Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
with different overall body sizes, which is known as allometric scaling. Ship-
man 2002, 505.
26. Although this quip has frequently been attributed to Henry Kissinger,
it is actually an expression of “Sayre's law,” which was formulated in 1973 by the
political scientist Wallace Sayre. Sayre, in turn, may have been paraphrasing
an even earlier remark made by Woodrow Wilson.
27. Dart with Craig 1959, 237.
28. Maser and Gallup 1990.
29. Broom, Sena, and Moynihan 2009.
30. See also Falk 2004a, 2009a.
31. Maser and Gallup 1990, 523.
32. Maser and Gallup 1990, 525-26.
33. Russo 2009.
34. Larson and Witham 1998.
35. Russo 2009.
36. Larson 2006.
37. The Web site for the National Center for Science Education (NCSE)
(http://ncse.com/creationism)
is a rich source of the latest information about
the ongoing debate. Passionate disagreement about how best to educate our chil-
dren in evolutionary science has always been at the heart of this controversy, at
least in the United States. As detailed by Eugenie Scott, of the NCSE, efforts
to ban the teaching of evolution have gone through various stages since the
Scopes trial, including the rise of so-called creation science, which mutated
more recently into the intelligent design (ID) movement. The concept of ID is
based on the unsubstantiated assertion that certain phenomena (such as eyes)
are too complex to have arisen by Darwinian natural selection and, so, must
have been deliberately designed by a designer—namely God. According to the
NCSE Web site, advocates initially encouraged giving equal time to ID in pub-
lic school science classes but shifted in the first decade of this century to attack-
ing the theory of evolution itself and urging school teachers to teach students
that scientific evidence against it exists (which is not true) and that controversy
exists among scientists about whether evolution even occurred (which, at best,
is highly misleading). Although “creationism has lost every major U.S. federal
court case for the past 40 years,” findings from a recent analysis suggest that
religious fundamentalism continues to have an impact in the classroom (Berk-
man and Plutzer 2011, 404).
38. After submitting a draft of this topic to my publisher, I learned from one
of its reviewers of an interesting article, “Receiving an Ancestor in the Phylo-
