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LE TENDON REVOLVER 3

Edited by United Dead Artists  - France
 

 

 

By MARK SHWARTZ 

Like most scientists, Greg Clark prefers the lab to the limelight. An associate professor of bioengineering at the University of Utah, he’d rather hone new designs for prosthetic limbs than engage in public debates about religion and science. But last year, his comfortable academic bubble suddenly burst when a Utah politician proposed that a religious concept called intelligent design be taught in state public schools alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution.

“Before then, evolution was a non-issue in Utah,” Clark recalls. “But this was an attack on science itself. As a scientist, educator and the father of a middle-schooler, I felt a moral obligation to speak out.”

Clark was all too familiar with the war on evolution. Public schools in Kansas and Pennsylvania were already embroiled in highly publicized anti-evolution campaigns led by advocates of intelligent design (known as I.D.), who claim that living things are so complex, they must have been purposefully designed by a supernatural intelligence. I.D. backers reject the fundamental tenets of evolutionary theory — namely, that species evolve over time through natural selection and random genetic mutations.

 

Since 2001, the teaching of evolution has been challenged in more than 40 states, from Pennsylvania to California. In many places, including Utah, the anti-evolution movement has been led by religious ideologues who consider Darwin’s theory antithetical to the biblical version of creation. At the same time, they tout intelligent design as a legitimate scientific theory, not a theological concept.