British biologist Richard Dawkins, one of the leading voices of the “neo-atheist” movement, has taken the latest book-sized shot at the “intelligent design” movement. You can read my interview with Dawkins’ here about his new book: “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.”

For a scientist of Dawkins’ caliber, intelligent design is a barn-door sized target. In a nutshell, it maintains that life is so complex that it must be the work of a creator. Its boosters claim their view is based in science and not influenced by religion, but it is widely seen as a thinly-veiled attempt to give a scientific gloss to creationism. That claim to science is the key here — most religions believe that God created the world, of course, but they state this as an article of faith and not a scientific fact.

On this blog, we often report on issues related to science and religion. We have to remain agnostic on the biggest question of all — does God exist? — and take fundamental dogmas as the starting point for each faith. This sometimes strikes readers as strange or biased. Some think it already shows a prejudice against belief. But just imagine what would happen if we took sides on teachings such as the resurrection of Jesus or the divine origin of the Koran. We would not be practicing journalism anymore, but some kind of theological analysis or deconstruction, and our readers would not be getting the information they want about religion news around the world.

That said, we can’t just take everything on faith alone.  As journalists, we have to stick to facts on the ground. It’s hard to question some beliefs, but we can hold people responsible for what they profess. For example, if a Catholic priest has an affair with a woman, that violation of his vow of celibacy makes his affair different from one between two lay people or two non-Catholics. And if he is prominent enough, like the charismatic Miami television preacher Father Alberto Cutié, it’s worth reporting. The same applies to Islam. The scriptures of most if not all religions can be vague and sometimes seemingly contradictory, so Reuters cannot say whether the phrase  “Islam is a religion of peace” is true or false. But we can report if a Muslim known to preach that belief is found to be involved in some violent activity. In both cases, we don’t question the basic tradition or belief but we hold the believers responsible to it in their actions.

Which brings me to the question of evolution. While preparing this post, I had a lively Dallas-to-Paris email exchange with Religion Editor Tom Heneghan about how we cover an issue in which two sides are so opposed.  We agree with how we’ve been doing it so far, but setting out our approach in words took some consultation. Here’s our view of the issue.

(Photo: Portrait of Charles Darwin, 12 Feb 2009/Gordon Jack)

All serious scientists accept evolution as a fact because of the overwhelming and verifiable evidence that supports it. Much of this evidence is laid out in Dawkins’ new book and a book published earlier this year by University of Chicago scientist Jerry Coyne called “Why Evolution is True.” I regard the latter, by the way, as more readable, especially for a layman. These came out now because this year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th of the publication of his major work “On the Origin of Species,” which originally laid out the case for evolution by natural selection. They have also come out because the authors are clearly irritated by the intelligent design movement.

How does that play out when we report about evolution? For example, when we write about the wildlife of Madagascar, we usually include a background paragraph saying something like: “Madagascar separated from the rest of Africa tens of millions of years ago and so its species evolved in isolation from its mother continent.” In a story about its lemurs, we don’t write: “Scientists say Madagascar broke off from Africa tens of millions of years but some people, taking the Bible as their reference, believe it can only be 10,000 years old and that its lemurs were made in their current form by a supernatural creator.” That would create a false equivalence between the two views. The scientists have empirical evidence for their view of these natural phenomena but the religious view is based on scripture and does not stand up to empirical analysis. This is a case of comparing apples and oranges.

Does this mean we have taken sides and are not being balanced? Hardly. In fact, we would lay ourselves open to that charge if we did give equal credence to arguments such as intelligent design. For instance, some boosters for intelligent design, trying to get their perspective taught alongside evolution in U.S. public schools despite repeated defeats, have shifted their approach and argued that for the sake of balance it is necessary to “teach the controversy” between evolution’s supporters and skeptics. But the world of science sees no serious issue to discuss, just a false equivalence created by campaigners trying to claim the seal of scientific approval for arguments that do not stand up to empirical testing.

So why do we “report the controversy” if we think one side has no case? We do it because creationists are numerous and politically and culturally influential in parts of the United States. They’re challenging science teaching in some states and opening museums that claim to prove evolution never happened. We also do it because their influence is spreading to other countries, most notably to Muslim countries through the work of Islamic creationists like Harun Yahya. And we do it because their arguments, flawed though they may be in the eyes of science, challenge scientists, religious leaders, philosophers and other thinkers to refine their arguments for whichever view of mankind they support. These are serious adult questions and attempts to wedge them into high school biology lessons miss the mark by a mile.

(Photo: Ken Ham, president of the group Answers in Genesis, at a creation museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, 26 May 2007/John Sommers II)

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A senior Saudi cleric said religious scholars should vet the curriculum at the kingdom’s only co-educational university, meant to be a beacon of science, to prevent “alien ideologies” such as evolution.

(Photo: King Abdulla at KAUST opening, 23 Sept 2009/Susan Baaghil)

King Abdullah’s University of Science and Technology (KAUST), designed to produce Saudi scientists, is the only educational institution in the kingdom where men and women can mix. It is located near a Red Sea village away from the clutches of religious police and opened on September 23.

“The recommendation is to set up sharia committees at this university to oversee these studies and look into what violates the sharia (Islamic law),” Sheikh Saad al-Shithri, a member of a panel of top scholars, was quoted by al-Watan newspaper.

“We are looking at some of the sciences that have included some irregular and alien ideologies, like evolution and such other ideologies,” said Shithri, who is one of several clerics who objected to co-education at the university.

Read the whole story here.

What do you think about this? Can a new university for science and technology not teach evolution?

With 2009 being Darwin Year, we’ve had quite a few blog posts on evolution recently. Here’s a selection:

• Evolution book takes aim at “Intelligent Design”
• Texas reaches evolution compromise: who won, who lost?
• Anti-Darwin speaker gagged at Vatican evolution conference
• Just before Darwin day, Pew reviews faith and evolution in U.S.
• Evolution gets added boost in Texas schools
• Cardinal Schönborn links financial crisis to evolutionism
• Can policymakers use Darwin’s insights? New twist on old debate
• Vatican sees “urgent” need to review Darwin and evolution
• Harun Yahya preaches Islam, slams Darwin and awaits Jesus
• Pope Benedict’s evolution book finally comes out in English

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Until not too long ago, most people believed human morality was based on scripture, culture or reason. Some stressed only one of those sources, others mixed all three. None would have thought to include biology. With the progress of neuroscientific research in recent years, though, a growing number of psychologists, biologists and philosophers have begun to see the brain as the base of our moral views. Noble ideas such as compassion, altruism, empathy and trust, they say, are really evolutionary adaptations that are now fixed in our brains. Our moral rules are actually instinctive responses that we express in rational terms when we have to justify them.

(Photo: Religious activist at a California protest, 10 June 2005/Gene Blevins)

Thanks to a flurry of popular articles, scientists have joined the ranks of those seen to be qualified to speak about morality, according to anthropologist Mark Robinson, a Princeton Ph.D student who discussed this trend at the University of Pennsylvania’s Neuroscience Boot Camp. “In our current scientific society, where do people go to for the truth about human reality?” he asked. “It used to be you might read a philosophy paper or consult a theologian. But now there seems to be a common public sense that the authority over what morality is can be found by neuroscientists or scientists.”

This change has come over the past decade as brain scan images began to reveal which areas of the brain react when a person grapples with a moral problem. They showed activity not only in the prefrontal cortex, where much of our rational thought is processed, but also in areas known to handle emotion and conflicts between brain areas. Such insights cast doubt on long-standing assumptions about reason or religion driving our moral views. “A few theorists have even begun to claim that that the emotions are in fact in charge of the temple of morality and that moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as the high priest,” University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, one of the leading theorists in this field, has written.

Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory argues that morality is based on five concepts that evolved in all cultures: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authorty/respect and purity/sanctity. Those concepts have real-life consequences, he says — political liberals and conservatives disagree so much on so-called “culture war issues” because liberals base their moral views on the first two concepts while conservatives use all five. Other theorists such as Marc Hauser of Harvard and John Mikhail of Georgetown suggest humans have a universal moral grammar akin to the universal grammar that linguist Noam Chomsky claims underlies all the world’s languages.

For more on these ideas, see review articles such as “The Moral Instinct” (Stephen Pinker, New York Times), “Do The Right Thing” (Rebecca Saxe, Boston Review), “The Emerging Moral Psychology” (Dan Jones, Prospect), “The Roots of Morality” (Greg Miller, Science) and “The End of Philosophy” (David Brooks, New York Times). Hat-tip to fellow boot camper Tamar Gendler for pointing them out.

(Photo: Mark Robinson at the boot camp,10 Aug 2009/Tom Heneghan)

Does this mean that public opinion will turn away from seeing reason or religion as the bases for morality, in favor of the brain? Robinson doubts that. “I don’t know that they will shift to a completely neurobiological view of morality (and) I don’t think this is a fundamental shift away from religion. But it will mean that religion will have to come to terms with the public’s perception.

“I think there will be a greater acceptance of biology as an accepted domain within which to ask certain types of questions. That isn’t to say that people will understand morality completely differently in the future, or won’t have any morality. But they will at least know that (neuroscience) is another domain to go to for answers. The question of authority is a big one. Who is the ultimate authority on these issues about the fundamental nature of human morality?”

Robinson stressed that the authority issue is different from the question of personal belief. In future, he says, people could have moral positions similar to those today, but based on different authorities than in the past. “Think of it in search terms. Where will people go? What kinds of questions will they ask?” he said. “If they will lead to different beliefs, who knows? But the process of looking has changed.”

What do you think? Do you sense that science is taking over from reason or religion as the preferred way for people to justify moral decisions?

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The academic study of religion has come a long way from the days when knowledge of scripture, history and a few ancient languages were the main qualifications a scholar needed. Psychology, sociology and other social sciences have been applied to the field for over a century. Over the past 20 years, cognitive science has been edging into the field, especially with the explosion of neuroscience research. Some of the hottest research into religion is now being done with brain scanners searching for data on what happens inside believers’ heads when they pray or feel a special connection to God.

(Photo: John Teehan at the Neuroscience Boot Camp, 6 Aug 2009/Tom Heneghan)

Among the participants at the University of Pennsylvania’s Neuroscience Boot Camp I’m attending this week and next is John Teehan, an associate professor in the religion department at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. He’s seen how cognitive science has brought new tools and insights to the study of religion and may eventually challenge the ways religions justify their beliefs. He is writing a book about how many moral teachings in the Bible fit with the moral psychology that cognitive science says evolved naturally. I asked Teehan for an overview of what’s happening in the religion studies field in the United States.

“At the end of the 19^th century, there was a real interest in looking at religion from a psychological perspective,” he said. “Sigmund Freud and William James were the major figures. The Freudian paradigm was not a scientific one, even though Freud thought it was, and our understanding of the mind and the brain was primitive then compared to what we have now. What’s happening now is that the science of the mind has advanced to the point that we’re actually developing a scientific understanding of the mind. With the cognitive revolution involving cognitive science, neurological science and evolution studies, a more empirical approach to understanding the mind and morality is developing. Over the last 20 years, some of these scholars have started to look more particularly at religion. This field of the cognitive science of religion started in the early ’90s looking at religious behavior and rituals and how emotions mediate or reinforce religious experience.”

Anthropologist Stewart Guthrie’s book Faces in the Clouds (1993) played an important part in turning religious studies towards cognitive science, Teehan said. Guthrie’s thesis was that people naturally tend to believe events are caused by a conscious agent and this belief was an important evolutionary tool. “If you live in a very uncertain and dangerous environment, as humans did for most of their history, it’s very important to be able to make sense of what you’re hearing and seeing. Guthrie points out the best rule of thumb is, when in doubt, overinterpret. If you hear a rustling in the bush, it could be the wind but it’s much more useful to interpret that as a snake or a possible predator. If you’re wrong and it’s just the wind, you’ve lost nothing. But if you think it’s the wind and it turns out to be a snake, you’re in danger. Guthrie argues this is an ingrained mental predisposition. There has since been lots of empirical work to show how easy it is to get people to think in terms of agents… Religions are built out of that and those we have today continue to tap into that.”

Teehan stressed the empirical work being done to test this thesis is not restricted to testing religious people. Researchers have found people in various situations respond the same way. Other new research into religion involves studying how people process information, how they make moral decisions and why they punish people who act against the community’s generally accepted morality.

“A lot of work in morality shows cooperation can develop among groups of strangers, but all the studies seem to show those effects only in very small communities. But humans have incredibly complex and large systems of cooperation. How do we get from one to the other? It seems that religion plays a complicated role here. A major role is the belief in a moral God who serves as the overseer of the community. One of the problems with complex societies is that it’s easy to benefit from society without contributing, the “free rider” problem. That problem is solved or improved if there is a common belief that all cheating is being observed. Behavioral economics has developed various games to test peoples’ willingness to cooperate and be generous in anonymous situations. When those situation are observed by somebody, people tend to be more generous… So part of the proposition is that part of the development of religion was an adaptation to help community cohesion and help communities develop into larger units.”

Religion also seems to play a role in drawing lines between an in-group and an out-group. “There is evidence that we are much more morally sensitive to people we identify with in our in-group than in an out-group,” Teehan said. “One study shows neurological evidence of how people respond to faces of in-group versus out-group members. One thing to be done is to see how religious identification or symbols or rhetoric may impact on those studies.”

Looking to the future, Teehan said cognitive science could provide guidelines or constraints for testing some of the more speculative propositions that scholars of religion put forward. “We have the theories, but can we see see what’s going on in the brain and does that seem to support what the theories predict? That would be significant if we have the cognitive psychology, evolutionary theory and neuroscience saying that the theories are coherent. With the explosive development in this field, we’re on the cusp of lots of new information. That’s very exciting.”

(Photo: Student volunteer wearing cap recording electroencephalograpic data, 5 Aug 2009/Tom Heneghan)

This scientific approach has established itself sufficiently in the religious studies field for the American Academy of Religion, the main scholarly association in the discipline, to add panels on cognitive science and religion at its annual meetings in the past two or three years, Teehan said. At some conferences, religious people present say the new approach gives another insight into God’s creation while the atheists in attendance see it as one last nail in the coffin of faith.

“My sense is that both of those are extreme and unjustified positions,” Teehan said. “This work does not entail atheism but I believe it does have implications for the justification of religious beliefs and claims. If we want to look at religion academically, scientifically, rationally, this is going to change some of the claims that can be made. We’re starting to generate good empirical evidence on how it is people come to have religious belief, the kind of belief they have and how those beliefs function in their moral lives and their decision making.”

Here’s a short video where Teehan talks about his upcoming book drawing links between Biblical teachings and moral psychology:

What do you think? Does a scientific study of religion like this undermine faith by showing “it’s all in the brain”? Or could it bring more insight into God’s creation? Or neither?

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Neurotheology - the study of the link between belief and the brain - is a topic I’ve hesitated to write about for several years. There are all kinds of theories out there about how progress in neuroscience is changing our understanding of religion, spirituality and mystical experience. Some say the research proves religion is a natural product of the way the brain works, others that God made the brain that way to help us believe. I knew so little about the science behind these ideas that I felt I had to learn more about the brain first before I could comment.

If that was an excuse for procrastination, I don’t have it anymore. For all this week and half the next, I’m attending a “Neuroscience Boot Camp” at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. This innovative program, run by Penn’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Director Martha Farah (photo below), aims to explain the latest research in neuroscience to 34 non-experts from fields such as law, business, philosophy and religious studies (as well as to a few journalists). The focus is not only on religion, but faith and issues related to it are certainly part of the discussion.

After only two of 8-1/2 days of lectures, one takeaway message is already clear. You can forget about the “God spot” that headline writers love to highlight (as in “‘God spot’ is found in Brain” or “Scientists Locate ‘God Spot’ in Human Brain”). There is no one place in the brain responsible for religion, just as there is no single location in the brain for love or language or identity. Most popular articles these days actually say that, but the headline writers continue to speak of a single spot.

“There isn’t a separate religious area of the brain, from what we can tell from the data,” said Dr. Andrew Newberg, an associate professor of radiology and psychiatry at the Penn university hospital and author of several books on neuroscience and religion. “It’s not like there’s a little spiritual spot that lights up every time somebody thinks of God. When you look at religious and spiritual experiences, they are incredibly rich and diverse. Sometimes people find them on the emotional level, sometimes on an ideological level, sometimes they perceive a oneness, sometimes they perceive a person. It depends a lot on what the actual experience is.”

In their research, Newberg and his colleagues have scanned the brains of Buddhist monks and contemplative Catholic nuns to see if their long experience of meditation and prayer had left its mark on their brains. One thing they noticed was that their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain linked to concentration and decision making, seemed to be more active than usual even in a resting state, and more active still while meditating. Some studies showed it was even larger in long-term meditators than other people. “It’s almost like a muscle,” he said. “If you exercise it every day through meditation, you enhance and increase its function.”

Rather than being located in separate areas, religious and spiritual phenomena “tend to be built upon the existing framework of how the brain works”, said Newberg (photo left). “So if we have an experience of the love of God, there is an underlying biology of that experience that is probably the same as how you feel love for your wife, for example. On the other hand, what we also tend to find is that there seems to be a larger network of structures that do tend to get involved. The data seem to suggest that (faith) probably activates these structures to a slightly stronger degree.

“If you’re doing math, your frontal lobe turns on. If you’re doing meditation, your frontal lobe turns on. But if you’re solving math, the frontal lobe turns on and that’s about it, you solve the math problem and then you’re done. With meditation, the frontal lobes turn on, but based on our research, then there’s activation in the temporal lobes, the parietal lobes are changing, and then it starts to activate the limbic system, the emotional drivers of your brain. So a lot more is happening.

“There are some people who says this is evolutionarily adaptive,” Newberg observed. “I try to get away from that because, unfortunately, there’s no real way to prove that. You don’t know what happened 100,000 years ago, whether religion became a part of us as human beings because of the mystical experiences people had, because people were afraid of dying and wanted to know what happened afterwards, or because it created a system of morals and ethics for people and helped enhance socialisation. It does all of those things, sure, but we don’t really know if it was all of those things or one or two of them. To some degree, I get worried about how much we can take that argument.

“My favorite discussion is what does this really mean. Does it mean we’ve found how God interacts with our brain or have we found that God is nothing more than a manifestation of our brain? I don’t have an answer for you yet …”

It isn’t all just lectures at the Boot Camp. We’ve also visited the university hospital’s fMRI scanner, where patients are slid into a narrow tunnel surrounded by a huge and powerful magnet. That’s me in the picture above entering the hospital’s mock scanner used to accustom patients to the claustrophobic feel of the machine before they actually enter the real one to have their brains scanned.

I’ll have more from the boot camp in coming days about religion, ethics and other issues. Anyone interested in getting a closer look at the conference can follow the Bloggin’ from Boot Camp entries by Francis X. Shen on the Law and Neuroscience Blog. Shen, a lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Government, is writing daily wraps on the day’s discussions for the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project.

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“We believe that there isn’t a moral gap between humans and other animals, and that saying things like ‘the behavior patterns that wolves or chimpanzees display are merely building blocks for human morality’ doesn’t really get us anywhere. At some point, differences in degree aren’t meaningful differences at all and each species is capable of ‘the real thing.’ Good biology leads to this conclusion. Morality is an evolved trait and ‘they’ (other animals) have it just like we have it.”

That’s a pretty bold statement. If a book declares that in its introduction, it better have to have some strong arguments to back it up. A convincing argument could influence how we view our own morality and its origins, how we understand animal cognition and even how we relate to animals themselves.

Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, a new book by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, presents a persuasive case for some animals being much more intelligent than generally believed. The authors show how these animals have emotions, exhibit empathy, mourn for their dead and seem to have a sense of justice. They draw interesting parallels to similar human behaviour that many people think stems from our moral codes and/or religious beliefs rather than some evolutionary process. All this is fascinating and their argument for open-mindedness about recognising animals’ real capabilities is strong.

The stories they base their thesis on are intriguing. They talk about an elephant with a leg injury whose fellow elephants in her herd slowed down for her and even fed her. They tell how dogs can agree for a session of rough play that’s not supposed to hurt and those that overstep the bounds, by for example by biting too hard, get frozen out of the group. Caged rats taught to push a level for food won’t do it when that prompts the scientists to give a rat in the next cage an electric shock. Vampire bats share the blood they collect with bats that can’t go out to hunt for their daily dose. Some sort of behavioural code is clearly working here, just as a behavioural code is at work when humans do similar things.

But the authors overreach when they say this shows that animals have morality. The problem is with their limited definition:

“We define morality as a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviours that cultivate and regulate complex interactions within social groups. These behaviours relate to well-being and harm, and norms of right and wrong attach to many of them. Morality is an essentially social phenomenon, arising in the interactions between and among individual animals, and it exists as a tangle of threads that holds together a complicated and shifting tapestry of social relationships. Morality in this way acts as social glue.”

Baby elephants in Nairobi, 10 Nov 2008/Radu Sigheti

That’s good as far as it goes. But morality isn’t only a “suite” (“a number of things forming a series or set”) of behaviours. It’s also a wider system of beliefs about what is right and wrong, not just for the person involved but for others and for society as a whole. It’s a system for evaluating actions, their causes and consequences even if we are not immediately confronted with the need to make a choice. Calling morality something “arising in the interactions between and among individual animals” is a bit too reductionist, like saying art boils down to something that comes from brush strokes on canvas. Yes, but there’s something more to it, too, that raises the requirements for any definition.

In arguing against the traditional view that humans and animals are separated by a wide gap, Wild Justice makes the gap too narrow. Human morality includes complex rational abstraction, ongoing debate and changing opinions mediated through language. Some animals have a certain level of intelligence, but not that much. The authors minimise this by deflating the human side of the gap, saying that “Western philosophical accounts of morality are outdated in important respects, for example in ascribing too much volition and intentionality to moral behaviour.” Sure, neuroscience is showing that the “too much” part of that statement is true. But this argument ascribes too little importance to volition and intentionality. Human intelligence allows us to express moral codes in words, debate their merits and change them if we find them insufficient. Without these abilities, we would probably still have “pro-social” reactions described in Wild Justice but not the wider systems known as morality or ethics.

Mother and baby gorillas at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, 28 August 2008/Daniel Munoz

If animals have morality “just like we have it,” could there be any parallel in the animal world to the changing standards and resulting debate over major moral issues such as we see now regarding legalising same-sex marriage and reducing abortion? That may sound facetious, but it highlights a key area of morality that Wild Justice excludes. Opinions and laws concerning homosexuality and abortion have changed enormously in recent decades, leading to heated and sometimes violent clashes between supporters and opponents of such changes. Supporters have successfully used legal and political arguments to champion an evolution of public moral standards. Religious arguments are often used to counter them. It’s hard to imagine any of this would have happened if humans only dealt with moral challenges confronting them directly and couldn’t analyse and debate them abstractly.

This change in public moral standards is a product of the particularly human intelligence that Wild Justice plays down. The authors rightly highlight the way some animals exhibit some aspects of what we call moral behaviour. Research into animal cognition will surely uncover more parallels and challenge our views of morality. But it shouldn’t narrow the definition of morality to make its results look more persuasive than they are.

Back in January we reported on a new book which argued that a hatred of slavery did much to form Charles Darwin’s views on natural selection as he sought to prove that blacks and whites had a common ancestor and were not separate species or products of “separate creations” as many of the 19th century defenders of white supremacy maintained.

I did a blog at the time to draw attention to my colleague Mike Collett-White’s story on “Darwin’s Sacred Cause” by Adrian Desmond and James Moore and said that it had piqued my curiosity enough that I might be tempted to read it. I have done just that and think it raises a couple of issues that will be of interest to readers of this blog.

(Photo: A portrait of Charles Darwin is displayed as part of an exhibition in Darwin’s former home Down House, Kent, England, 12/02/2009, REUTERS/Stringer, UK)

For starters, much of the credit for the anti-slavery movement has been taken by evangelicals and other Christians such as the Quakers, who were indeed often the driving force behind it.  There was much excitement in U.S. evangelical circles two years ago about the release of the movie “Amazing Grace” about British anti-slavery pioneer William Wilberforce who was an ardent evangelical. Much ink has been spilled on this topic, notably in 2005 by Adam Hochschild in his superb book “Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery.”

But no one would mistake the father of modern biological science for an evangelical. Most of his biographers agree (based on overwhelming evidence) that Darwin gradually lost his own faith. Another leading abolitionist in Darwin’s day was his cigar-smoking dining companion Harriet Martineau, who was also a self-proclaimed atheist. Darwin’s own family — which had its share of religious sceptics, notably his father, as well as devout believers– was also heavily involved in the anti-slavery movement.

So it seems that the secular humanist crowd also has an old and some would say noble tradition of anti-slavery agitation  which it can draw on — and it was an issue that united it with evangelicals. Similar bridges are being built today between secular and evangelical leaders on issues like climate change, torture and even the modern slave trade.

It is also worth noting of course that Darwin and his intellectual offspring are often a favored target of conservative evangelicals, especially in the United States. This goes beyond the trouble that many biblical creationists have with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which is more popularly known as evolution. Some conservative Christians say that Darwin’s theories helped to inspire the eugenics movement whose advocates included Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. They therefore tie Darwin to the abortion rights movement, which Harry R. Jackson Jr, a leading African American conservative evangelical, has dubbed a “black genocide” (because of the large number of black women who seek abortions).

But Darwin himself — as Desmond and Moore elegantly demonstrate in their thought-provoking book — was passionately opposed to cruelty inflicted on racial grounds and so sought to find humanity’s “common descent.” There is almost universal scientific agreement now that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa (which Darwin suspected to be the case). This is a notion that has tellingly troubled some modern white supremacists, some of whom still cling to the fantasy that blacks and whites have different roots (I had a Polish doctor in South Africa once tell me this matter-of-factly, he just could not buy the out of Africa, common descent image).

(Photo: A replica of the remains of a more than 3-million-year-old female hominid known as “Lucy” at the National Museum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia , 07/08/2007 REUTERS/STR New)

And there are evangelical traditions in the United States which don’t have the proudest histories on the issue of race relations. America’s largest evangelical group, the Southern Baptist Convention, gets its name because it broke ranks with its Yankee brethren because of its support for slavery. And many Southern Baptists were not exactly big supporters of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. (To the SBC’s credit it is working hard to make amends on issues of race and racial reconciliation and last year elected a Native American as its president. But some of the SBC’s critics might say it shouldn’t throw too many racial stones Darwin’s way).

This is all grist for the very big mill that is the legacy of Darwin — who is getting a lot of attention this year because it marks his 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of  ”On the Origin of Species.” But Darwin saved his big surprise on humanity and evolution for the “Descent of Man” in 1871. That, it seems, has sealed him a place in the history of the struggle against racial injustice.

Among the new crop of books with themes that would resonate with readers of this blog, one that caught my eye is Jerry A. Coyne’s recently published “Why Evolution is True”. I rushed out, bought it and read it.

The title says it all and is clearly aimed at an American audience. America’s reluctance to embrace evolution — which is the foundation of modern biology and stems from Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection — sets it apart from almost all other countries in the developed world. Polls generally show that only around 40 percent of Americans believe evolution is true while in most European countries the figure is closer to 80 percent.

A Harris poll in 2007 for example found that only 42 percent of Americans accepted evolution while 62 percent believed in the devil.

Most commentators attribute this to America’s high rates of religiosity. Evangelical Protestants in particular are suspicious of evolution with many accepting the biblical story of creation as they see it as the literal word of God.

There have been various high profile battles over whether or not to teach “alternatives” to evolution in the classroom. “Intelligent design” theory, which has scientific pretensions, is the latest attempt to bring a creationist alternative to evolution into the classroom. In a nutshell, it maintains that the complexity of life can only be explained by an “intelligent designer.”

(Photo: A primate’s skull is displayed in Charles Darwin’s former home Down House, in Kent, southern England February 12, 2009. REUTERS/Tal Cohen (BRITAIN)

Coyne, a professor at the University of Chicago in the department of Ecology and Evolution, is having none of this and he confronts the intelligent design crowd loaded for bear.

Evolution is more than a theory, Coyne points out. It is a fact and is supported — contrary to the claims of proponents of intelligent design — by a wealth of overwhelming evidence. It also makes verifiable predictions. This is why virtually every serious scientist accepts it. (And there are no serious alternative theories to it in scientific circles, another claim made by some of evolution’s opponents. Coyne notes that this does not mean that data or evidence might some day emerge which show Darwinism to be wrong. The point to be made is that none has to date).

Coyne provides many examples to make his case. The fossil record is of course incomplete. But fossils that are found turn up where we would expect to find them (no Precambrian rabbits have been found ). A progression can clearly be seen in the fossil record from simpler to more complex forms of life. The first mammals appear 250 million years ago, arising from reptilian ancestors. This is followed by the first birds and so on. As Coyne notes: “No theory of special creation, or any theory other than evolution, can explain these patterns.”

Much of the discomfort with evolution stems from the fact that many people simply don’t like the idea that humans are related to apes. But the evidence that we are is overwhelming and wishful thinking cannot make it go away. Coyne points out that Darwin himself had conjectured that our species had arisen in Africa because our closest relatives the chimpanzee and the gorilla are found there. Subsequent fossil finds in Africa have indeed shown this to be the case, while DNA testing shows just how close our kinship is to these great apes.

In short, a prediction which was verified.

Critics of evolution also say that there is no “proof” as we have not seen species evolve before our eyes. But what about bacterial strains that evolve — repeat, evolve — to resist drugs? New strains of the tuberculosis bacteria have evolved resistance to all drugs that have been used against them. As Coyne notes, “this is natural selection, pure and simple.”

Biogeography provides some of the strongest evidence for evolution and Coyne notes that it is territory intelligent designers do not even venture into. It is one of the things that got Darwin thinking about evolution in the first place as he noticed that birds on neighboring islands were related but not precisely the same species — a scenario that fits neatly with the idea that they had evolved their different traits in isolation from one another.

Most oceanic islands for example show a similar pattern that evolution eloquently explains but does not make much sense if one is an intelligent designer: they often have an abundance of endemic birds, insects and plants but lack mammals, amphibians and perhaps most tellingly of all freshwater fish. The reasons are clear: such islands arose bereft of life from the sea floor and the animals and plants that made it to them would be mobile (birds and insects fly and the former often have plant seeds in their droppings). Evidence for evolution on them can be seen in the fact that many of the bird species which inhabit them are flightless (flying takes up energy and is not needed if there are no local predators). Freshwater fish don’t show up because they can’t swim in the ocean to get there.

This is just the tip of Coyne’s iceberg and his book has many more examples. (Why can some people still wiggle their ears? Because it seems to be a remnant from when our ancestors needed to move their ears around to help them localize sounds). It is one of many books that will appear this year to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” as well as his 200th birthday. It will certainly raise a few eyebrows in certain circles — and I wonder now if our ability to do so doesn’t have some unknown roots?

The State Board of Education in Texas voted on Friday to remove a long-time science curriculum rule that required “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories be covered in the classroom.

It also struck down two proposed sections that would have required students in high school biology classes to study the “sufficiency or insufficiency” of common ancestry and natural selection of species.

But it settled on a compromise that will require teachers to discuss “all sides” of scientific theories with their students. This may allow both sides to claim a victory of sorts.

Evolution proponents were especially alarmed by the “strengths and weaknesses” clause because it implied a “weakness” where few scientists say one exists. But some biblical critics of evolution will no doubt be happy by the “all sides” provision. 

The old ”strengths and weaknesses” wording was regarded by many as an attempt by social and religious conservatives to raise questions about Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which is popularly known as his theory of evolution.

Some of the supporters of the “strengths and weaknesses rule” said  they just wanted open discussion and accused the evolutionists of trying to stifle debate.

Critics contended that maintaining the rule would have given Biblical creationists or proponents of “intelligent design” theory an open door to get their anti-evolution agenda into the classroom.

Some fear the new “all sides” rule will still allow this to happen.

“The word ‘weaknesses’ no longer appears in the science standards. But the document still has plenty of potential footholds for creationist attacks on evolution to make their way into Texas classrooms,” said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, an advocacy group that has long been at odds with religious conservatives on a range of issues.

The Dallas Morning News urged the board to vote out the “strength and weaknesses” rule in an editorial on Thursday under the headline “No Doubt About Science.”

“Even many people of faith accept the theory of evolution,” it noted.

For the most part, the two sides are light years apart. Many creationists believe the planet is a few thousand years old. The scientific consensus is closer to 4.5 billion years.

Intelligent design theory holds that the complexity of life would not have been possible without a designer. (And that designer would be God).

The vast majority of scientists accept evolution at least in its broad outlines, and the theory of natural selection (once again, to use the term favored by Darwin himself) is the foundation of modern biology.

Scientists point to an abundance of evidence to support the notion that species evolve. These include the species divergence found between islands, even those close apart (this was the clue that got Darwin thinking); the fossil record (no mammals in those Precambrian rocks); DNA testing (the great apes are indeed our closest living relatives).

But what do you think? Is it not right to let students look at all sides of scientific issues, provided that they stick to science? Or does this open the door to a religious agenda that may not be ground in science?

(Photo: The skeleton of an Ophtalmosaurus sea reptile on display at the Christie’s auction house in Paris February 12, 2009.  REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes (FRANCE)

Just in time for Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday next week, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has posted an extensive research package examining the debate about evolution, Darwinism and religion in the United States. “The Debate over Evolution” is a treasure trove of information about the debate and especially useful for the lists breaking down views of the main religious groups and the political fight over Darwinism state by state.

(Photo: British Darwin commemorative stamp, 29 Dec 2008/Royal Mail)

Here are the main entries:

• Overview: Fighting Over Evolution
• Darwin and His Theory of Evolution
• The Social and Legal Dimensions of the Evolution Debate in the U.S.
• Religious Groups’ Views on Evolution
• Fighting Over Darwin, State by State
• Evolution: A Timeline
• Graphic: Religious Differences on the Question of Evolution

Speaking of Darwin, we’ve done several posts about the Turkish anti-Darwin campaigner Harun Yahya and his Islamic creationst campaign against evolution. Most of the attention on this has been on his mega-book Atlas of Creation, how it’s being distributed in Europe and what the reaction to it has been.

His office has just sent me the photo at right of an anti-evolution stand they’ve set up in the mall at the Burj Dubai skyscraper in Dubai. 
We’re bound to hear a lot more about Darwin, evolution and faith this year, as it’s also the 150th anniversary of the publication of On The Origin Of Species. This debate has been going on for decades and the pros and cons have been gone through a thousand times. Is there anything new to say about this?