A couple of times now, I’ve been called on to duke it out with creationists trying to “balance” a school curriculum.  Actually, to be fair, once I was called on, once I volunteered — loudly.  Several other times I’ve made my pitch from the audience.

In all cases, I’ve successfully sent the anti-science crowd packing.  This isn’t because I’m brilliant, or because I have enough sheepskin to cover a couch.  It’s not because I’m a great orator.  It’s because I keep my head and realize: this is not a debate.

Over at kos, DarkSyde has done some nice evolution primers, but this isn’t about explaining science.  This is about sending them back humming the theme song to Inherit the Wind.  All you have to do is keep a few things in mind.

  1. It’s not a debate because you’re not trying to convince anyone.  This is true for several reasons.  First, the folks arguing on the other side often don’t believe a word of what they’re saying — they’re just there because it’s another way to smack down “liberals.”  Secretly, most of these people already know you’re right.  The ones that don’t, the true believers, are your allies.
  2. Don’t worry about convincing the school board.  They know you’re right too, but every school board member is also sure that they’re just a hop, skip, and a jump away from being congressman (or senator, or president).  They’re politicians writ small, and they’re there to play politics.  They don’t care a fig about who’s right.

So if you’re not there to convince your opponents, or the school board, or even the handful of other community members who have nothing better to do than attend school board meetings on a work night, why are you there?  Don’t convince them, embarrass them.  You have to demonstrate that there’s nothing to what your opponents are saying but hot air and religious platitude.  Keep smiling, make jokes, and be relentless in your pursuit.  Once you’ve adequately demonstrated that the emperor is buck naked, or you’ve backed them into using the “G” word, your job is done.  The school board can relax and go back to wondering how they can skim money from the soda machine contract.

All right, the job is to make these crusaders swallow their own arguments.  So how do you do that?  It’s really not that hard because of one big factor: they don’t know anything about evolution.  Even better than that, they think they know something about evolution.  This gives you a tremendous advantage.  You know what their arguments are going to be, they don’t know diddly about what you’re going to say.  This is true even when your opponent’s spokesperson has a PhD or MD after their name.  Believe me, if it didn’t come from one of “Black Box” Behe’s books, or out of a fine quality “Chick” publication, they haven’t read it.

So what are they going to say?

The No Evidence Argument
Bet your bottom dollar that your opponent will say there’s no evidence for evolution.  They get this from both sides, and the bozos who make their living writing an endless stream of Intelligent Design books lie to them about this every single time.  They’ve been told there’s no evidence so firmly, that they’ll just start shaking their head when you give a counterargument.  Again, remember you’re not out to convince your opponent, only to make them look bad so they can’t foist this hoax on the school.  You can come at this argument from two directions: the fossil record or the panda’s thumb argument.  I prefer the fossil record because it’s easier to hit in short sentences, and it’s guaranteed to draw the parry “even Darwin said the fossil record is incomplete.”  Behe makes a big deal of that in his bestselling book, and you should all thank him, because this shows the “intelligent design” position as foolish right off the bat.  You couldn’t ask for a better set up line than that, because Darwin delivered his statement in the middle of the nineteenth century.  Just ask them how well physics was understood in 1850.  Would they take a statement made in 1850 as the last word on electricity, rockets to the moon, or computers?  Darwin was smart, but he never claimed to be able to see the future.  Since Darwin’s day, we’ve expanded our knowledge of prehistoric life just as much as we have any other field of science.  And what we’ve found is millions of examples of evolution. The fossil record is a wonderful, rich, incredible record of life on Earth and our understanding grows with each year (at this point, I usually launch a digression about the ancestry of whales, or discuss dinosaur digs I’ve worked on).  There is no creature on earth, least of all man, that is lacking lineage in the fossil record.  If you’re big on humanoid evolution, feel free to dazzle them with facts about the widespread nature of ancient man, and the sheer volume of fossils that have been found.  Frequently, your opponents will believe that there are only one or two specimens of each species (because that’s what they’ve been told), and these can be explained away by disease or as “freaks.”  I’ve literally had one of these guys argue that the “only” specimen of Neanderthal was “just an old man with arthritis.”  Ah, we should always be so lucky.  Catching them in these statements, by showing the real nature of the evidence, can be fun.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics Argument
I think this one has fallen out of favor.  Creationists used to like it because years back it came so far out of left field that it would leave scientists stuttering.  But it’s easily demolished, and I think they’ve retired this one from the official creationist play book.  A thirty second statement along the lines of “the second law only applies to systems where no energy was coming in, and last time I looked there was something up there called the sun” has handled this on the few occasions where it’s popped up.

The Common Sense Argument
This is the one you’ll get the most, now that creationists are all wearing Intelligent Design clothing.  The whole house of cards created by Behe and the ID crew is based along something very like this: I know the difference between something created and something that’s ‘natural.’  The typical example is a stone and a pocket watch lying in a field.  You can see that the stone is natural, and you can see that the watch is ‘designed.’  How can you tell there?  Well, it’s just common sense!  In other words, skip all that science stuff and substitute your own opinion directly.  It’s so much easier that way.  And when you look at how complex livings things can be, common sense says they have to also be designed, QED, QEF, WWWWW, ipso facto, etc.  The best thing about this argument is that the guys advancing it think they’ve got you.  Arrgh!  I never expected the “a single flagellum on a bacterium is too complex to arise by chance, much less a whole organism” argument.  Let me just stagger out of the room and… oh, wait.  One little thing — your inability to understand how something happens does not mean it can’t happen.  You may not know how a jet engine works, but that doesn’t cause planes to fall.  In physics, there are many items – maybe even the majority – that defy common sense.  Why is light an absolute speed limit?  How do quarks jump from one spot to another without moving through the values in between?  It’s common sense to think that time is the same everywhere.  It’s also wrong.  Once, it was common sense to think the world was flat – everyone just knew it was true.  They were wrong, and so are people who think complexity can’t come from simple sources.  Given an input of energy and enormous periods of time, simply anything can happen.  To repeat: “common sense” is not science – science often defies the obvious solution.  Likewise, an inability to understand a complex process is not evidence against that process.  Plenty of people don’t understand the tax code, but the IRS persists.

Scientists are all conformists who don’t like change. .
This can be couched in nice terms that make it seem as if they’re challenging the control of the scientific press, or the tenure system at universities.  They may even pull out ideas that had a hard time breaking in as the “standard view” (oddly enough, Copernicus seems to be the go-to guy).  No matter how it’s phrased, implicit in this the idea that scientists are all godless automatons, motivated by nothing but conformity to their robot masters.  The response to this one is simple.  Ask them to name a scientist.  Odds are hugely in favor of them naming Einstein.  I’ve also had Jonas Salk and one Edison (er, okay).  Then ask them if these scientists are remembered because they went along with the way things were, or because they had new ideas.  Every scientist wants to be remembered.  Every professor at every school, every researcher in every lab, every field tech brushing sand away from a bone, is hoping to make their mark.  They know they won’t do it by writing a paper that says “yup, the world looks just like we thought.”  They’re dying to be rebels. And the colleges are dying to hire these mavericks.  The journals are dying to print their papers.  Science thrives on controversy.  If there was one piece of evidence for Intelligent Design, there would be professors clamoring to write about it, magazines lined up to publish it, and new chairs being endowed in geology departments across the country.  But there isn’t, and there aren’t.  Right now, when it comes to evolution, scientists in the field do all think the same – because all the evidence is on the side of evolution.

The Micro vs. Macro argument
Kind of the “death by a thousand paper cuts” of counter-evolutionary argument.  Your opponent professes to believe in “micro” evolution – changes in colors of moths, that sort of thing.  Generally, they’ll say there’s no evidence of evolution within a species, but no evidence of change from one species to another.  Of course, your opponent will not have the slightest clue what species really means, but then, neither does 99% of the population (including a good number of biologists), and your luck in explaining it is likely to be no better than mine (unless you have some killer metaphor, in which case, please share).  Instead, you’re better off pointing out that all evolution is micro over the short term, macro over the long term.  Lead them down the path of small changes, and you can likely find your opponent admitting to changes that clearly cross the species (and genus, and family) boundaries.  So far, I’ve yet to meet a real “God created all the species in a fixed state and none of them have ever changed” person.  They probably exist, but they don’t bother trying to argue their points in front of school board.  Maybe they’re all too busy hosting shows on Fox.  Believe it not, this argument can veer into the “if people came from monkeys, why are their still monkeys?” territory.  You will want to scream when it does.  Bite back the scream, explain how evolution works on individuals and small populations, and move on.  You don’t have to say your opponent is an idiot.  If they go down this path, they’ve done it for you.

The Just a Theory / Closed Mind Argument
This one generally appears toward the end, when the “facts” have failed to hold up the creationists mythical positions.  It can be said a number of ways, but it always boils down to “evolution is just a theory; we owe it to the kids to teach them all the alternatives.”  Good luck trying to argue that “theory” in science doesn’t mean what they think it means.  The word is in too common coinage for anyone to believe they don’t understand the meaning.  Instead, point out that everything in science is a theory.  The idea that the sun is powered by fusion is a theory.  Quantum mechanics is a theory.  In science, we teach the current working theory, the one that’s supported by evidence and trial.  We don’t offer unsupported theories any more than we offer alternate theories of history.  Someone may believe that Benedict Arnold was a hero and George Washington a traitor (indeed, a great many Brits may do so), but we teach what best fits the information at hand.  There’s no obligation to indulge in theories that don’t fit the facts.   The emphasis in this argument used to be the “just a theory” section.  Now it’s more “we should keep an open mind for the sake of the children” drivel.  At the last meeting, I actually had an English teacher swayed by this, who began to argue that we shouldn’t exclude views from the classroom because it wasn’t “Democratic.”  I answered that facts were not democratic, they were just facts.  I then asked her if she taught that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Francis Bacon.  I’m not sure she got the point, but she got mad and started screaming, which was almost as good.  When your opponents are frothing, you’ve won.

The Obligation to Faith Argument
This one has come up several times, so someone must have put it down on paper.  It runs along the lines of “we have a responsibility to present information that’s sensitive to the faith of the majority of Americans.”  This from the same people who usually complain about any attempt to be “politically correct.”  I go personal on this one, explaining that I am a Christian, but that I find no conflict with my faith.  I also suggest that facts don’t change just because the majority finds them inconvenient – although the Right seems to have a slippery hold on reality these days, so that last may not work.

All right, go stick ’em in the eye.  And if things start to get sticky, and they’re really huffing and puffing, give them a blast of the old reductio absurdum.  After all, if living things require a creator, isn’t It more complex still?  So, who created the creator?

Good hunting.