She’s not a Darwinist

Eugenie Scott is not a fire breathing Darwinist. Heck, she doesn’t even believe in evolution. And those are just a few of the things I learned Monday from Dr. Scott’s two lectures she gave at the University of Central Florida.

Dr. Scott is the executive director of the National Center for Science Education. The folks at the UCF Department of Biology brought her to town as part of their speaker series honoring the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s work on evolution. Her first lecture was targeted at graduate students and focused on how universities can do a better job of teaching about evolution. The second event was a public lecture for a generalized audience and provided a guided tour of the history of “academic freedom” bills that are popping up across the nation, including here in Florida.

The graduate student lecture had at least 70 people in attendance with some latecomers forced to find a spot on the floor to sit. Dr. Scott’s lecture was entitled “Genie’s Top 10 Ways to Teach Evolution Better.” She politely admonished the university system for not emphasizing evolution enough when training future public school teachers. Evolution simply can’t be set off into a separate course while ignoring it in other life science courses. That’s irresponsible, especially since many non-biology majors won’t ever make it to that higher-level evolution course. Evolution should instead be the main theme driven home again and again during even introductory level biology courses. She then took a step away from evolution and made a few points about the nature of science overall. For instance, the general public does not understand how science uses the words law, fact and theory. Also, the public tends to think that science changes from day to day as new things are discovered, but Dr. Scott said science is nonetheless incredibly reliable due to a core body of accepted knowledge.

Are you a Newtonist? No, of course not, Dr. Scott said. Physicists don’t refer to themselves as Newtonists. Neither should evolutionary biologists stand for being called Darwinists. Doing so just plays into the hands of folks actively campaigning against the teaching of evolution. Likewise, Dr. Scott confided to the audience that she doesn’t believe in evolution. Her point was that “believe” is essentially a statement of opinion. Evolution should be understood and accepted (or not accepted), but not believed.

This lecture went beyond her allotted hour, but the audience certainly didn’t seem to mind. Dr. Scott was incredibly knowledgeable and quite friendly. After her lecture and a few minutes of asking questions, she was whisked away to other engagements for the remainder of the afternoon.

The evening lecture was also well attended, with more than 300 people filling up the auditorium. For this presentation, Dr. Scott started off with a basic primer on evolution so that the audience had a knowledge baseline to launch from. Next, she led us through step by step the progression of anti-evolution activities from the Scopes trial to creation science to equal time laws and finally to today’s “teach all the theories/strengths and weaknesses of evolution” mantra. Dr. Scott’s presentation made it quite clear how the anti-evolution movement “evolved” over the years, and how the “academic freedom” bills we saw here in Florida recently are simply the modern incarnation.

Dr. Scott was incredibly accommodating after her lecture, taking pictures with folks and patiently talking with journalism students before finally heading back to her hotel. A handful of college faculty and Florida Citizens for Science members then snagged an hour of her time later that evening and heard all about the challenges in Texas and Louisiana. I can’t say enough about how incredibly nice Dr. Scott is. She was obviously tired from a long, action packed day, but still gave us her time and attention. What a class act!

Our thanks to the UCF Biology Department folks for bringing her here. We definitely made some new friends. It was time well spent. And on a final note, I was told that UCF got a letter from the Discovery Institute complaining about Dr. Scott’s appearance. Too dang funny!