In this fascinating story of evolution, religion, politics, and personalities, Matthew Chapman captures the story behind the headlines in the debate over God and science in America
In Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Education, decided in late 2005, a Republican judge rendered a surprising verdict in a case that pitted the teaching of intelligent design (sometimes known as "creationism in a lab coat") against the teaching of evolution. Taking place in a small Pennsylvania school district, the case had national repercussions, all the way up to President Bush, who said he believed intelligent design should be taught as "an alternative theory" to evolution.
Matthew Chapman, the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, spent several months covering the trial from beginning to end. Through his in-depth encounters with the participants—creationists, preachers, teachers, scientists on both sides of the issue, lawyers, theologians, the judge, and the eleven parents who resisted the fundamentalist proponents of intelligent design—Chapman tells a sometimes terrifying, often hilarious, and above all moving story of ordinary people doing battle in America over the place of religion and science in modern life.
Written with a filmaker's eye for character and detail, and including insights only a descendent of Darwin could bring forth, Chapman paints an entertaining, yet disturbing picture of America today.
I hope the fact that my great-great-grandfather was Charles Darwin will not deter you from reading this book. You might assume that my opinions are predictable and that a less biased, and therefore more suspenseful, account could be found elsewhere. The truth is that at the start of the trial I did believe creationism should be banned from high school science classes. By the end of it, however, I had been convinced by the intelligent design advocates that creationism in all its forms should be a mandatory part of every child's science education. My reasons for believing this are slightly different from theirs, but that's another story—the story of this book.
Being a descendent of Charles Darwin was not something I thought much about as I was growing up in Cambridge, England. The theory of evolution was accepted, and Darwin was a mere historical figure. If I did think about my connection to him, it was only negatively. Academic pressure on me was intense, and, at least in comparison with my ancestor, success was unlikely.
I was a child whose maximum attention span was approximately five seconds, a boy who refused to be educated and was kicked out of several schools, and a youth whose only academic achievement was a stunning lack of achievement. At the age of fifteen, when I was set free, I had not passed a single exam of any consequence. Soon after the school door slammed behind me, I rediscovered my curiosity.
To support myself, I worked in a variety of jobs—van driver, welder, house cleaner, bricklayer, spotlight operator in a nightclub, and so on—before becoming an apprentice film editor, editor, screenwriter, and finally film director.
In the early eighties, I moved to the United States, where I discovered to my surprise that many Americans not only rejected Darwin's theory of evolution, but they reviled it. I had come here in part because I hated the English class system and thought of America as being less weighed down by the past. Now here I was in the New World, faced with an old and willful ignorance that went far beyond anything even I had attempted.
I did not know much about evolution, but a quick study of easily available information showed that its most important idea, natural selection, was easy to understand and made sense.
Darwin saw how plant and animal breeders influenced characteristics through selective breeding. Why wouldn't nature do the same? If life was a struggle for survival, those best suited to their environment had an advantage. Any small, random mutation favoring survival would increase the likelihood of that animal or plant living long enough to pass on its genes to offspring, who would then inherit the advantage, and so on. Increased complexity and slow adaptation seemed inevitable.
It soon became apparent from my reading that 99 percent of scientists believed in evolution. Why would one doubt them? Did the pedestrian question the theory of gravity? Did the farmer who went to the doctor question his diagnosis? Why, when it came to evolution, did nonexperts feel compelled to disagree with those who clearly knew better?
The answer was that evolution appeared to contradict the bible. Evolution requires a lot of time to bring about change, and if plants and animals constantly become more complex, it was logical to infer that previously they had been far simpler. If one went back far enough, it seemed probable, though hard to prove, that all life-forms on earth shared a primitive ancestor perhaps found in some distant "primeval soup" of chemicals.
This, of course, was not how the origin of life was described in the bible. Evolution did not put either God or human beings at the center of a recent, ordered, and...
