by Ira Flatow
…we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.
In other words, ID is creationism in another wrapping. Judge Jones went on to attack the notion that evolution and religion are incompatible:
Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.
To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.
The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.
Very stern words about fundamentalist religion written by a judge appointed by a fundamentalist President Bush. But he had more to say. Not only were several school board members dishonest about their convictions but also the board violated the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom. Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court.
Judge Jones had more:
The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.
Wow. Summing up, the Judge entered an order “permanently enjoining Defendants from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District, from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution, and from requiring teachers to refer to a religious, alternative theory known as ID.
Barbara Forrest is an expert witness in the trial whose testimony helped persuade the judge that ID is creationism relabeled. Judge Jones specifically remarked that Dr. Forrest’s testimony and exhibits “provides a wealth of information, a wealth of statements by ID leaders that reveal ID’s religious, philosophical and culture content.” The defense tried and failed to have her barred from testifying at the trial. Dr. Forrest is a professor in the Department of History and Political Science at Southeastern Louisiana University and coauthor of Creationism’s Trojan Horse. Dr. Forrest is “not totally surprised” by the ruling because, she says, that during the trial “whenever he would issue rulings in response to motions, they were very thoughtful, very carefully done. But I think it really sets a benchmark for judicial excellence and integrity, especially with respect to this issue.”
But what will be the impact of this ruling on other schools where teachers and parents are fighting to keep intelligent design out of science classes? Forrest says Judge Jones’s ruling will send a strong message to some school boards, perhaps most, but not to others.
“But one of the things that we know from the history of creationism and the religious right in general is that they tend not to pay attention to court rulings. We thought that in 1987 with the Edwards vs. Aguilar ruling that came right out of my own state of Louisiana that that would put an end to the problem of creationism in this country, and obviously it did not. The good thing about Judge Jones’s ruling, though, is that it didn’t leave the intelligent design/ creationists much room to morph. What creationists usually do, in response to their losses in court, is that they change themselves into something a little bit different, but I don’t think they have much room to do that after Judge Jones’s ruling.
“You also have to recognize that the creationism issue is not based on evidence. It isn’t based on reason. It’s based on an uncritical acceptance of certain religious doctrines that are not very thoughtfully held. And so when you get a position that is not based on evidence and rational appeals, you get people who are going to ignore court rulings because they are motivated by religious zeal.”
People who have made up their mind tend to pick and choose facts from an argument that back up what they believe. If you believe the Earth is flat, no amount of satellite imagery taken from space will convince you. If you believe that the Earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old, then no radioactive dating mechanism is going to change your mind, either.
Dr. Forrest agrees. “One of the amazing things that Judge Jones points out in his ruling—he talked about this in detail—is that when the Dover School Board adopted this policy endorsing intelligent design, they themselves had no understanding of it. That was amazing. Not only do they not know the science—the supporters on the Dover board—not only did they not understand the science of evolution, they didn’t even understand intelligent design. And so here you have people that are supposedly responsible for the education of other people’s children, and they have no inkling of what it is that they are enacting. That’s truly remarkable.”
How important will the Dover case be in coming years? It would be naive to assume that Judge Jones’s opinion has settled this battle. Certainly in a country where many believe that Noah’s flood created the Grand Canyon and that the Earth is no older than a few thousand years. Dr. Forrest is sure there will be other cases, other opportunities for her expertise in the very near future.
“I guess right now I’m looking to the next occasion when I might have to put what I have learned to use.”
PART IX
PIONEERS PRESENT AT THE FUTURE
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
JANE GOODALL
Yeti or Bigfoot or Sasquatch. You’ll be amazed when I tell you that I’m sure that they exist.
—JANE GOODALL
As a young journalist in 1971 I found myself, totally by accident, in a room with the greatest living archaeologist of the time: Dr. Louis Leakey. There was no one else but we two. I didn’t immediately recognize Leakey and did a full, Hollywood double-take and decided there was no way that I could just let this historic moment go by without introducing myself.
But then what? Make small talk? Me, a 22-year-old neophyte journalist? I was so stunned to be breathing the same air he was that I wasn’t sure I could put a cogent thought together.
After a few eye-contact moments with the snowy-haired scientist, I found myself walking toward his side of the room, hand extended, and introducing myself as a science reporter. I told him that I had always enjoyed his National Geographic television specials and wished him luck. To my surprise, he brightened, looked straight into my eyes, and said, “Thank you.” The door to conversation had opened. Now came the hard part: What to say? I have been star-struck very few times in my career, and this would be the first and longest lasting. I just had to find an icebreaker to open the conversation.
“Dr. Leakey,” I croaked, “what would you say is the most important evolutionary advance that sets humans apart from other animals?” That sounded pretty intelligent. I had no idea what he would say: fire making, brain size, transistor radios?
“Oh yes,” he began with a twinkle in his eye. “Surely it is precision grip—the opposing thumb and forefingers—that all
ows us to make tools.”
“Of course,” I stammered, as I thanked him and retreated back to where the air was easier to breathe.
That brief encounter with Louis Leakey is still one of my most treasured memories, as he died a few years later. And I was eager to share it with a scientist who knew Leaky and had spent many years knowing and working with him: Dr. Jane Goodall.
The story goes that filmmakers working at the Science Museum of Minnesota asked a group of people to name a famous living female scientist. It’s not easy to do. Think about it. They scratched their heads and then went to the top of the list, where they found Jane Goodall. Her amazing life story, working with chimpanzees in the jungles of Gombe, Africa, made a perfect subject for an IMAX movie, and so the filmmakers set to work, and Jane Goodall’s Wild Chimpanzees was the result.
Of course, one doesn’t need a pretense to interview Dr. Goodall. She is the preeminent primatologist, the United Nations Messenger of Peace, the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and the author of many books, including The Chimpanzees I Love.
Jane Goodall’s early claim to fame was her discovery of just how smart chimpanzees are. She observed chimps making tools—such as fashioning a leaf or a twig—and using it to retrieve hard-to-get food. (They made good use of their precision grip.) The toolmaking abilities of these primates shocked scientists, who had always assumed that only we humans were clever enough to fashion tools.
I had always wanted to interview Jane Goodall and ask her about her discoveries of chimp intelligence. As a college undergraduate, I marveled at the stories my professor told about his hours spent working in the primate lab with chimpanzees, where he was always amazed by how much intelligence and toolmaking ability they exhibited. And I wanted to ask Goodall about Louis Leakey.
INTO AFRICA
Gilbert Grosvenor, chairman of the National Geographic Society, once wrote about her, “She was hardly the image one would project to become an old African hand. Her bush experiences were honed in the genteel English countryside.” With that background, how did she wind up in Africă
“It wasn’t exactly genteel,” she said. “I wouldn’t have described it like that. But animals were my passion from even before I could speak, apparently. I was watching earthworms in my bed when I was one and a half. And I hid for five hours in a henhouse when we had the opportunity to go into the country because I was collecting the eggs and there was the egg. Where was the hole big enough for the egg to come out? Nobody told me, so I hid.”
Even at this young age, Goodall would practice a technique that would serve her well the rest of her life: Patiently watching and waiting.
“It was my first wonderful experiment. And then when I was about ten, or eleven, I found the books about Tarzan of the Apes. I fell in love with Tarzan. He’s got that wife Jane, so I was terribly jealous of her. And that was when my dream started. When I grew up, I would go to Africa, live with animals, and write books about them. That’s how it all began.”
Opportunity to fulfill that dream came knocking in the form of an invitation by a friend to stay on a farm in Kenya. “I was working at the time with a documentary film studio in London, which is a great job, didn’t pay very much, so I quit that, went home, and worked as a waitress and served people their breakfast, tea, and lunch and dinner till I’d saved up enough money to buy my return fare by boat, because it was cheapest in those days. I was twenty-three and I sort of said bye-bye to family, friends, and country, and off I went on this amazing adventure.”
LOUIS LEAKEY
Jane stayed for just a month, not wanting to “sponge off people.” Looking to stay in Africa, she found a “boring” job as a secretary that, if nothing else, kept her in earshot of the great explorer of the day: Louis Leakey.
“Somebody said, ‘Jane, if you’re interested in animals, you must meet Louis.’ So I picked up the telephone, cheeky me, and made an appointment to go and see Louis Leakey. He was then curator of the Natural History Museum in Nairobi.
“He was amazing. The first time when I called, to my amazement, he answered the phone, and he said, ‘I’m Leakey. What do you want?’ It wasn’t a very auspicious beginning. But then when I got there, he took me all around. He asked me so many questions about the animals there, and because I had done what my mother said I should do, which was, if you really want something, you work hard, you take advantage of opportunity, and you never give up.”
Leakey was impressed with her knowledge. She had been doing a lot of homework learning about Africa and its wildlife, spending many lunch hours in the Natural History Museum. “So he gave me the opportunity to work for him, and he took me with his wife [Mary] and one other young English girl to the now-famous Olduvai Gorge. It was absolutely wild, untouched Africa.
“And typical Louis, there was never any money, so everything was on the shoestring, and the equipment mostly didn’t work, and it was a very ramshackle sort of place. And I remember when he first talked to me about going on that expedition, and he said, ‘Well, it’s going to depend on my wife. If she likes you, you can come.’ And can you imagine what it was like when I went to lunch at the house, thinking, Oh, Dear, what can I do to make Mary like me?”
Fortunately, she did. Goodall went to work with the Leakeys before they made their famous discovery of the “Zinj” bones in Olduvai Gorge that would change views about the origins of humans in Africa. In fact, she began work in Africa when archaeology was not the exact, rigid science it is today, where excavations are crisscrossed with a grid work of strings carefully marking the exact place objects are removed from the Earth.
“There was no formal digging up a place and marking it on a grid. It was pre-all that, so we just spent all day chipping away in the rock. There wasn’t a road there. There wasn’t a trail. There was nothing. And all the animals were there, the antelopes, the zebra, the giraffes, and then one evening, there was a rhino, which was a little bit scary, and one evening a young male lion, two years old, totally curious, never seen anything like me.”
Goodall had found her calling. She was hooked on a new career.
“When I got there, when I got out to Olduvai, it was like being at home. Louis realized that I was the sort of person he said he’d been looking for about ten years, who didn’t care about hairdressing and clothes and parties and boyfriends. You know, I really wanted to be in the wild.
“So he made the suggestion to me. It took him a year to get the money. I mean, who was going to give money to a young girl, a female, who didn’t have a degree of any sort, straight out from England? What a ridiculous idea. So I was in England waiting, learning what I could about chimpanzees, while he searched for money and eventually found a wealthy American businessman who said, ‘Okay, Louis, here you are. Here’s enough money for six months. We’ll see how she does.’”
And she did quite well.
“It was a very, very worrying time because I got to Gombe, again I felt I was at home, but the chimpanzees ran away as soon as they saw me. You know, they’re very conservative. They’d not seen a white ape before. And I knew if that six months’ money ran out before I’d seen something really exciting, I would have let Louis down. ‘Well, we told you so. This is ridiculous.’ But fortunately, just before that time came, I saw the first observations of using and making tools, and that was the saving observation, the breakthrough, and he was able to go to the National Geographic Society and persuade them to put some more money in when the first six months ran out. Because, of course, at that time we were defined as man, the toolmaker. That was supposed to differentiate us more than anything else in the rest of the animal kingdom.”
Jane’s discovery of the toolmaking ability of the chimps would make her famous.
“David Greybeard [the chimpanzee], bless his heart, I saw him crouched over a termite mound, couldn’t really see properly. They were still not very relaxed in my presence. I was hiding. But I knew he was using a piece of grass, and a few days later, he and one of the other chimps—I coul
d see them much better—the whole thing, putting in the grass, picking the termites off, picking a leafy twig, and stripping off the leaves, which was the beginning of toolmaking.
“I couldn’t actually believe it. I had to see it about four times before I let Louis Leakey know. And then I sent a telegram. And he sent back his famous comment, ‘Ha, ha. Now we must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as humans.’”
How did Goodall know, when she watched the chimp drawing out the ants on a stem, that she was observing a revolutionary act? As Louis Pasteur observed a century before, chance favors the prepared mind. “I knew because just about two weeks before, I was visited by George Schaller, who’d just finished his mountain gorilla study, and as we sat up on the peak, which was my lookout place from which gradually the chimps got used to me, he said, ‘If you see tool using and hunting, those two things will make your study worthwhile,’ and within two weeks, I saw them both. It was quite extraordinary. And both times it was David Greybeard.”
She named the chimps she was studying, a unique practice that no one else was following. “No, they weren’t. And the funny thing was, after a bit, Louis said, ‘Jane, you have to get a degree, because otherwise you can’t get your own money, and I won’t always be around to get money for you.’ But he said, ‘We don’t have time to mess about with a BA, so you’ll have to go straight for a PhD.’
“So he managed to persuade Cambridge in England to accept me as a PhD student. And when I got there, it was actually a very unpleasant and hostile reception that I had. I shouldn’t have named the chimps. It wasn’t scientific. I knew nothing.
“I mean, I couldn’t talk about their personalities, these vivid personalities that I by then was beginning to know. I certainly couldn’t talk about them being capable of rational thought, which they clearly were. And finally, worst sin of all was that I was ascribing to them emotions, like happiness, sadness, and so forth. But more importantly perhaps, all through my childhood, I had this wonderful teacher, and that was my dog Rusty. So I knew that animals had personalities, minds, and feelings, and of course they needed names. But fortunately by that time I was twenty-seven and I wasn’t in it because I wanted a PhD. I was there for Louis.”