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.

For decades, Japan and Europe have deployed high-speed rail systems, which consist of trains that average over 125 mph. The closest we come to such a network in the United States is Amtrak’s Acela Express service, a train with an average speed, 86 mph, that is dwarfed by that of many international competitors, like France’s TGV trains, which average 173 mph.

Several states have recently announced, or are in the process of building, high speed rail lines. The federal government should embrace these projects and support them financially, recognizing that they can play an important role in sustaining the innovation and business networks that serve as the bedrock of the 21^st century American economy. Here are a few proposed around the country:

An $18 billion to $20 billion project envisions 200-mph trains running throughout the “Texas T-Bone,” from Dallas/Fort Worth to Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. According to the Secretary of the Texas High Speed Rail and Transportation Corporation, “this system will create thousands of permanent jobs and attract a significant amount of investment, helping to ensure the continued growth of Texas’ economy.”

On election day this past November 4^th, California voters approved a ballot proposition that authorized $9 billion in bond funding for an 800-mile intercity high speed rail network that will carry passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 2 hours and 38 minutes. A report released in 2008 by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute found that “the high-speed train service can help Bay Area businesses expand their markets within California by providing more efficient access throughout the state.”

In the research and development phase, the Ohio Hub is a proposed 860-mile high speed rail network that will connect the major Ohio commercial centers of Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland with southern Ontario, Detroit, and other smaller cities. A report evaluating the economic impact of the proposed network found that “in the communities linked by the system, the project will create a new business environment that will be attractive to ‘New Economy’ (high tech mobile industry, frequently related to computer, telecommunications, and professional services businesses).”

A 2000 Florida referendum authorized funding for the phased development of a statewide HSR network, although a later referendum repealed that funding. A 2007 Florida State University study estimated that the “benefits of a statewide high speed rail program could range from $39 to $51 billion,” primarily by encouraging business connections between centers of industry.

For more on innovation clusters and tech-based economic development, see our “Regional Centers of Innovation 101.”

Plaudits from a galaxy of research luminaries indicate that there’s a lot in the new administration’s statements and actions for senior scientists to like. But the strains of “Happy Days Are Here Again” are harder to hear among the people who do most of the actual labor of American science—the poorly paid post-doctoral researchers and graduate students putting in years of 70-hour-weeks at the bench. Despite the change in administrations, their future still looks bleak. The reason: Channeling substantially more money—as much as 100 percent more over the next 10 years—through the existing university-based research structure ignores the fact that in certain crucial respects this structure is severely dysfunctional.

This mismatch between effort and outcome is, according to leading labor force economists, the central obstacle discouraging many of America’s most talented young people from pursuing advanced scientific studies.

Labor market experts agree that without major structural reforms in how research is organized, additional funding will not remedy—and could substantially worsen—a central failing of the nation’s scientific enterprise. That failing is the dismal and worsening career prospects of young Americans who want to spend their lives doing scientific research. Like other students with the talent and drive to excel at rigorous studies, the scientifically gifted hope for a profession that will afford them at least a comfortable middle-class lifestyle and reasonable financial security. The current university-based research structure severely inhibits that quest.

Training as a research scientist takes a demanding decade and starting a real career today generally requires landing a faculty position. Such openings are so painfully few, however, and each one available already draws hundreds of qualified applicants. These days, therefore, the investment of time, effort and opportunity needed to prepare for a research career very rarely pays off in the desired result.

This mismatch between effort and outcome is, according to leading labor force economists, the central obstacle discouraging many of America’s most talented young people from pursuing advanced scientific studies. This problem is so grave and so intrinsic to the way America’s academic research system is now organized that fundamental reform is needed to fix it. Simply providing more funding for basic scientific research won’t solve this fundamental problem.

A Decisive Choice

For several decades now, the United States has in fact pursued policies that systematically destroy the incentives that could draw America’s best—and very plentiful—homegrown talent into research careers. Despite claims of a shortage of Americans capable of doing topflight science, education statistics clearly show that the nation produces an abundance of young people with the ability to do science and math at the very highest levels. But, in the words of a foreign postdoc who has spent years working in American university labs on a temporary visa, “no American in his [or] her right state of mind would get into a career in academia. You can end up very easily in your 40s without a future ahead of you.”

Today’s crisis is not accidental. It grew out of decisions made, with little thought about labor force consequences, in the years after World War II.

Bright undergraduates at the nation’s universities see the grad students and postdocs laboring in their professors’ labs and the lives of penury, toil, and insecurity that await those who follow in their footsteps. In response, many of our best math and science students chose medicine, law, finance, or other careers over scientific research. Rebuilding the incentives that can once again make research a career of choice for Americans with the potential to do outstanding science is essential to assuring the nation’s future as the leader in innovation.

Today’s crisis is not accidental. It grew out of decisions made, with little thought about labor force consequences, in the years after World War II. In that dawn of massive federal research budgets, policymakers chose to finance science by awarding grants for specific projects to university professors who would use their students and, eventually, their postdocs, to provide the labor. This system worked well for a while.

But it had a hidden—and ultimately fatal—flaw that in the end turned it into an intellectual pyramid scheme. In addition to a stream of new findings, these “self-replicating” professors also produce a constant stream of new PhDs seeking to start research careers of their own. As American higher education expanded rapidly through the mid-1960s, young scientists could generally find the opportunities they sought. But when the growth in faculty openings drastically slowed, the production of new PhDs did not. Universities continued to give fellowships and postdoc appointments based on the amount of research money they received, not on the career opportunities awaiting their graduates.

By the mid-1970s, PhDs seeking faculty jobs far outnumbered the available career opportunities. Where once scientists had generally moved into faculty posts by age 30, now they went in large numbers into low-paid, temporary, postdoctoral “training” positions while they searched for assistant professorships. Before long, five or more years as a postdoc became “normal” in many fields. But even as the typical postdoc period grew, the chances of getting that faculty post shrank and labor force observers began calling extended postdoc training “disguised unemployment.”

Smart undergraduates began noticing the poor professional and financial payoff from science graduate study, and their professors began importing large numbers of PhDs and graduate students from abroad to provide the highly skilled but low-paid labor that keeping their grants required. Today, the majority of the nation’s estimated 60,000 or more postdocs are foreigners on temporary visas.

A New Ladder Needed

Pouring more money into this same dysfunctional system will obviously do nothing to attract more young Americans to careers in science. It will only, as our foreign postdoc puts it,  “create more postdoctoral training jobs when we have thousands and thousands of people who have already been trained for many years under the present system” who can’t start careers. But don’t get me wrong. The nation needs increased research funding to meet our ambitious goals in health care, energy independence, green energy, and more. Doubling expenditures over a decade makes excellent sense.

But how the we spend that money is as important for the nation’s future as how much we spend. The last sharp hike in research funding, when the National Institutes of Health budget doubled between 1998 and 2003, produced some excellent research. But it also did real damage to countless careers because it led to a large number of new researchers who cannot get permanent jobs or grant funding.

This time, we must spend the increased funds in a way that builds, not destroys, long-term career opportunities for scientifically talented young Americans. Instead of the failed strategy of simply giving professors more money to pay more postdocs and grad students, we need to start constructing new career ladders that provide appealing long-term opportunities for large numbers of gifted young scientists. Small programs that provide special grants to a few hundred handpicked young investigators will not suffice, because the odds of winning them are too low to motivate people who have many options to persevere through a decade or more of demanding training.

Instead, we need to break from the present system of tying career opportunities in research to winning one of the tiny number of faculty openings available each year—a number that appears to be shrinking even further as today’s cash-strapped universities impose budget cuts and hiring freezes. In place of the old, counterproductive job structure, the nation needs a new one with plenty of solid, professional, career opportunities that offer young PhDs salaries, status, security, and chances for advancement that befit their long training and specialized skills. These jobs need not carry the title “professor” or to be at universities, but they must provide talented young Americans who choose graduate school in science, and hope to spend their lives doing research, a reliable chance of realizing their dreams.

Experts suggest various of ways of accomplishing this, all of which involve dismantling the current pyramid scheme. Instead of depending for labor on a constant stream of cheap, temporary students and postdoc “trainees,” labs need to establish many long-term positions that offer workers a realistic income commensurate with their education and experience as well as opportunities for advancement within predictable career tracks. A model that many experts favor is staffing labs primarily with bachelors- or masters-level career technicians and PhD-level permanent staff scientists while using much smaller percentages of grad students and postdocs.

Because these new-style labs would not depend on student labor, they would not need to be in universities. Rather than continuing to limit competitive research funding largely to university-based professors, major U.S. funding agencies would, like many European countries, encourage the development of freestanding research institutions based not around the teacher-and-disciple academic model, but around a staff of career scientists and technicians. The legendary Bell Laboratories, for example, supported for decades by the monopoly profits of the regulated U.S. telephone industry, worked on such a model and produced some of the 20th century’s major technological advances, as well as six Nobel Prizes for basic research.

In our own time, Janelia Farm, the Howard Hughes Research Institute’s innovative new research facility in Ashburn, Virginia, eschews university-style hierarchy and places a strong emphasis on employing long-term PhD staff scientists. These are only two of the possible arrangements that America should consider, experts say.

Building this new career structure will take bold thinking and strong leadership, but anything less cannot achieve President Obama’s goal of keeping American science pre-eminent in the 21st century. Our nation must do more than satisfy the clamor of today’s senior scientists for additional money for their labs. The time is overdue for the nation to recognize and take seriously the vital long-term challenge of ensuring the career opportunities that will motivate our best young people to make the commitment needed to do the great science of the future.

Beryl Lieff Benderly, a Washington journalist, writes the monthly “Taken for Granted” column on science labor force issues on the website of Science.

The Act addresses many of the critical areas that politicians and economists alike have been discussing in recent weeks. It makes investments in clean energy that will form a solid foundation upon which to build a 21st-century low-carbon economy. It addresses the creaking infrastructure needs that are slowing down U.S. business competitiveness. It helps those most hurt by the recession, invests in education, lowers health care costs, and provides necessary funds to save vital public services at the state level.

But as outlined in the Center for American Progress report, “A National Innovation Agenda,” the Act also recognizes the importance of science, technology and innovation, which “have long provided the foundation for America’s prosperity.”

A key part of this agenda is ensuring that the United States has the innovation infrastructure necessary for it to compete on the global stage.

Getting the economy back on track is not enough unless the recovery is sustained and living standards once again rise in line with economic growth and increases in productivity. The steps necessary to achieve this were set out in the CAP report, “Progressive Growth.” A key part of this agenda is ensuring that the United States has the innovation infrastructure necessary for it to compete on the global stage. Although the United States remains the world’s most innovative economy, other countries particularly in East Asia are quickly catching up. Underinvestment in recent years has precipitated this decline.

To address this, the Recovery Act announced several critical investments, including $6 billion for broadband and wireless services, $20 billion for health information technology, $1 billion for technology improvements for a more efficient and secure government, $1 billion for education technology, and $11.7 billion for scientific research.

The stimulus proposal also includes significant funds supporting research and development efforts across the physical, environmental, and life sciences. Despite a modest supplemental boost in June, assistance here comes at a time when total budgetary authority for R&D has been dropping in real dollars; adjusted for inflation, it declined 1.9 percent overall in fiscal year 2007-2008. In biomedical research, the situation is more severe. Continuous flat funding for the National Institutes of Health has dropped its inflation-adjusted research budget to a level 13 percent lower than where it was five years ago.

The Recovery Act would allot $2 billion for NIH, the amount CAP Senior Fellow Rick Weiss recommended last October. This funding can support researchers who are working on cures for a healthier country. It can potentially help the younger generation of scientists who have been squeezed out of the NIH funding process because of the tightening budgets. Some 80 percent of grant requests go unfunded at the agency, and the competitive process favors established researchers—the average age of a scientist winning his or her first NIH grant is 42 years.

Additional funding through the National Science Foundation—$3 billion—will expand opportunities for scientists working on America’s energy and health challenges, while investing in research for the future.

But just as grantmaking agencies can create and sustain good jobs with additional funding, they also have to maintain the facilities where scientists work. Just like the highway system, much of our country’s research infrastructure needs upgrading. Chairman Obey’s bill includes construction funds to renovate existing facilities at universities and institutes and build new ones: $400 million for the National Science Foundation, $1.5 billion for NIH, $462 million for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, $300 million for the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, and $50 million to repair hurricane-damaged NASA facilities.

Support for basic research in the physical sciences will help maintain U.S. competitiveness in the field. While the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland may have blown a gasket before going into operation last September, it nonetheless pulled the gravitational center of particle research away from the United States. The Recovery Act provides $1.9 billion for basic research through the Department of Energy, along with $400 million for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which pursues potentially transformative high-risk, high return work—a critical approach that has fallen, all too often, out of federal funding favor.

As a complement to the $73 billion the stimulus package proposes for clean energy projects, the Act provides for Earth sciences research to better understand the state of our planet. This includes $400 million for NASA Earth scientists and $600 million for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite equipment and climate modeling, which will be crucial for global warming mitigation and adaptation policy.

To help translate discoveries from lab to market, there are also funds that can support regional technology-based economic development: $100 million for NIST labs to coordinate manufacturing standards, and another $100 million for the Technology Innovation Program and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership.

As Science Progress contributors explain in several recent features on regional centers of innovation, developing prosperous regional innovation clusters yields dividends to the domestic and world economies—whether it be information technology or life-saving medical advances. Regional centers also benefit local communities by attracting a talented and high-paid workforce, cultural organizations, and start-up businesses that generate tax revenue and support the cycle of growth—all key stepping stones on the path to economic recovery.

Will Straw is the Associate Director for Economic Growth at the Center for American Progress. Andrew Plemmons Pratt is the Assistant Editor for Science Progress.