Carole Wade
18
Human Genome Project, is a Christian who believes that God used the mechanism of
evolution to create the world, including human beings. The problem occurs when people
misunderstand the meaning of the term theory in science, and when they assume that
intelligent design and evolution have equal standing as scientific theories. Such misunder-
standings are common among students.
As Collins (2005) wrote in Time magazine, nearly all working biologists, whether reli-
gious believers or not, accept that the principles of variation and natural selection explain
how multiple species evolved from a common ancestor over very long periods of time, and
agree that these processes are sufficient to explain the rich variety of life forms on the
planet. Indeed, evolution is the very basis of modern biology, and plays an increasing
role in psychological theory as well. The processes of evolution are plain for everyone to
see every time a virus or bacterium becomes resistant to a drug, as have flu viruses over just
the past five years. Evolution is evident in the adaptive changes that have occurred during
the 20th century in many more complex species, such as the peppered moth in England
and the rock pocket mouse in Arizona (Nachman, Hoekstra, & D’Agostino, 2003;
Young & Musgrave, 2005). And evolution is evident in the recent comparative analyses of
human and chimpanzee genomes. In contrast, as Steven Pinker (2005) has observed, the
idea of intelligent design runs smack into the inconvenient facts that the retina is installed
backward, that the male seminal duct hooks over the ureter like a garden hose snagged on
a tree, and that, when we are cold, goose bumps uselessly try to warm us by fluffing up
long-gone fur. Nonetheless, because so many people misunderstand what science is, in a
2005 Pew poll, 38% of respondents favored replacing evolution with creationism in the
science curriculum. As conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer (2005), who is
generally sympathetic toward the role of religion in American life, has asked, in an essay
lamenting the public confusion of faith with science, “How many times do we have to
rerun the Scopes ‘monkey trial’?”
Religious ideologies, then, can get in the way of critical thinking about science,
including psychological science. And so can political ideologies, so shrill these days on
both the right and the left. Because of such ideologies, reactions to psychological find-
ings, especially those that challenge conventional beliefs, such as findings on sexual
orientation, gender, abstinence-only sex education, and the emotional effects of abor-
tion, often have little to do with a study’s scientific merits. Scientifically literate students
need to know this.
Other social trends also decrease the ability (or willingness) of people to think critically.
One, as Frank Cioffi (2005) noted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, is that the national
language of “debate” has become cheapened. Many television programs, and political
commentators like Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, whose commentaries contain an average
of 8.88 instances of name-calling per minute (as noted in The Week, May 18, 2007, p. 16),
have reduced public discourse to a verbal food fight, in which the person who shouts the
loudest and says the nastiest things wins. Thus it is little wonder that students often fail to
understand the very concept of intellectual argumentation, or the value of coming up with
counterarguments.
In sum, the scientist–practitioner gap, ideological intrusions into science, relativistic ways
of thinking in the culture, uncritical responses to the biotechnical revolution, and other