14 | APRIL 2016

Creationism

Evolves

NICK MATZKE

It’s 10 years since the teaching of “intelligent design” was ruled

unconstitutional, yet anti-evolution legislation continues to replicate

and “evolve” across the USA.

M

any who have studied the anti-evolution

movement have noted that “creationism

evolves”. Usually scholars make the joke,

note the irony and move on with tradi-

tional approaches to history.

But “creationism evolves” can be made into a more literal,

scientiic statement. I have estimated the evolutionary family

tree, or phylogeny, of 67 anti-evolution policies proposed in

the United States between 2004 and 2015

(tinyurl.com/zxkyr38).

I describe all of these policies as “stealth creationism”. They

never mention creationism or “creation science”, and they rarely

mention “intelligent design”, primarily because these topics

were ruled to be in violation of the US Constitution's prohi-

bition on government promotion of religion in public schools.

(The last major court case, Kitzmiller v. Dover, was about “intel-

ligent design” and was decided on 20 December 2005). The

stealth creationism policies attempt to portray evolution as

“controversial”, encourage teachers to “critically analyse” evolu-

tion (by promoting bogus creationist arguments against evolu-

tion), and the policies attempt to prevent school administrators

from correcting teachers who are promoting pseudoscience.

Because the creationists are adopting stealth strategies and

trying to hide the sectarian basis of their activities, I hypothe-

sised that a phylogeny could be used to trace what the creation-

ists were up to. This phylogeny tells us not only the family

relationships between policies but also gives information about

which sources particular creationists copied their policies from,

and gives insights into which policies are chosen for future

legislative attempts.

While a phylogeny is usually an evolutionary tree that shows

the family relationships between DNA sequences or species,

it can be used for far more than DNA. Phylogenetic trees have

been constructed for proteins, chromosomes, fossils and even

cultural objects like languages, musical instruments and texts.

One famous example was a phylogeny of Little Red Riding

Hood, which examined variants of the bedtime story across

Europe, Asia and Africa. In some versions of the story, the wolf

is replaced with a tiger, or the red riding hood is some other

garment. Versions of the story that share these variants are

more likely to have shared history, just like the fact that our

DNA is most similar to chimpanzee DNA indicates that chimps

are our closest living relatives. By examining hundreds of such

variants using computer programs, a phylogenetic tree with

the best it to the data can be estimated.

A new term for the application of phylogenetics to cultural

objects is phylomemetics – the phylogenies of memes. The

term “meme”, of course, was invented by Richard Dawkins in

his 1976 book The Selish Gene.Dawkins drew an analogy

between ideas that spread in our culture, and genes that spread

in populations.

While memes have become irmly embedded in popular

culture, the scientiic study of them has lagged behind. Early

discussions devolved into debates about how they should be

deined, and whether or not thinking of ideas as objects repli-

cating in the culture under natural selection was any more

useful than traditional historical analysis how and why certain

ideas become popular in the culture.

Phylomemetics provides a way forward. While evolutionary

biologists remain interested in reconstructing phylogenies for

their own sake – we all want to know what Darwin's Tree of Life

will look like when all of the data is in – much of the scientiic focus

is now using phylogenies to test hypotheses about how evolution

works. Phylogenies allow us to measure things like the rates of

speciation, extinction and evolutionary change, and the correla-

tion of these rates with other factors. Do ice ages promote speci-

ation or extinction? Do all species have the same chance of

producing new species, or do only a few species have key traits

that cause them to take over, driving others to extinction?