Even the European Parliament it seems has been infected by creationism. In October 2006, a Polish MEP hosted a seminar at the European Parliament entitled “Teaching Evolution Theory in Europe – Is your child being indoctrinated in the classroom?”

Those who attended the seminar were treated to extraordinary claims by a few creationists, such as:
“New discoveries show that men and other mammals did coexist with the dinosaurs” (Dr Hans-Joachim Zillmer, Germany) and
“All the millions of people who were killed by Stalin, Hitler and Mao were inspired by the thoughts of Darwin” (Professor Joseph Mastropaolo, USA).

In response, Swedish MEP Maria Carlhamre, in cooperation with the Swedish Humanist Association, decided to organise a response. Called “Evolution and Religious Fundamentalism in European Schools”, the seminar took place in the Parliament on 17th April 2007. The principal speakers were Professors Richard Dawkins and Steve Jones, Wanda Nowicka from Poland and Roy Brown. (The contribution from Wanda Nowicka will be the subject of a separate article in a later issue.)

In her introduction, Mrs Carlshamre warned that we were at a crossroads in European politics, particularly in education. By not separating politics and religion, we were threatening our basic values of democracy, tolerance and freedom. Christer Sturmark of the Swedish Humanist Association told us that Sweden was one of the most secular countries in the world and that therefore the successful Swedish Humanists had a moral responsibility to help those struggling throughout Europe against the forces of fundamentalism, such as the Poles.

Dawkins on Creationism in Schools

Richard Dawkins led the attack. He pointed out that claims that men coexisted with dinosaurs arose from the biblical notion that the world was only a few thousand years old. The scale of the error was equivalent to believing that the distance between New York and San Francisco was 8 metres. This was not a matter of a trivial difference between scientists! Mastropaolo, he said, was not an individual whose views had any weight or merit but unfortunately Europe was not free from its own creationist eccentrics. At the moment, however, they tended to lack political power. But we should note that in 2004 the Italian Education Minister attempted to have creationism taught in schools on the grounds that Darwin’s theory led to materialism. Dawkins pointed out that even if this dubious claim were true, it would have nothing to do with science.

He then referred to demands by creationists to “teach the controversy” and for children to “learn about both sides”. At first hearing this might sound reasonable, but we should remember that when two opposing points of view were expressed with equal intensity, the truth did not necessarily lie midway between them. The demand to teach the controversy was like demanding that children be taught on the one hand that humans reproduced by sex and on the other by storks. In the case of evolution, there were not two sides. There was the scientific theory of evolution and then there were multiple creation myths. Which of 999 different creation myths should be taught?

Evolution was a scientific theory supported by huge amounts of evidence, such as molecular genetic data, which supplied a detailed digital record of the history of every organism studied. There were many fascinating controversies within evolutionary biology that might deserve to be taught but the fact of evolution itself was scientifically unassailable.

Creationists never offered evidence for their views but focussed instead on supposed deficiencies in evolutionary theory, such as gaps in the fossil record. But even if there were no fossils at all, the evidence for evolution would still be rock-solid. Fossilisation was a rare event, so there were bound to be gaps. Dawkins himself would like the honour of becoming a fossil, but it was not very probable.

There was an asymmetry between the theory of evolution and “creation theory”. The one was supported by masses of evidence, the other by no evidence at all. And yet creationists claimed that any gap in the evolutionary record implied the truth of creationism.

The attempt to infiltrate creationism into schools deprived children of the incredible wonders of scientific truth. Those who perpetrated it were enemies of science education and of children.

Jones on the importance of teaching Evolution Theory in Schools

Professor Steve Jones, President of the Galton Institute, University College, London, argued that debating creationists was always problematical. A creationist might believe that 2+2=5. If one tried to maintain that on the contrary 2+2=4, the response might be to say, “Let’s discuss it” and perhaps try to compromise on 2+2=4.5.

In his own university, one-third of his first-year biology class were creationists.

Darwin’s Origin of Species had given biology a grammar, bringing together many disparate areas of study to form a single subject. The elements of evolution were descent with modification combined with genetics and time. It was so simple that it could be physics!

The most famous Jones in history was William Jones, the great linguist, who first discovered the relationship between Sanskrit and the European languages, and his work had led to a whole theory of linguistic evolution that paralleled the evolution of species.

Natural Selection was simply about inherited differences in the ability to reproduce.

Professor Jones had witnessed an example of Darwin’s theory working on the shop floor. In a detergent factory a nozzle was needed to spray what was to become detergent powder. It was a very hard engineering problem to design a more efficient nozzle, , so it was solved by an evolutionary computer program, where each design “gave birth” to offspring with slightly different designs, and the efficiency of each design was then assessed. After 45 generations of mutation and selection a really efficient nozzle had emerged.

To turn to genetics, HIV gave us the opportunity to show the power of Natural Selection. The genetic tree of HIV resembled the linguistic tree of the Indo-European languages. Theoreticians had deduced what the ancestor of HIV might be like and then a 1959 specimen of HIV was found in a sample from the Congo. It proved to be very close to the theoretical model.

Natural Selection could be shown to be operating on HIV hosts. The CCL3L2 allele influenced the survival times of those infected by HIV. Those with the most copies had the highest survival times, and those with none the lowest. As a result of the operation of Natural Selection on their ancestors, chimpanzees on average had nine copies of CCL3L2, African humans on average had six copies and non-African humans on average had just two. Chimpanzees seemed to be unaffected by the virus, and Africans were more resistant on average than non-Africans.

Humans were the primate that did not evolve; the difference between, say, a Swede and someone from Papua New Guinea was likely to be much less than that between two chimpanzees living 200 miles apart in the same region of Africa. It could be argued that we had stopped evolving genetically once we had language. For example, it could be shown that education about HIV had had the effect of reducing people’s average number of sexual partners and therefore their exposure to the virus. Without that effect, we could expect to see HIV producing much stronger Natural Selection in the human population.

Evolution was a comparative science and therefore did not tell us very much specifically about humans.

Brown saw the debate primarily as a political issue

Roy Brown, immediate past-President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union and Secretary of the Committee for A Vision for Europe, said that what we were now faced with in Europe was an extension of what we had already seen in America and many other parts of the world: the demonising of science, and attempts to replace science by pseudo-science in the classroom.

The promotion of creationism or so-called “intelligent design” as part of the science curriculum was part of a political struggle between authoritarian attempts to promote religion at all costs, and a desire to uphold the secular principles and values of the European Enlightenment.

Secularism had recently come under sustained attack in Europe. It had been misrepresented as equivalent to atheism, as anti-religious, and as wanting to banish religion from the public square. This was totally misleading. Secularism was not the same thing as militant atheism. It did not imply that religious believers and their leaders should be silenced, but that no particular belief should have a privileged position or privileged access to the institutions of government. Secularism meant neutrality in matters of religion and belief: favouring none and discriminating against none. Secularism was the only guarantee of freedom of religion or belief for every citizen. It was vital to defend Europe’s secular heritage and the values of democracy, equality, individual freedom and the rule of law – the values on which our civilisation was based.

Six weeks earlier, the European Parliament had seen the launch of the Brussels Declaration (see Page 13), a restatement of the common values that underpinned our civilisation. The Brussels Declaration affirmed the right of everyone to an open and comprehensive education. Education should be about teaching children to think and to find answers for themselves. Schools should not be used for indoctrination.

Parents had the right to impart their own values and religious beliefs to their children, but states had no obligation to support them in doing so. States did however have a responsibility to provide information and education about all religions and widely-held beliefs. Teaching that one religion was true and all others false, that one religion provided the only acceptable source of values, or presenting religious beliefs as science, was not education but indoctrination.

Professor Dawkins then announced that he intended to sign the Brussels Declaration. (Professor Jones, Ms Nowicka, Mrs Carlshamre and Mr Sturmark had already done so).