The co-author of a biology textbook fights to prevents schools from placing a disclaimer warning off the cover of his work

11:46 AM EST on Friday, November 26, 2004

BY BRYAN ROURKE
Journal Staff Writer

AP file photo

Brown University Prof. Kenneth Miller, speaking in 2002 in Columbus, Ohio, is at the forefront of a schoolbook battle regarding the teaching of evolution.

PROVIDENCE -- A million American high school students read Kenneth Miller's biology textbook.

But in Cobb County, Ga., northwest of Atlanta, they do so with a warning: "Evolution is a theory, not a fact."

Miller, a Brown University biology professor, isn't pleased about that.

"It's a fact evolution took place," Miller said. "It's as much of a fact in science as anything we know."

Two years ago, the Cobb County Board of Education stuck a disclaimer inside all its copies of Biology, published in 2002 by Prentice Hall, and coauthored by Miller and Joseph Levine. It was an attempt to accommodate those unaccepting of evolution.

That action prompted the American Civil Liberties Union to file suit against the school board on behalf of several parents. The ACLU suit alleged the disclaimer violated the separation of church and state. The school district, the suit alleged, was implicitly endorsing a religious explanation of creation.

The Georgia case is only the tip of the iceberg. This year alone, 13 states are grappling with challenges to the teaching of evolution in their classrooms. In Pennsylvania, a local school board passed a measure that calls for the teaching of intelligent design as well as evolution. And in Maryland, some school officials are discussing whether to get rid of textbooks that supposedly reveal a bias toward evolution.

The debate had largely disappeared from the national stage until 1999, when the Kansas Board of Education voted to eliminate evolution from the state's science textbooks. That decision has since been reversed.

Two weeks ago, the Georgia case came before the U.S. District Court in Atlanta. Miller testified at the one-week bench trial, without a jury, which ended Nov. 12. In his testimony, he called the disclaimer "very weird . . . the only place I see warnings is cigarette packs."

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

U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper is expected to issue his written ruling by early December.

In deciding the case, the judge must determine whether the sticker promotes religion or is merely an advisory action by a government entity.

According to Miller, E. Linwood Gunn IV, the school district's lawyer, tried to get him to testify that the stickers are "a reasonable accommodation of religion," which Miller refused to do. Gunn did not return phone calls.

"The popular feeling is a theory is just a hunch," Miller testified. "In science, you don't use the word theory for a hunch or a stupid guess. Theories explain facts. They tie them together."

The stickers are simply wrong, contorting a scientific term to promote a religious point of view, Miller said in a recent interview in his Brown office.

Science, Miller said, has theories on thousands of things. For instance, there's a theory of gravity. No one questions that, he said, or tries to prevent others from reading about it.

"If I could have reworded the unit in the book, I would have called it evolutionary theory supported by millions of facts," Miller said.

In court, the school board asserted that several scientists agreed with its disclaimer's wording. Miller's reponse is that scientists have a different definition of the word theory than the general public, and they're trained to demand proof for everything.

"The first virtue of any scientist is skepticism," Miller said. "To say we are skeptical is absolutely true. You should be skeptical of everything in science."

Singling out evolution as the sole subject worthy of skepticism from a science book featuring hundreds of concepts, Miller said, sends the wrong signal.

"Students come into the classroom assuming evolution is an especially shaky scientific theory, which it is not," Miller said.

But Duane Gish, senior vice president of the Institution for Creation Research in California, said evolution is no more grounded in scientific fact than intelligent design, which holds that life is so complex that there must be an intelligent force behind it.

"We are suggesting that there is another side to this question," Gish said Wednesday. "There is a tremendous body of scientific evidence that contradicts evolutionary theory and, in some instances, is incompatible with it."

Gish said the theory of evolution so dominates the classroom that students have no opportunity to challenge its validity.

"None of the scientific evidence that so powerfully supports creation is being considered," he said. "What we have is indoctrination."

Supporters of creationism are not a fringe group. In a Gallup poll conducted this month, 45 percent of all respondents agreed with the statement: "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so."

One-third of those polled view the Bible as something to be taken literally, while 48 percent think it is divinely inspired but not necessarily the literal truth.

"This is a very serious movement," said Paul R. Gross, life sciences professor emeritus at the University of Virginia. "It touches the deep and sincere feelings of a great many people in our country."

Cobb County, which surrounds Marietta, is a conservative area within a conservative state, according to Miller. It's also affluent and educated. "It is to the rest of Georgia what Barrington and East Greenwich are to Rhode Island," he said.

This controversy did not come as a surprise to Miller. He has been expecting it for a while.

Miller is the author or coauthor of five biology textbooks which are used by high school students in all 50 states. And some of those states aren't so different from Georgia.

In 1991, Alabama started sticking lengthy evolution disclaimers inside Miller's books. However, no one in that state has legally challenged the disclaimer, Miller said, so the practice continues there. Oklahoma came close to adopting Alabama's disclaimer, which prompted Miller and Levine to create a Web site in response.

Out of 12 statements in the Alabama disclaimer, Miller and Levine found 7 to be false or "seriously misleading."

While the trial in Atlanta wasn't supposed to directly address evolution, it couldn't help but be brought into question. The school district's lawyer challenged Miller to answer why the theory of evolution could not fully explain everything about the natural world.

"There are elements of the Battle of Gettysburg we can't explain," Miller testified. "Does that mean it didn't take place? Of course not."

Last week, Miller, a country music fan, delivered a seminar at Villanova University, in Pennsylvania, that he titled "Looking for God in all the wrong places."

"I tried to explain that the mainstream notion of evolution is entirely consistent with Christian thought," Miller said.

-- With reports from Linda Borg and The Boston Globe