Ebb tidings

who look for firm guidance on moral matters, and “at least some fire and brimstone to enliven our dreary public debates,” according to an opinion piece in one conservative British newspaper. But the paper welcomed his comments. “The Archbishop argues against the teaching of ‘creationism’ in schools. Yet he does so in a way that does not diminish the biblical story... As he puts it, the doctrine of creation should not be reduced to a ‘stark theory alongside other theories’.” And one member of the government used the archbishop’s remarks to back a stronger position for evolution. The British home secretary, Charles Clarke, told a London meeting that he was “totally opposed” to the concept of creationism. Clarke, who said that he did not believe in God, insisted that science was the basis for progress and praised Charles Darwin, one of just four Britons presently portrayed on the country’s banknotes, as one of the greatest scientists in history. “It is certain in my view, that creationism is anti-scientific and, as I believe that science should be the route of where we go, I therefore do not approve of it,” he said at the conference last month. New-found hostility to Darwinism is also growing among some students. An article in The Guardian in February highlighted the case of Muslim medical students handing out leaflets that dismissed Darwin’s theories as false, and highlighted the growing number of evangelical Christians also increasingly vocal in challenging the notion of evolution. Sir Robert May, the former president of the Royal Society, warned in his speech ending his presidency last year, that fundamentalist thinking was skewing debates. “Such is the influence of groups that ignore or misinterpret scientific evidence, that the core values that underpinned the Enlightenment and led to ‘free, open, unprejudiced, uninhibited questioning and inquiry, individual liberty and separation of church and state’, are being eroded,” he said. “All ideas should be open to questioning, and the merit of ideas should be assessed on the strength of the evidence that supports them and not the credentials or affiliations of the individuals proposing them. It is not a recipe for a comfortable life, but it is demonstrably a powerful engine for understanding how the world actually works and for applying this understanding.” The Royal Society held this month a public lecture by Steve Jones of University College London, titled simply ‘Why creationism is wrong and evolution is right’. The society said: “Many biologists are worried by a recent and unexpected return of an argument based on belief by the certainty, untestable and unsupported by evidence, that life did not evolve but appeared by supernatural means. Worldwide, more people believe in creationism than evolution. Why do no biologists agree?” Steve Jones addressed what evolution is, new evidence that men and chimps are close relatives and how we are, nevertheless, unique and why creationism does more harm to religion than it does to science. The growing concerns amongst British scientists about the creep of creationist ideas is also echoed forcefully by Paul Nurse, the British president of Rockefeller University in New York. In a Commentary article in Cell earlier this year, he expressed his concern for the status of creationism and intelligent design in the US and the failure, in his view, of scientists there to oppose these views. “The attack on Darwinism by supporters of intelligent design is a straightforward attack on science itself. Intelligent design is not science because it proposes a supernatural designer as an explanation for evolutionary change. It is quite extraordinary that the Scopes trial of the 1920s is once again being revisited in parts of the US where attempts are being made to replace scientific teaching in schools with explanations based on religious beliefs,” he wrote. He also raised concerns about the failure of key US institutions to back evolution. “It is crucial that great US scientific institutions like the NIH are unequivocal in their defense of science, especially over an issue that is as fundamental to biomedicine as Darwinism. This is a very important matter because the failure of the leadership to robustly support science will eventually be damaging for the whole scientific enterprise in the US.”