghold, a stronghold of the Enlightenment.”

steve.fennessy@creativeloafing.com