The biology teacher at my public high school in South Bend, Ind., was a whip-smart Mennonite with a dry wit and zero tolerance for underachievers. For a long time I wondered if he was also, in his earnest and understated way, a lawbreaker.
I wondered because my teacher, Nevin Longenecker, taught us about creationist ideas of life’s origins, in addition to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
It’s the sort of issue that has roiled science teachers in Kansas and caused parents to file a federal lawsuit against the school board in Dover, Pa., where teachers were ordered to talk about intelligent design, a newfangled term for creationism. A judge has promised a verdict in the case by year’s end.
Despite the similarities, I’m betting no one would ever sue Nevin.
His genius was to plot a middle road in a debate where compromise often seems hopeless. The extra time he devoted to evolution made it clear he thought Darwin was basically right. He just wanted us to understand why some people would think the idea of a designer has merit beyond religion.
Unlike the board members in Dover, he never spoke of creationism as an especially likely theory, or one that solved fatal weaknesses in evolutionary thought. When he described the idea that God creates each species individually–poof!–it was with the slightest roll of the eyes.
“I’m certainly not against Christian beliefs, but I don’t believe the Bible is a science book as such,” Nevin told me recently, in our first talk in 17 years. “It’s a great book; it’s very useful. More people should read it–but it’s not a science book.”
Supporters of evolutionary theory sometimes act as if no serious biology teacher would ever breathe a word about intelligent design or creationism–and that doing so could permanently scar students.
Having survived Nevin’s classes, I tend to think the reverse is true. In the context of his normally rich explanations, the anti-Darwinian point of view seemed simply unscientific. If more students could see the evidence presented that way, the dismal percentage of people who believe in evolution would skyrocket.
I expected the big-time boosters of Darwin at the California-based National Center for Science Education to curl their noses at Nevin’s conciliatory approach. To my surprise, they said they have long embraced the idea.
“Religious advocacy is what’s forbidden, but acknowledging that there are religious controversies and objections around evolution is another thing,” said Glenn Branch, the center’s deputy director. “It would be perfectly acceptable for there to be a discussion of the fact that there are religious objections to evolution.”
Federal court decisions have found that states cannot require teachers to talk about creation science, in part because the purpose of such laws has been to advance religion. Individual teachers have latitude to broach creationism, so long as they stay within their district’s curriculum.
Yet that also invites teachers to walk an extremely fine line, Branch said. Although instructors can discuss challenges to evolution, most biologists say it would be wrong simply to “teach the controversy” as if the competing theories had equal standing.
A thriving field
The theory of evolution by natural selection is a thriving field of thought that is crucial to all of biology, including studies of genetics and how viruses and bacteria adapt to their hosts. Intelligent design, an idea entertained by a small minority of scholars, has found no practical applications.
“Evolution in the sense of the common ancestry of all living things is not seriously debated in the scientific community,” Branch said. “A biology teacher is doing students a disservice if he suggests otherwise.”
To be honest I’m not sure if Nevin ever crossed that strict line. He may have come close. But his classes were among the best at Adams High School, which churned out waves of aspiring research biologists under his watch.
Nevin started teaching biology at Adams in 1968; I remember leafing through old yearbooks in the publications office and spotting his no-nonsense, slicked back haircut among the funkier styles of that era. A straight-laced man from a conservative community near Dayton, Ohio, he was not a natural apostle for Darwinism.
“Before I went to college, I guess I got pretty much the literal interpretation of the Bible,” said Nevin, who received his master’s degree in biology from Purdue University.
“Obviously my thinking adjusted considerably when I got in college and we discussed explanations for life besides God creating us out of mud,” he said.
In Nevin’s class, when we came to the subject of evolution, his first step was to lay out the irrefutable fossil evidence showing that life on Earth has changed dramatically over hundreds of millions of years. It’s a fact accepted by all but the most retrograde “Young Earth” creationists, who believe the world has been around no more than 10,000 years or so.
The next question was how scientists could explain the changes life has undergone. How would you even begin to address such a fundamental mystery?
Nevin proposed three options. The first was Lamarckism, an early 19th Century theory, since refuted, that said organisms change during their lifetimes–like a weight lifter putting on muscle–and then pass on those acquired traits to the next generation. He then briefly outlined the idea of special creation, which teaches that God intervenes in the natural world to create or destroy each species separately. (We never discussed the related idea of “intelligent design” because it did not yet exist.)
Last of all, Nevin explained, at length, evolution by natural selection. As proposed by Darwin in 1859 and developed since then, natural selection holds that all species contain natural variation, and that changes that aid survival or reproduction tend to spread through the population in succeeding generations.
Over many generations this leads to specialized adaptations and the grand diversity of species we see everywhere.
The exam on this subject revealed Nevin’s priorities. We were to describe how each of the three theories might explain how horses developed into their current form.
The answer for natural selection had to be detailed and use all of the theory’s key tenets. But as I recall, some guy got full credit on the creationism section for the answer, “God said, `Let there be a horse!’ And Lo! There was a horse!”
Nevin didn’t raise the subject of creationism just to mock it. He wanted us to understand that each of the ideas about life’s origins gained acceptance for a reason. For all its weaknesses, creationism offers a clear account of how life first began–something natural selection does not explain.
Natural selection’s limitations
Although creationism gives no testable claims about how plants and animals change into different forms, natural selection has its own limitations. There’s abundant evidence from genetics, fossils and embryology that species have evolved over time–the emergence of whales from land mammals is one example. But whether the engine of natural selection caused such changes is harder to establish.
“Nobody alive today was alive whenever life started on Earth, or when these other changes occurred,” Nevin said. “It becomes a hopeless argument.”
This is where Nevin’s approach teeters close to what some scientists dread–the concession that natural selection and creationism are both equally valid theories.
On scientific grounds, any brand of creationism loses out to evolution. That’s why Nevin taught “creation science” basically as history–a second-tier idea, like Lamarckism.
But there’s another reason why Nevin was right to talk about creationism. Most people think there’s a greater plan in this world than what science reveals. We talk about hurricanes, tsunamis and tornadoes as “acts of God,” though we don’t look to preachers for weather forecasts.
Just so, the natural explanation of evolution does not rule out the possibility of a designer behind it all.
Nevin, who still attends a Mennonite church, told me about a class exercise he designed in which students collect thousands of seeds from a single maple tree–an illustration of Darwin’s premise that nature produces more offspring than can possibly survive.
This year, as he was sifting through the plastic baggies his students used, he couldn’t help wondering whether all that overpopulation is really necessary to ensure that some trees survive.
“I’ve never told this to a student,” Nevin said, “but couldn’t it actually be that somebody’s putting this food here for us, rather than just to produce another maple tree?”
Science can’t answer his question. It probably belongs in a religion class–or better yet, a private religious school.
But does that mean students and teachers always have to turn off that part of their minds when they enter a science classroom? Could they if they tried?
Nevin never gave us a final answer about life’s origins. He knew a good mystery when he saw one.
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jmanier@tribune.com
Jeremy Manier is a Tribune staff reporter.
