What Meyer's "Explore Evolution" Teaches

The newest anti-evolution textbook is called Explore Evolution: The Arguments for and Against Neo-Darwinism. Previous anti-evolution textbooks directly advocated creationism, Creation Science, or Intelligent Design (ID). Court cases have determined that all of these are still creationism, with Kitzmiller v. Dover deciding this for ID in 2005. Creationism evolves fast, and Explore Evolution was published in 2007 to get around all these court cases. Explore Evolution is the first textbook to just teach the false weaknesses with evolution without directly advocating for creationism. Even so, the alleged weaknesses are still creationist beliefs, not the findings of science. Public schools that use this book are inviting the next court case.

The book has five authors, and the first is Stephen C. Meyer. Meyer is the Vice President of Discovery Institute, which he describes as “the nation’s preeminent scientific think tank promoting the theory of intelligent design.”(1) Meyer is one of the “expert” advisors to the Texas State Board of Education, as is another author of the book, Ralph Seelke. Both were nominated by antievolutionists on the Board. Meyer also was at the center of the Sternberg peer review controversy, in 2004, which resulted in this statement from the Council of the Biological Society of Washington, DC, stating that Meyer's paper did not meet the scientific standards of their Proceedings publication.

Explore Evolution systematically undermines science education. To see this, consider four example false weaknesses taken from the book. You will see that the alleged weaknesses with evolution are false rhetorical arguments. To teach from this book is to teach students to think unscientifically.

On page 26, Meyer et al. state that we only have a few of all possible transitional fossils. The authors argue that claiming evolution to be justified on the basis of a few transitional fossils is like claiming that a student who gets only 3 out of 100 answers right on a test actually understands the material, despite getting 97 answers wrong.

The book imagines this student pointing to his correct 3 answers and saying, “This proves that I understand the concept. It was just a fluke that I missed the others.” An imaginary teacher responds, “A fluke? What test are you looking at? I'm looking at 97 wrong answers. If you want to talk about flukes, check out the three right answers.”

Think about all the problems with this argument:

1. The argument falsely implies that we have very few transitional fossils. We have hundreds of them, if not thousands. (See Donald R. Prothero's book “Evolution: What the fossils say and why it matters” for many examples).
2. It falsely implies that it's theoretically possible to acquire a majority of transitional fossils (in evolution, every species that ever lived is potentially an intermediate between ancestor and descendant species).
3. It falsely implies that it is pragmatic to expect we could find all transitional fossils (we only get fossils for specimens that happen to get fossilized, happen to survive geologic forces for long enough, happen to get exposed, and happen to be discovered).
4. Even if we ignore mistakes (1)–(3), the analogy itself is mistaken. Students are not allowed to change their answers after taking a test, but scientists can continue making new discoveries and further substantiating their claims. Consider the recent discovery of Tiktaalik, the walking fish. Furthermore, having even just one transitional fossil sequence is evidence that evolution can occur, demonstrating that the evolution makes sense of at least some of our observations. No theory in science is required to explain everything.
5. Even if we ignore mistakes (1)–(4), we have still another problem: the authors deduce from the analogy that evolution must therefore be wrong. Philosophers deduce facts about the world from analogies, not scientists. Scientists use analogies to gain intuitive understanding and to develop new hypotheses, which they would test before declaring “facts” about the world.

The authors of Explore Evolution present false information about evolution, make a false analogy to this false information, and then unscientifically claim to deduce a fact about the real world from this false analogy. Do we really want this “weakness” to be a model of scientific reasoning for students to emulate?

On pages 66–70, Explore Evolution exploits a famous mistake in the history of biology. In 1874, Ernst Haeckel noticed that vertebrate embryoes of dramatically different species are similar and appear to trace evolutionary history as they grow. He drew pictures of these embryos, but his drawings exaggerated the similarities of several (but not all) of the embryos. Explore Evolution declares that the falsehood of these old drawings invalidates the claim that modern developmental biology provides evidence for evolution.

Explore Evolution suggests that Haeckel's drawings served as evidence for evolution, and being wrong, they therefore undermine evolution. The book entirely ignores the enormous amount of developmental evidence for evolution we've amassed since 1874, including both anatomical evidence from embryos and evidence that the genes responsible for coordinating body plans are common to species as diverse as fruit flies and man. Furthermore, Haeckel's drawings were not entirely wrong, and modern images still reveal similarities.

This “weakness” teaches students that it's legitimate to respond to century-old claims without first doing any research about what might have transpired in the intervening decades. It also teaches students to think that one mistake anywhere in science undermines all of the science forever after. It teaches students that scientific theories are fragilely dependent on every bit ever proffered as evidence for the theory.

On pages 90–94, Explore Evolution attempts to provide arguments for why microevolution cannot produce macroevolutionary changes even if given enough time. Most of the arguments read like this: Humans have not artificially created large-scale change in a domesticated species in a few thousand years, therefore evolution can't do it naturally over many millions of years.

For example, on page 90, Explore Evolution claims that natural selection has limits because dogs have not been bred to be as small as sunglasses or as large as horses. The senselessness of this argument is readily apparent by imagining what the book would have said if we did already have dogs the sizes of glasses and horses: “Evolution has limits because we haven't bred dogs the size of mice or dogs the size of elephants.” There is always a smallest dog and a largest dog, so this argument is nonsense. This argument teaches students to appeal to intuition at the expense of logic and evidence. Consider that the domestic dog is descended from wolves, and in just a few thousand years of artificial selection we have pretty dramatic differences betweens wolves and, say, yorkies or dachshunds.

Another example appears on page 92. Here the book argues that evolution cannot produce large-scale changes for the same reason that a tree that grows five feet tall in five years doesn't grow 1000 feet tall in 1000 years. The authors thought this argument was significant enough to merit its own illustration, which shows tree heights, with the final tree too tall to fit on the page. But by this same argument, plate tectonics couldn't gradually produce mountains, and erosion couldn't gradually reduce mountains to hills or plains. It's a false analogy having nothing to do with evolution, and teaching it teaches students that rhetorical arguments constitute valid scientific reasoning.

On pages 94–95, Explore Evolution argues that evolution cannot produce new biological information. The argument goes like this: In order for new features to appear in a species, the genes for those features must already exist in the species. Natural selection weeds out the unhelpful genes. Over time, natural selection reduces the genes that are available, so information is gradually lost from the species. In particular, new information is never created, and novel forms can never come into existence.

Sounds convincing, huh? The argument is based on a false assumption: that there is no source of information outside of natural selection. Mutation is a significant source of new information in evolution, but Explore Evolution fails to mention it in this chapter because doing so would undermine the argument.

Although the next chapter does talk about mutation as a claimed source of “evolutionary novelty,” students are deceived by not mentioning it in a chapter that dedicates itself to arguing for a “weakness” that the existence of mutations completely invalidates. After reading this argument and then seeing mutation mentioned as a source of information later in the book, students learn by example that an argument in science cites only supporting evidence and ignores contrary evidence. This book teaches students that science is more about convincing people to believe something than about meticulously and honestly teasing answers out of the world, making sure all facts are accounted for.