Recent surveys suggest that nearly half of all American adults do not accept human evolution and an even larger majority is open to the teaching of nonscientific alternatives in our public schools.

There was a time when such statistics could be accepted without much alarm. After all, one need not accept or even understand evolutionary biology to become an excellent aerospace engineer, a computer scientist, or even a heart surgeon. And besides, isn’t society in the midst of a period of secularization such that advocates for creationism will be an ever-shrinking and increasingly marginal minority?

These two arguments are undermined by recent research on the teaching of evolution, and recent trends in the politicization of science in America. As a result, scientific illiteracy with respect to evolution is better viewed as a symptom of broader weaknesses in science education and we can expect that the tactics used by evolution deniers will soon be applied to other issues such as climate change.

Our recent book on how evolution is actually taught in the nation’s public schools reveals a broader undermining of science that has the potential to breed distrust of sound science in mainstream American culture.

• We estimate that at least 13 percent of all public high school biology teachers flout U.S. federal court decisions by explicitly endorsing creationism or intelligent design in their classrooms.
• We find that even in states with very rigorous content standards with respect to evolution, teachers’ coverage of evolution is largely dictated by their own personal values and their desire to accommodate local community sentiment.
• To avoid controversy, many teachers disassociate themselves from the material—explaining that students need to learn it simply to pass the test.
• Other teachers who themselves accept evolution nevertheless encourage students to come to their own opinions about the validity of evolutionary biology—conveying the idea that it is just a matter of opinion.
• Still others focus only on microbiology. Not only do most avoid human evolution entirely but many omit fossil, genetic, and anatomical evidence of common ancestry of vertebrates—leaving high school graduates open to the common creationism argument that there is no real evidence for the emergence of new species.

It is not hard to see how these practices produce new generations of citizens who lack an appreciation for the nature of scientific inquiry and whose distrust of science will make them easy marks for those who see the findings of mainstream science as a threat to their profits or ideology (a phenomenon well documented by Oreskes and Conway in their book, Merchants of Doubt).

In sidestepping potential controversy, teachers are missing opportunities to explain how science actually works. For example, the field of evolution has many great examples of how scientists gain increasing confidence in hypotheses as replications and convergent evidence from disparate approaches cumulate in favor of the same conclusion. Teachers are missing opportunities to explain how modern science moves forward through the efforts and integrity of thousands of highly competitive individuals, all operating under the scrutiny of peer review.

In short, the current teaching of evolution represents an opportunity lost—the opportunity to prepare the next generation of citizens to play an informed and meaningful role in public debates that hinge on scientific evidence.

If this missed educational prospect was not cause enough for concern, it seems clear that instruction in earth science is likely to become embroiled in similar politics. Increasingly partisan and ideological politicians and activists are linking the two topics. Consider Ken Mercer, a former member of the Texas Assembly and current two-term member of the Texas Board of Education. When asked a question about his stance on evolution, he stated, “what we do have is the right for our kids to raise their hands in class and ask honest questions, especially in the areas of evolution and global warming.” As reported in a recent New York Times article, the joining of these two issues offers tactical advantages to each camp. Evolution deniers can claim that their skepticism of mainstream science is not rooted in religion because they also ask for teaching of “gaps” and “weaknesses” on climate change research, while climate skeptics can gain strength by allying with well-organized networks of socially conservative Christians who seem predisposed to doubt the conclusions of mainstream science.

These two trends—the cultivation of distrust in science generally and the convergence of interests of evolution and climate change deniers—signal a new chapter in the politicization of science. We can expect that mainstream science will be under attack in several venues. These include state boards of education that approve curricular standards, and local school boards that make choices among state-approved textbooks and instructional materials. But our research suggests that the most consequential arena will be the nation’s classrooms and the key players will be the nation’s science teachers. Moreover, the surest way to ensure teachers will not bow to political pressure is to arm them with a rigorous science education to complement their expertise in pedagogy and classroom management. If our research on high school biology teachers generalizes to science teachers more broadly, we can expect that many lack confidence in their ability to respond to politically motivated pressures with cogent explanations rooted in scientific research. Lacking such confidence, the sensible choice is to downplay scientific conclusions that generate controversy.

In this light, policymakers should review the rigor of science education that is typical of newly minted science educators and, where appropriate, elevate the expectations of what background is necessary to be considered well qualified. Such reforms have the potential to reduce the number of children who become casualties of the new science wars.

Podcast interview with Dr. Eric Plutzer conducted by Diana Epstein, a Policy Analyst at American Progress. Article by Dr. Eric Plutzer, professor of political science, and Dr. Michael B. Berkman, professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Penn State University Political Science Department. Dr. Plutzer and Dr. Berkman are the authors of the new book Evolution, Creationism, and the Battle to Control America’s Classrooms. This article was cross-posted at Climate Progress.

References

Berkman, Michael, and Eric Plutzer. 2010. Evolution, Creationism, and the Battle to Control America’s Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kaufman, Leslie. 2010. “Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets.” The New York Times. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/science/earth/04climate.html).

Newport, Frank. 2010. “Four in 10 Americans Believe in Strict Creationism.” Gallup (http://www.gallup.com/poll/145286/Four-Americans-Believe-Strict-Creationism.aspx).

Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of Doubt. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. 2005. “Religion A Strength and Weakness for Both Parties.” Washington.

Tuma, Mary. “Q&A | Ken Mercer, Republican Nominee for State Board of Education, District 5.” Community Impact Newspaper (http://impactnews.com/vote10/candidates/8633-qaa-ken-mercer-republican-nominee-for-state-board-of-education-district-5).

So in dedicating this column of praise to Eugenie C. Scott—who for over two decades has headed up the Oakland, CA-based National Center for Science Education, or NCSE, the chief defender of the teaching of evolution in the United States—I want to make clear just how much I think such a departure is necessary and deserved.

Scott has been receiving a great deal of recognition lately; I merely want to lend an additional push. First, she recently won the Stephen Jay Gould prize, awarded by the Society for the Study of Evolution, in recognition of how her “sustained and exemplary efforts have advanced public understanding of evolutionary science and its importance in biology, education, and everyday life.” Perhaps an even bigger accolade came from Scientific American, which listed her among the top 10 leaders who have “demonstrated outstanding commitment to assuring that the benefits of new technologies and knowledge will accrue to humanity.” (The list includes other names you might know, like Bill Gates and Barack Obama.)

The opening to the Scientific American commendation is both amusing, and also provides a hint as to why Scott succeeds:

Thomas Henry Huxley was the 19th-century biologist known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his defense of the great scientist’s ideas. The 21st century has a counterpart in the woman who describes herself as “Darwin’s golden retriever.”

As this joke suggests, Eugenie Scott knows well what was obvious even in the Victorian era—there are already plenty of Darwinian bulldogs out there, fighting the creationist pitbulls daily, sounding off on blogs and attacking the religious beliefs of their foes. But being “Darwin’s golden retriever,” and staying friendly when tempers flare—that’s a lot rarer. The line shows both Scott’s genial humor and also the kind of pro-evolution advocacy we need more of: tolerant, strategic, accommodating, but always firm when necessary.

The National Center for Science Education is a clearinghouse for pro-evolution information, and a fount of unrivaled expertise on the complex and ever-changing stances and strategies of the creationists. It is also the leading source of advice and counsel to local communities whenever evolution battles crop up, as they do each year virtually without fail. NCSE’s goal is always to help communities resolve such conflicts without resorting to litigation. But when courtroom fights do arise, the group is also invaluable, and served as a scientific adviser on the historic Kitzmiller v. Dover evolution trial of 2005, which ended in a resounding victory for science and an equally resounding defeat for “intelligent design.”

Scott, an anthropologist by training, has been steering this ship since 1987, her career marked not only by Dover but by another key pro-evolution legal precedent, 1987′s Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard, which banned the teaching of “creation science” in schools. She has been involved in pro-evolution advocacy longer still, since the year 1980.

And if you want some idea of how difficult the job is, just try the following. First, peruse the web for all the creationist attacks on Scott. According to Wikipedia, she likes to joke that sometimes she thinks her first name is “Atheist,” they call her “Atheist Eugenie Scott” so much. Then, when you’re done sampling the anti-evolutionist  barbs, flip over to this recent post by University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, which takes Scott and NCSE to task for their “accommodationist” stance on religion, calling it “offensive and unnecessary—a form of misguided pragmatism.”

As this evidence suggests, Scott is regularly under fire from the culture war combatants on both sides. Not only does NCSE have to monitor the endless permutations of the creationists, who are constantly coming up with new ploys for attacking evolution. It also has to deal with the pugilistic evolutionists who want to make this battle about the truth or falsehood of religious belief, rather than the truth or falsehood of what science discovers about the world. In this gauntlet, Scott has remained an eloquent defender of the view that people of science and people of religion can and must work together to solve conflicts—and indeed, this is the best and only way forward.

I would be remiss, though, if I didn’t commend NCSE’s single best initiative: Project Steve. In riposte to creationists who are constantly promulgating lists of scientists who allegedly question evolution, NCSE created an even bigger list of scientists named “Steve” who support it. Yes, that’s right: Scott and NCSE made a statistical argument hilarious and memorable. How many people can you say that of?

I know Scott, although not particularly well. I’ve interviewed her, seen her at the typical conferences, and witnessed her on the ground in Pennsylvania during the Dover conflict. And for some time, I have been asking myself the following question: Given that we’re barely holding back the creationist tide as it is, what on Earth would we do without her? I sincerely hope these latest awards bring added recognition and support to the woman who is working every day in one of the toughest jobs imaginable: Keeping our schools, and our society, safe for science.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Darwin’s humility in the face of insufficient evidence — his willingness to say “I don’t know” — is as important a lesson as any to be found in biology texts today. This is not about “teaching the controversy” — Darwin had a slam-dunk in his explanation of the evolution of species, including humans, and every modern test of evolutionary theory has only strengthened his conclusions. But he also knew there is plenty of room for God at the top, upstream of the business of biology.

Read the full editorial: “One Thing Darwin Didn’t Know.”

What was the view in your family about the Darwin legacy—were people living in its shadow? Did they make inside jokes about it?

I do think that some of the family lived in Darwin’s shadow. It’s hard not to, but it gets easier as time goes by. When I was young people did not make jokes in the way that I do. There were people, my mother included, who I think felt they had something to live up to, and, failing to do so, were made unhappy. Others I have met over the years—not my immediate family, I hasten to mention—seem to be rather excessively proud of it. I poke fun at the connection by saying that I’m the best argument creationists have because if you look at my family tree with Darwin at one end and me at the other this in itself disproves evolution. When I look at Prince Charles, he always seems rather rueful to me, as if he was saying to himself, “This is all very well, but it’s just an accident of birth.” He’s right about this, and it’s how I feel, except that in my case there are no perks.

What did you think every time you looked at the ten-pound note? Was that why you left England—you prefer your money with crazy pyramids on it?

The ten-pound note didn’t come into existence until after I left in 1982. Sometimes people ask me to sign their copy of Origin of Species, which I do, but with a little embarrassment. I will, however, for a fee of ten pounds, happily sign a ten-pound note.

When you appeared on Science Friday recently and discussed Darwin, the very first caller asked a question about atheism. Is this a regular response?

This is normal. Some callers hate him for his atheism, some adore him for it. I think it is an interesting fact that Darwin slowly came to the conclusion that God did not exist, but this is not his primary achievement. There are several dead philosophers and living commentators who do a far better job. The danger, I think, is that if atheists take possession of Darwin, the public will continue to be distracted from, or feel active antipathy toward, his scientific work and all its modern offshoots. As this is a vital part of modern science, anything that deters people from studying it and perhaps entering science seems to me a shame, and potentially disastrous to America.

Tell us what first sparked the idea of ScienceDebate2008. Do you think Darwin would have been proud?

Like most people, I knew that there were several environmental crises going on and that science was an integral part of their potential solutions. As I watched the first fifteen or so debates, I noticed there were no questions dealing with this, or very few. Similarly, none of the debate moderators were asking questions about the science behind health and medicine, both individual and global. Nor were there any serious questions about the relationship between education and science and science and technological development, nor any about scientific integrity in government.

To me, these were the key issues that would determine our future. That the politicians weren’t discussing them was understandable—that the debate moderators were letting them get away with it seemed really bad news for American voters. When I learned that half the growth in the American economy since the 1950s could be attributed to science, it seemed really, really odd that the debates did not include a segment devoted entirely to science and technology policy. I then thought that actually science was so important in so many ways that it actually deserved a stand-alone debate of its own. I still believe this. I think that Darwin would approve. He did have political causes (he was an abolitionist), and he would certainly be made sad by some of our attitudes to science, to science education, and by our self-inflicted environmental problems.

What do we need to restore science in our culture, so that someone like Darwin is respected as one of history’s greatest scientists, rather than reviled and dragged into the culture wars?

To some extent I’m sure this is an education question—and as such I’m not best equipped to answer it. However, it’s also a cultural question. Almost everyone has at one time or another taken a pill that saved their lives or reduced their physical or existential pain. This is just one example of one aspect of life that people are generally grateful to science for, and yet scientists are usually portrayed as wild-haired madmen. Why is this? There are fantastically interesting and charismatic scientists around, but somehow they don’t achieve popular fame. I’ve suggested elsewhere that scientists ought to dress better, earn more money, get more sex, misbehave, go to rehab at public expense, and generally reap the rewards of their great contributions to society. More seriously, I think that some of this anti-science and anti-scientist stuff must be toxic waste from the gigantic anti-evolution movement in America.

Any Hollywood projects in the works that involve science?

Yes, several, but I don’t want to get robbed!

So how are you celebrating February 12?

I’ll be having dinner with my wife and daughter. My daughter is the great-great-great granddaughter of Darwin. You have probably heard of “regressing toward the mean”—that’s me. My daughter shows signs of an upswing on the family tree.

Indeed, historians have shown a wide range of contemporary responses to Darwin’s work, and many religious thinkers had no problem adapting to it.

It’s difficult to extricate our view of Darwin from the U.S.’s century-long history of evolution battles, or from the fact that nearly half of our citizens reject outright the deep history of the Earth and its living things revealed by Darwin and some of his contemporaries. Gallup polls taken over several decades consistently show that roughly 45 percent of Americans agree with the stunning statement, “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” Meanwhile, some leading evolutionary thinkers—chief among them Oxford’s Richard Dawkins—move more or less directly from their understanding of Darwin’s work to cheerleading for atheism. Science-religion battles seem resurgent today, and it’s tempting to see in Darwin the modern originator of this enduring conflict.

Yet historical research on the relationship between science and religion, including work on the Victorian period and the Darwinian revolution, reveals a very different story. Not only did fundamentally theological ideas—the notion of the “perfect adaptation” of living organisms to their circumstances, for instance—actually help shape Darwin’s theory, but religious beliefs strongly influenced its reception in surprising ways. Who would have thought that several fervent early twentieth century neo-Darwinists right in Richard Dawkins’s beloved Oxford were actually exuberantly pious Anglo-Catholics, who saw in Darwin’s ideas a stick with which to beat back deistic Protestantism?

Which is not to say that science and religion have always held hands. It is surely the case that truculent up-and-comers like Darwin’s so-called “Bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley, delighted in using Darwinism to tweak the noses of the Anglican clergy who ran the universities (and much else besides) at the end of the nineteenth century. The point is, surprise!, it was complicated: as the science historian John Hedley Brooke has written, “There is no such thing as the relationship between science and religion. It is what different individuals and communities have made of it in a plethora of different contexts.”

Just look at the science-religion “conflict thesis” itself, born of a pair of American late-nineteenth century books: John Draper’s 1874 History of the Conflict Between Science and Religion, and Andrew Dickson White’s The History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom of 1896. Context? Draper was a professor of physics in New York who had looked on with horror in 1870 when the Pope made his notorious declaration of papal infallibility. The idea of a pointy-hatted Italian sending unbreakable commands to Irish immigrants gave Draper the creeps. And White? He was the president of Cornell, the first non-sectarian American university, and thus keen to insist that reason itself had to be protected from all spiritual influences.

Indeed, historians have shown a wide range of contemporary responses to Darwin’s work, and many religious thinkers had no problem adapting to it. We often hear about Thomas Henry Huxley’s famously theatrical 1860 Oxford debate against the Anglican bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who rejected Darwin’s idea. Yet we forget figures like the Anglican clergyman Charles Kingsley or the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederic Temple, both of whom saw in evolution a new revelation about the Creator’s wisdom and plan.

As for Darwin himself, he was no Huxley. While he famously concluded about religion that “I for one must be content to remain an agnostic,” he was never combative about the relationship between his science and others’ faith. One reason for his sensitivity was his wife Emma’s enduring Christianity. The other was simply his temperament: He was not a fighter. The so-called “New Atheists” today, like Dawkins, who use evolution as their cudgel are certainly not following the example Darwin set in his own life. In a late-life letter to an inquiring philosopher, Darwin sifted from his own master-theory a doctrine of modest caution in the face of the infinite: “you have expressed my inward conviction” he wrote, “that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or are at all trustworthy.”  Undue certainly was not to be encouraged–in any direction.

When we survey the range of responses to the teaching of evolution in the United States today, we’re not actually so far off from the Victorian period in many ways. We have our atheists who embrace evolution and strongly reject religion (the Huxleys, the Dawkins), our religionists who reject evolution and embrace biblical literalism, and then our vast middle of compromisers and reconciliationists—those who understand the gist of evolution by natural selection, but do not experience that knowledge as a solvent of their religious beliefs. This latter group has no motive to fight the culture war, and we seldom hear from them. But Darwin Day is for them, too–in fact it may be theirs most of all.

D. Graham Burnett is associate professor of history at Princeton University and author of Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature. Chris Mooney is a visiting associate at Princeton’s Center for Collaborative History, author of The Republican War on Science, and the contributing editor to Science Progress.

Science, Cultured

Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture from Los Angeles, California. He is author author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.” (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)

There are probably as many ways of imputing meaning to Barack Obama’s presidential victory as there are pundits around to do so. But I’d like to start this column with an interpretation that isn’t exactly earth-shattering, and for that reason, probably true.

Obama’s election represented a mandate to cast aside an old way of doing politics, one that was divisive and superficial, and that throve on partisan attacks, culture warmongering, and the continual inability to find common ground. At a time of twin wars and economic calamity, Americans were sick of that breed of politics. They wanted change, of a sort that would usher in a new politics of unity, purpose, substance, and compromise. Or as President-elect Obama put it in his victory speech in Chicago:

Let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers—in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people. Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.

Like so many people, I woke up the morning after the election with new inspiration and optimism, and my mind racing. I fired off a bunch of “let’s do this, let’s do that” emails. If they had any common theme, it was the drive to apply the mood of the moment to the stretch of politics and policy with which I’m most familiar: science.

We’ve been in a post-Sputnik mode of science politics since, well, Sputnik.

It’s an arena in which change, in the Obama sense of the term, has not exactly been a common occurrence. It’s a vast oversimplification, but in essence true: We’ve been in a post-Sputnik mode of science politics since, well, Sputnik. Scientists have most centrally been concerned with conducting research and securing funding (from the government or industry) to do so. The scientific community reaches out to politicians and the public, to be sure, but the goals of this outreach are not on par with the research imperative.

At the same time, divisiveness, and the lack of shared purpose, has been rampant in relation to science issues. There are two divides that chiefly concern me here, and they’re not unrelated. The first is the divide between the pointy-headed experts and everybody else, one where the experts want to lecture, and the citizens go “la la la” most of the time. The second is the divide between science and religion, where the atheists attack believers and claim science exposes a godless universe, and the creationists attack evolution and claim science is just thinly disguised atheism—and the middle gets polarized, or just drowned out completely.

Is it too much to hope that we in the science world, and we who care about it, might seize the momentum in the wake of Obama’s victory and try to heal these rifts? Is it even remotely possible that when Darwin Day rolls around on February 12, 2009—the 200-year anniversary of Darwin’s birth, which just happens to fall in the 150^th anniversary year of the publication of On the Origin of Species—we won’t use the occasion to fan the flames of another battle between the “new atheists” and the creationists? Rather, could we emphasize instead that science-religion conflicts are needlessly divisive and inflammatory and—as with culture war politics generally—not what most people really care about?

I’m hoping religious leaders and scientists will come together this February 12 with a strong statement to this effect. It is long past time that we heard from the vast middle on this issue.

Ask yourself this question: If Barack Obama was president of science, how would he govern? I think it’s obvious that he would emphasize common purpose, that he would seek to defuse tension, and that he would try to bring everyone along.

He would reach out to the entire public, and try to help it appreciate science—not through technical lecturing, but by emphasizing what science can do to improve our lives: create new energy innovations, new medical technologies, new jobs. And he would try to heal the divisive science-religion conflict, emphasizing how the two can and do coexist peacefully in so many minds, scientist’s and religious believer’s alike.

Of course, there is no president of science—it’s up to us to determine the ultimate direction of the nation’s scientific enterprise, and how that enterprise relates to the society in which it occurs. Gandhi said, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” How’s that for a goal?

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

That is the question that scientists in Australia recently asked—and nicely answered—in a study that offers new and elegant support for the inexplicably maligned theory of evolution.

More than 40 percent of polled Americans agree with the statement: “Humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”

The research, described in the September issue of the journal Animal Behaviour, is the latest in a seemingly endless stream of nails, screws, and spikes that scientists have driven into the coffin of creationism—albeit with shockingly little impact on Christian fundamentalists, many of whom remain committed to undermining evolution’s teachings in public schools. More generally, the research deserves celebration as a quintessential example of why the scientific method is the way to understand the world around us.

The findings are worth highlighting because the battle over evolution is still far from won in this country, despite the overwhelming mass of scientific evidence that supports this model of how the biological universe works. School districts are still having fights over how to address evolution in curricula. And astonishingly, more than 40 percent of polled Americans agree with the statement: “Humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time,” while less than half agree that “humans and other living things have evolved over time.”

Which gets us to the chickens.

Chickens have long been popular subjects for studies of “sexual selection,” an aspect of evolutionary theory first proposed by Charles Darwin himself. The more widely taught evolutionary principles of “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” speak to the importance of an individual’s ability to weather life’s challenges, occasionally with the help of new, advantageous mutations. Sexual selection refers to a particular component of that formula for success: Convincing a member of the opposite sex to mate with you, so you can have more offspring than your less-fit competitors before you die. And as anyone who has visited a bar knows full well, generally it’s the males that need to do the convincing.

Toward that end, the males of many species are heavily ornamented. The theory of sexual selection says that such visual extravagances can serve as a signal of an individual’s health. It takes energy, after all, to maintain colorful tufts of hair, brilliant waddles, or other seemingly goofy goo-gahs. Indeed, in many instances these accoutrements are barely manageable—think about the peacock’s tail—and are the first to go shabby when a male gets sick or is parasitized. Over generations, as females repeatedly choose the most flamboyant males as a surrogate means of picking the healthiest sperm on the block, these exotic traits become more prevalent.

Experiments have generally confirmed that females are suckers for male décor. When female ornamental chickens (Gallus gallus) are given a choice between two males, presented to them in separate cages simultaneously, they go for the one with the most brilliant orange feathers and the reddest, fleshiest comb. The new experiments sought to go further: Do a mate-choice experiment in a more natural setting, in which males could not just show off their colors but literally strut their stuff—that is, behave in ways that might contribute to their attractiveness.

Here is where the Australian research team helped resolve a longstanding quandary in evolutionary biology. Chickens, it has long been known, are among a number of species in which individuals—generally males—will let out warning calls of various sorts when a predator is near. These calls are extremely valuable to the group as a whole. When, for example, a male chicken lets out the call that means “aerial predator approaching!” other chickens in the vicinity crouch low and look upwards, as though watching for a hawk. When a male gives the signal indicating an approaching land-based predator, the others stand erect and look toward the horizon, as though searching for a fox.

But what’s in it for the one doing the signaling? Under the strict rules of natural selection, an animal ought to do whatever it can to boost its own odds of survival—like hiding as soon as trouble appears and leaving others to fend for themselves. Running around making a lot of noise (okay, not necessarily crossing the road while at it) is surely not the best way to avoid being noticed by a predator. It just didn’t sit well in evolutionary theory, though possible explanations have been proffered.

Beyond the specifics of evolution itself, the new research on poultry paramours is also worth highlighting because it is such a fine example of the simple power of the scientific method.

Some scientists have suggested that even if the signaling individual sacrifices himself, he may at least end up saving some close relatives, a perhaps reasonable, though imperfect, substitute for saving his own DNA for posterity. Others have suggested that the chaos that often ensues after raising a predator alarm may confuse the would-be attacker and help protect the whole group.

But for chickens, at least, the real advantage did not become clear until David R. Wilson, Christopher S. Evans and their colleagues at Macquarie University in Sydney did their unprecedented mate-choice experiments, which involved small groups of male and female chickens in natural, open spaces—places where females could base their choices not just on the degree of decoration among a few caged males but on the actual behavior of those males.

To their surprise, the team members found that in naturalistic conditions, feather brightness and comb color were not the best predictors of which male a female would swoon for. Outside of caged conditions, behavior, it turned out, was more important than sartorial style. And specifically, “the best predictor of mating and reproductive success was the rate at which males produced anti-predator alarm calls.”

No one knows, of course, what is running through those little female bird brains. Perhaps the gals are attracted to the selfless heroism of those who shout warnings. Or perhaps, as Animal Behaviour’s editor Daniel T. Blumstein opined in an accompanying commentary, female chickens “are attracted to honestly scared males.”

These are, after all, chickens.

Whatever is going on, the males willing to squawk when danger looms are the ones who get the girls. And the math suggests that even if, now and then, this bold behavior does prove fatal, the overall odds are that, by then, those pluckily clucking pieces of prey will have sired more offspring than their quieter cousins. And thus, gratifyingly, another puzzle piece that seemed not to fit into Darwin’s theory—a behavior that had been presumed to decrease a male chicken’s chances of evolutionary enlightenment but which, in fact, now appears to increases those odds—clicks into place after all, like so many before it. Darwin’s rules keep proving true.

The fact that nearly half of Americans refuse to acknowledge this could be tolerated if these very same people were not tirelessly foisting their beliefs upon others—and not just upon their own children, who are arguably victims of child abuse for being taught such a warped picture of reality, but upon school districts across the country. Once again, for example, the Kansas board of education is poised for an electoral war over the teaching of evolution in that state’s classrooms. The Louisiana legislature also recently passed the Louisiana Science Education Act, which calls upon the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to “create and foster” a school environment that promotes “objective discussion of scientific theories being studied, including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life,” and a other indisputable elements of the scientific canon.

Beyond the specifics of evolution itself, the new research on poultry paramours is also worth highlighting because it is such a fine example of the simple power of the scientific method. There was a presumption: a male chicken that clucks when a predator is present is essentially a dead duck, one that female chicks would hardly consider dating. And there was a hypothesis: Maybe there is more to clucking than meets the eye. There was an experiment: Let’s see how these blustering boys really do. Then there was a result, and a revamping of scientists’ thinking—a revamping that if anything only bolsters the overarching framework of evolutionary theory.

So here’s to the scientists who, while school boards and others wave the flag for creationism and “Intelligent Design,” just keep on following their beaks, and sticking to the facts. Perhaps someday a majority of Americans will believe the evidence these researchers have repeatedly confirmed. Perhaps someday we, like the proverbial road-crossing chickens, will get to the other side.

Rick Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Science Progress.

Roston, a former correspondent for Time, is a senior associate at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. In his narrative, the story of carbon connects these various areas of science and also draws them closer together. Among his intriguing conclusions along the way: the more scientists understand about the element, the more they must work across disciplinary boundaries.

Carbon fuels evolutionary systems and climate change. But it also underscores much of the science that’s changing the way we think about everyday life. Roston joined us at Science Progress to talk about how a close look at carbon can redraw the lines between fields as seemingly disparate as geology and economics. This interview has been edited.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt, Science Progress: In the prologue, you quote Shirley Ann Jackson, President of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who has said that, “a number of important questions are only able to be addressed at the nexus of the life sciences with the physical, computational, and information sciences.” And you later write that the biological and computational sciences are actually evolving into sort of an “uberscience.” How will these convergences of scientific research tell us more about the natural world, and will they actually be able to help us make smarter policy solutions?

Eric Roston: We’re learning about the natural world at a clip that is just accelerating and it will help us make smarter policy solutions. So, the answer to the question is actually, yes. Now what’s extremely noteworthy is something we’ve seen in the last year: the scientific community really getting its act together and realizing that they need to play a bigger role in policy. If they are not communicating to the public and to policymakers and not informing everyone what their observations of the natural world are, then our policy will not be based on what is occurring in the natural world.

This is something I think about frequently. There was an article from Physics Today in June 2007 and about Dwight Eisenhower and his scientists. Shortly before his death in 1969, he was telling a friend of his, “You know Jim, this bunch of scientists was one of the few groups that I encountered in Washington who seemed to be there to help the country and not just themselves.” There is this element that scientists are curious about: how the world works and how to try and explain it to the best of our ability. What is important is the linkage between studying the natural world and making smarter policy initiatives. You introduced me in connection my work at the Nicholas Institute; we actually exist to take science and help bring it to Washington and inform policy. So this is a linkage that is growing.

SP: In the book you talk with people who are working across a huge swath of scientific research. Do you now find yourself working with these same groups, coming together at these same intersections through your work with the Nicholas Institute?

Roston: Yes. One thing we are seeing in universities—possibly more than any other place—is the emergence of new disciplines and the emergence of new categories of thought. And the Carbon Age is my attempt to say: “Look, we divide the world in our experience into administrative and intellectual categories of thought that are dozens—in some cases hundreds of years old. And the science we understand now no longer justifies a lot of these sorts of categories.”

The book is also an attempt to say, “Alright look, lets just take a breather here for a second. Lets peel back some of these categories, look at something very fundamental, and see if we can’t come up with a way to rethink the way we think about the world.” If you retreat to carbon, which is the central structural element of all life and civilization, and you build up from the central element of our civilization, then you understand how energy and climate and personal health and industrial materials are all far more interrelated and interconnected than we give them credit for.

SP: People probably hear about carbon in the mainstream media most often in the context of climate change. There is some recent survey data from the Pew Research Center indicating that the proportion of U.S. citizens who say that there is solid evidence of global warming has dropped since the beginning of last year and is about where it was at the beginning of the summer of 2006. And less than half of the U.S. population, only 47 percent, believe that humans cause global warming. As someone who is an expert on carbon, how do you go about explaining that humans are the cause of global warming?

Eric Roston: The easiest answer is in the IPCC report. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the consortium of 3,000 scientists that over the past twenty years has produced four reviews of everything we know about climate science. If you go to Chapter 9 of the Working Group 1 IPCC 2007 report, you have the physical science basis of climate change. There are two crucial figures: figures 9.4 and 9.5 [PowerPoint].

Figure 9.5 shows the amount of climate change from natural forcings. The two biggest natural forcings are generally volcanoes, first and foremost, and solar variability. If you graph only what we know about CO2 coming from volcanoes and solar variability, you can’t even begin to really see an increase in temperature. There is a tremendous gap in this graph between observed natural forcings and observed temperature increases. So in the graph above this you add anthropogenic forcings or man-made forcings, and once you add the man-made gases on top of these natural forcings, it is identical to the temperature rise.

So science moves forward and is emboldened by correlations: correlations from fields that have nothing to do with each other, correlations from people who have never spoken, correlations from within and outside of disciplines. In general, this is where the strength comes from. We have seen the rises in temperature, we know these natural forcings have occurred, and we know these unnatural forcings have occurred and they match—the predictions match—and that’s what makes science trustworthy.

SP: You’ve straddled a huge breadth of scientific research and drawn connections between evolutionary biology, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and climate change. The link between them, the thread, is carbon. Can you to talk about how this particular link can actually help us communicate more effectively in public debates over how to teach evolution or climate change?

Roston: It’s a good question, and goes to the very heart of this project. I used to write for Time magazine and this book emerged after I’ve been there for a couple years, and I did spend a lot of time covering energy and climate. And since it’s a general news magazine, you end up covering a lot of things. Then I began to ask myself, “How can I make sense of everything I am covering?”

At the end of 2003, climate change was picking up steam in the private sector; energy prices were on the rise; the price of oil had begun its steady ascent; Lance Armstrong was riding to victory every year on a $6,500 carbon-fiber bicycle; and the Atkins, low-carb diet was careening its way toward a spectacular blowout. So, then I said, “It’s going to be carbon”—that’s going to be my tool for probing all of these things I’ve covered.

I wasn’t a science writer before this; I was a business and technology journalist who had had a lot of questions about science. Once I went back to the carbon atom, as a unifying explainer, from there I ended up writing a book—much to my surprise. I had no idea what this book was going to look like—three years of research that took me in this direction.

So once you have the carbon atom, it bonds with other carbon atoms out in space, they bond with other kinds of atoms, you accrete into big clouds and condense into big stars and planets, and it turns into a book about old earth geology and the origin of life and evolution, and evolution’s effect on the global carbon cycle—and that’s how the book took its shape.

I also realize that there is no reason to call these scientific disciplines what scientists call them. Who cares what scientists call them? (I’ll get in trouble for saying that.) I am holding here the National SMART Grant Department of Education Fields of Study list of majors for students who can apply for these grants. This is a very long list. In fact, this list became infamous in early 2006 when it became clear that the Department of Education removed environmental biology from this list; since then it has been added on. You go through this list, and unless you are majoring in one of these things, there is no reason for guys like you and I to distinguish between biochemistry, biophysics, molecular biology, molecular biochemistry, molecular biophysics, photobiology, structural biology…and it goes on and on. So what I decided to do was say, “Hey, let’s skip this and talk about it like we are not scientists and just call it ‘carbon science.’”

Follow the carbon out of the volcano, down into the plant, into our stomach; we pass away, and bacteria go out of us and back into the atmosphere, and it eventually washes into the ocean back into the sediment and is subducted into the earth’s mantel. By following the carbon it allows you to restructure, to give a dynamic rather than a static picture of this cycle of how the world works and how various parts of experience correlate.

SP: You write: “Anthropogenic global warming erases the line between ‘biological’ and ‘geological’ timescales as vividly as anything else humans do on this planet.” You also have a great quote from Scott Wing of the Smithsonian Institute who says, “We are plate tectonics.” How do we have to rethink these distinctions between disciplines and between ideas of natural and unnatural planetary events and natural and unnatural disruptions to the carbon cycle?

Roston: One thing that happens if you start to challenge the way we think about things is you see the bigger picture. You see how behaviors in certain parts of the world and in certain industries affect the whole world. There was a headline from a magazine from a couple years ago, a teaser from a front section to a series of book reviews about economics books: “Guess what the hottest new science fad is? Here’s a hint: It’s not geology.” That’s great; that’s a perfectly acceptable teaser to get you into this series of book reviews about economics. The problem is not with the headline; the problem is that we do not see economics or geology as the same thing.

What are people going to think fifty years from now when they look back and say this is a civilization of people completely bored out of their skulls about geology, yet who excavated carbon minerals out of the ground to make their economy run? Economics is geology—it is powered by rocks we pull out of the ground. And the practical repercussions of drawing this distinction between economics and geology is that we only have a price tag of what we get out of the ground, so when we burn that into atmospheric gas, it no longer has any value to the economy—that’s changing, and that’s where federal and international carbon emissions trading policy is going to solve this question.

SP: You have another other great metaphor, when you’re discussing the Stern report and other economic analyses of climate change, and you write that, “Chronic illness is to personal income what global warming is to economic output.” So in the present, we’re really going to have to think critically about a future where we continue to separate geology and economics. Keeping them in separate bins is not going to get us to the right place.

Roston: That is not going to get us to the right place; that is absolutely correct. And there have been a lot of interesting papers by a number of economists around the country and around the world in the last couple of years. Here is how I would frame an answer to this question: economists have a much harder job than geophysicists and geochemists have studying Earth’s carbon cycle. The Earth is a very complicated thing, but it is consistent. Carbon has always flowed through the Earth in the same way; plate tectonics have always shaped the continents. You can always build models that are very powerful because of these Earth processes.

Economists have to do two things: they have to build models that predict how groups of people will behave, and no one knows how to do that with the same precision that geophysicists can do their work. So economists are in this unenviable position of having to build a model on top of the science model, and that adds more variables into the mix and into their analyses.

For me it’s a little weird that so many people doubt climate science, but economists have as much influence as they do. Because when you look at it from this perspective, economists have a much harder job to do, and I don’t envy them, and I’m not putting them down because I work with economists and they are some of the smartest people I know working on some of the hardest problems ever conceived. In the last year or two, you have some people like Martin Weitzmen at Harvard University saying maybe neoclassical economics actually is not suited to a problem as big as climate change. Global warming is a unique geological event.

How do scientists and economists think about it differently? There is a huge gap between how scientists and economists think about climate and I think it’s because they don’t talk to each other as much as you would think. At the center of the discussion that they are not having enough of is the central question of climate change: What does the current generation owe to the future? How do we value the future? Literally, it is a variable in an equation that economists use in cost-benefit analyses to determine how much a climate change policy will cost.

You alluded to the Stern report. The big debate in economics over the last two years has been over how the Stern report broke with economic tradition by choosing a variable in this equation that places a very high value on the future. And because of that, the Stern report has a recommendation that says we should do as much as possible now because it will be cheaper to act now then to wait and let later, richer generations deal with it. That idea is entering the public sphere slowly, but it has not gotten to policy makers yet.

SP: Some people who work in energy and climate policy talk about the “technology trap,” the idea that the solution to climate change is breakthrough technology like hydrogen-powered cars. How do we need to think about science and how do we need to think about technology to get us out of this mess?

Roston: Since there has never been anything like climate change—with the exception of the threat of nuclear war—this is an “all hands on deck” affair. We need to fundamentally change the way we behave in order to have what will be interpreted by future generations as a real attempt at dealing with climate change. I think it’s easy to fall into the technology trap or fall into any little trap along the way that makes climate change seem like something you can parcel out from one aspect of our experience, from one aspect of our national governance, when in fact we really have to reach for every possible technology that might work. One area of conflict: there are a number of firms and scientists who are trying to experiment with pouring iron into the ocean so that it catalyzes biological activity and draws carbon from the atmosphere.

SP: A geoengineering solution?

Roston: Yes. A lot of marine biologists are conducting research showing that this can have negative effects; this can have no net gain; this can add carbon to the atmosphere through the air-sea interaction and the transport of carbon in between them. I read all the papers that come out, and I’ve talked to some of the people who run these companies, and it is easy to come to the conclusion that we need to try everything and that businesses as usual will alter the climate in places that people have settled for tens of thousands of years and make them no longer good places to have settlements. I think that scale gets lost in the noise.

SP: What’s important to remember about carbon when people are thinking about energy or environmental policy?

Roston: You can tell a big story; you can tell a single story about our experience by looking at carbon. As I said earlier, energy and climate and personal health and pharmaceuticals and industrial materials and all these topics that we treat as stove-pipe categories all become episodes of this grand story of the carbon cycle. As a book, I hope people enjoy it. I spent a lot of time taking this material and trying to make it fun and easy to read. I hope it is an organizing tool for helping people think about the way we think about things.

Dr. Ayala, a former Dominican priest, said he told his audiences not just that evolution is a well-corroborated scientific theory, but also that belief in evolution does not rule out belief in God. In fact, he said, evolution “is more consistent with belief in a personal god than intelligent design. If God has designed organisms, he has a lot to account for.”

…

[He] dismisses the argument that it is only fair to teach both sides of the evolution/creationism controversy. “We don’t teach alchemy along with chemistry,” he said. “We don’t teach witchcraft along with medicine. We don’t teach astrology with astronomy.”

He said he was saddened when he saw the embrace of evolution identified with, as he put it, “explicit atheism,” as in the books of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins or other writers on science and faith.

Neither the existence nor nonexistence of God is susceptible to scientific proof, Dr. Ayala said, and equating science with the abandonment of religion “fits the prejudices” of advocates of intelligent design and other creationist ideas.

Sound bites proclaiming the opposition of science and religion tend to drown out more moderate voices calling attention to the compatibility of belief in evolution with belief in God. However, many religious institutions, including the Catholic Church, already support or explicitly endorse the latter view. With the brouhaha over recent creationist movie Expelled, and ongoing disputes about teaching “intelligent design” in the classroom, scientists and religious believers alike have a strong interest in making sure that voices like Dr. Ayala’s come through loud and clear. Failing to do so does a disservice to science and religion alike.

Sirine Shebaya, Ph.D. is a Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics and Health Policy at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.