982 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
Even with this temporal conjunction, the Chicago meeting wouldn't have
attracted public attention if the press had not been alerted by accidental cir-
cumstances (neither the participants nor the organizers invited general journalists
to the meeting). At most, reports would have appeared in the News and Views
sections of Nature and Science, and professional history might have been tweaked
or even altered a bit.
But the general press caught on and grossly misread the forthcoming meeting
as a sign of deep trouble in the evolutionary sciences (rather than the fruitful
product of a time of unusual interest and theoretical reassessment for a factual
basis that no one doubted), and therefore as an indication that creationism might
actually represent a genuine alternative, or at least a position that stood to benefit
from any perceived confusion among evolutionists.
No single source can be blamed for thus alerting and misinforming the press,
but an unfortunate article by James Gorman appeared in the popular magazine
Discover just a month before the meeting ("The tortoise or the hare," October,
1980), leading with the following confused and unfortunate paragraph:
Charles Darwin's brilliant theory of evolution, published in 1859, had a
stunning impact on scientific and religious thought and forever changed
man's perception of himself. Now that hallowed theory is not only under
attack by fundamentalist Christians, but is also being questioned by
reputable scientists. Among paleontologists, scientists who study the fossil
record, there is growing dissent from the prevailing view of Darwinism.
Partly as a result of the disagreement among scientists, the fundamentalists
are successfully reintroducing creationism into textbooks and schoolrooms
across the U.S. In October, a hundred or so scientists from half a dozen
different disciplines will gather at Chicago's Field Museum...This misconstruction yielded two unfortunate consequences—first, in
inspiring a substantial contingent of the general press to attend the Chicago
meeting under the false assumption that these technical proceedings would yield
newsworthy stories about the success and status of creationism; and, second, by
creating a blatantly false taxonomy that dichotomized natural historians into two
categories: true-blue Darwinians vs. anyone with any desire to revise anything
about pure Darwinism (including the strangest bedfellows of evolutionary
revisionists and creationist ignoramuses). We must never doubt the potency of
such false taxonomies, especially when promulgated by a general press that grasps
the true issues poorly, and also plays to an audience too prone to read any dispute
as a dichotomous pairing of good and evil. (Consider, for example, the harm done
when scientific fraud, the worst of conscious betrayals for all we hold dear as a
profession, gets linked with scientific error, a correctable and unavoidable
consequence of any boldness in inquiry, because both lead to false conclusions.
The pairing of punctuated