Louisiana Coalition for Science

By Barbara Forrest

In Knox County, Tennessee, a parent named Kurt Zimmermann has complained to the school board about the use of the word “myth” in his son’s honors biology textbook, Asking About Life (Tobin and Dusheck, 2nd ed., 2001), which is being used at Farragut High School. Zimmermann’s complaint is nothing new. It sounds much like many other complaints made to school boards by creationist parents. But this one has a Louisiana connection.

Background

Mr. Zimmermann, a Sunday School teacher, objects that the book’s use of the word “myth” undermines his child’s belief in the truthfulness of the Bible and displays a bias against Christianity. In the complaint form that he filled out, he cites p. 319 of the book, on which there is a reference to “Creationism, the biblical myth that the universe was created by the Judeo-Christian God in 7 days.” At the April 7, 2010, Knox County School Board meeting, Mr. Zimmermann offered some remedies for the situation: “You could pitch the book, you could fix the book, you could come up with an alternative. There’s things you can do.” His friend Steve Cook, also a Sunday school teacher, agrees: “I am at my church teaching that there is a creator and I have students coming to me telling me there isn’t a creator.” (See this video clip of the school board meeting. See also “Ban a Science Book? School Board Delays Action,” at Metropulse, 4/8/2010.)

In order to evaluate the complaint that the word “myth” is offensive to Christians, the school’s review committee consulted Dictionary.com. Mr. Zimmermann used Webster’s Dictionary, where he found a section of the definition reflecting his contention that the word is insulting to Christians: “Describing Christian beliefs, such as Bible stories, as myth is therefore usually considered an attack on those beliefs.” But there is nothing inherently offensive or disrespectful to Christianity about the use of the word “myth.” The most respected dictionary in the English-speaking world, the Oxford English Dictionary, gives this as the first definition of the word:

1. a. A traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification for something such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon.

The OED provides a representative statement in which the word is used with this meaning:

1978 J. D. CRICHTON in C. Jones et al. Study of Liturgy I. 7 The myth was a sacred narrative, whether true or fictional, which gave an account of, or ‘explained’, the origins of human life or of the community.

The word can indeed be used in a way that reflects Mr. Zimmerman’s objection, as in the second definition in the OED:

2. a. A widespread but untrue or erroneous story or belief; a widely held misconception; a misrepresentation of the truth. Also: something existing only in myth; a fictitious or imaginary person or thing.

However, the very next definition that follows this one points once again to a perfectly respectable — and respectful — way to use “myth”:

[2.] b. A person or thing held in awe or generally referred to with near reverential admiration on the basis of popularly repeated stories (whether real or fictitious). [emphasis added]

In the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the most venerable of all school reference works, the article on “Christian Myth and Legend” opens with a wonderfully sensitive recognition of the importance of the concept of myth to Christianity:

Myths and legends number among the most creative and abundant contributions of Christianity to the history of human culture. They have inspired artists, dramatists, clerics, and others to contemplate the wondrous effects of Christian salvation on the cosmos and its inhabitants. They conjoin diverse cultural horizons and fuse them creatively with the religious histories that exist prior to and alongside the orthodox Christian world. . . .

But Mr. Zimmermann and his son find the word objectionable, so he and three like-minded supporters registered their complaints against Asking About Life (AAL) at the April 7 school board meeting. (Given the volatile nature of the issue, all parties — both complainants and board members — conducted themselves with admirable Southern courtesy, as shown in the school board’s 4/7/10 video of the meeting.)

The school board has a review process for citizen complaints, which Mr. Zimmermann apparently followed correctly. The book unanimously passed inspection by the six-member review committee appointed by the principal of Farragut High School. The committee members’ individual review forms, along with Zimmermann’s complaint, are included in the board’s April 7 agenda [pdf]. Below is the clip of the complaint, which reveals the Louisiana connection. Anyone who has followed the posts at the LA Coalition for Science website for the last two years will see a familiar name (click on image below):

For readers who are not familiar with what has been going on in Louisiana, here is the connection:

Where the form asks, “What reviews of this material have you read?,” Zimmermann wrote, “19 page Review by Charles H. Voss, Jr. Ph.D. dated August, 2006.” This indicates that Zimmermann is taking as his authority for evaluating Asking About Life none other than Louisiana’s own Charles H. Voss, Jr., a longtime creationist who is well known among creationist-watchers for his mischief-making in our state. In September 2009, working with the Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), an affiliate of Focus on the Family, Voss was instrumental in persuading the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) to adopt a creationist-friendly procedure for reviewing complaints about the use of creationist supplementary materials in public schools. (See “Procedure Crafted for Handling Evolution-materials Complaints,” Baton Rouge Advocate 9/17/09.) One year earlier, the LFF had engineered the passage of the Louisiana Science Education Act under which the use of such materials is permitted.

Background on Voss

Voss has promoted creationism in Louisiana for years. In 1993, he wrote a pamphlet entitled “Did God Direct Evolution?” [pdf], in which he rejected the mainstream belief in theistic evolution (the religious belief that God used evolution to shape life on Earth), opting instead for full-blown, biblical, young-earth creationism: “Ninety percent of the known indicators of the earth’s age say the earth is young while only ten percent give old ages to the earth.” He contends that scientific evidence and the Bible make it “impossible to merge biblical creation and evolution into a single theory such as theistic evolution.” According to Voss, “God-directed evolution seems plausible on the surface, but it is in conflict with the biblical record. . . . God did not direct evolution!” Among his items of evidence is this: “Human-appearing sandal prints have been found in supposedly 600-million-year old rock — a 600-million year discrepancy.” (This little factoid is documented on websites such as “The Bible UFO Connection.”) In his biosketch in the pamphlet, he informs readers that he “considers creation research and Bible study as avocations and believes that he can show logically that God does exist.”

In 1994, he and his colleagues in the creationist Origins Resource Association attempted (unsuccessfully) to convince the Livingston Parish, LA, School Board to adopt a creationist curriculum guide that was riddled with errors. (See Barbara Forrest, “Combating Creationism in a Louisiana School District,” The Textbook Letter, July-August 1997.) He now partners with the Louisiana Family Forum to promote his “Biology Text Addenda” at TextAddOns.com, among which is the “19 page review” of Asking About Life that Mr. Zimmermann is using in Knox County. (The AAL addendum is included in the Knox Co. School Board agenda packet [pdf].) Voss has written creationist addenda for eleven well-known biology textbooks; he has posted them  in pdf for downloading by teachers, students, and parents. However, he does not have the expertise in biology that would qualify him to critique biology textbooks. His degrees are in electrical engineering, and he is a retired professor of electrical and computer engineering. His credentials are listed along with the names of the creationist reviewers of his addenda on his TextAddOns website [pdf].

By way of contrast, the co-author of Asking About Life, Albert J. Tobin, Ph.D., has distinguished credentials in the biological sciences.

Allan J. Tobin, Ph.D., is Managing Director of MRSSI and Senior Scientific Advisor to the High Q Foundation and to CHDI Inc., organizations dedicated to the development of therapies for Huntington’s disease. He is also Professor Emeritus at UCLA. Tobin received his S.B. (1963) from MIT, in Humanities and Science, and his Ph.D. (1969) from Harvard, in Biophysics. After postdoctoral training at the Weizmann Institute and at MIT, he became Assistant Professor of Biology at Harvard from 1971 to 1975. In 1975, he moved to UCLA, where he later became Professor of Physiological Science and Professor of Neurology. He was a visiting scientist at the Institut Pasteur in 1982 and at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 2002-2003. At UCLA, he was Chair of the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Progam from 1989-1995, Director of the Brain Research Institute from 1995-2002, cofounder of the NeuroEngineering Training Program, and, from 1996, the Eleanor Leslie Chair in Neuroscience. Tobin’s research laboratory at UCLA used molecular and cellular techniques to study the function, regulation, and degeneration of GABA-producing neurons in the brain and spinal cord, in order to address basic mechanistic questions important for Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and spinal cord injury. He was Scientific Director of the Hereditary Disease Foundation from 1979 to 2002 and is the coauthor of Tobin and Dusheck, Asking About Life, a prize-winning textbook.

Dr. Tobin’s co-author Jennie Dusheck is a professional science writer, currently an author at Cengage Learning, with a B.A. in English and zoology (terrestrial evolutionary biology, animal behavior and ecology) from the University of California-Berkeley. [UPDATE 4/12/10 — Ms. Dusheck has informed me that she is a freelance writer, not a Cengage employee. She wrote and is responsible for the chapters on evolution in AAL. Readers can see the full extent of her credentials here.] She also has an M.A. in zoology from the University of California-Davis (ecology, evolutionary biology, developmental biology, plant-animal interactions, and statistics and experimental design). She earned a Certificate in Science Writing from the University of California-Santa Cruz. Ms. Dusheck is also a member of the National Association of Science Writers, the Northern California Science Writers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Authors Guild.

Back to Knox County

The school board did not vote on Zimmermann’s complaint at its April 7 meeting but decided to table it until a later meeting. Board chair Indya Kincannon noted that the textbook review committee members were not there to speak for themselves, so she moved to defer action for one month in order to allow the committee to be present at the next meeting. Although this move was very considerate on Ms. Kincannon’s part, if past experience in Louisiana is any indication of what is going on in Tennessee, when school boards defer such clear-cut creationist initiatives until a future meeting, the creationists then have extra time to marshal their forces even further, making them more difficult to deal with. Backed up by the review committee’s unanimous recommendation to retain the book, the board should have made an unequivocal decision to deny Mr. Zimmermann’s request. To their credit, the majority of board members, in a 6-3 vote, did reject an effort by board member Karen Carson to work out a compromise that would have permitted the use of Voss’s addendum:

Karen Carson, of the West Knox County 5th District, tried to find middle ground with an amendment that would have upheld the school committee’s recommendation but also offered to biology teachers a critical analysis of the textbook submitted by Zimmermann and written by Charles Voss. (Voss, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Louisiana State University, is a longtime activist for the cause of creationism and vice president of an outfit called the Origins Resource Association.) But Carson’s amendment satisfied no one, especially after she revised it to make it subject to review by school system science staff, and it failed on a 3-6 vote. [Metropulse, 4/8/2010; emphasis added] [See the Origins Resource Association here. See also the ORA's Facebook page.]

Note carefully that the addendum is referred to as a “critical analysis.” The LA Science Education Act is designed to promote “critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning” (emphasis added). Voss includes “critical thinking” exercises in his addenda, and the LA Family Forum promotes them on a “Critical Thinking in the Classroom” page on its website.

The August 2006 addendum that Zimmermann used and that Ms. Carson wanted to offer to Knox Co. biology teachers is interesting in another respect: this addendum is a sanitized version of an earlier one that was dated “October 2003.” The 2003 version is saturated with creationist language and young-earth creationist source citations. In 2006 — after the verdict in Kitzmiller v. Dover — Voss tried to cleanse the creationist language from his 2003 addendum; in fact, he “updated” all eleven of the addenda on the Textaddons.com website. (Each addendum is simply a variation on the same basic document, adjusted for a specific biology textbook.) In the October 2003 version of the AAL addendum, Voss’s first three table of contents entries are direct references to items on the page that Zimmermann cites in his complaint:

1. Creation is a Myth – p. 319
2. Creation is Not Science – p. 319
3. Each Species is Created – p. 319

Voss responded this way in the 2003 addendum to the use of the word “myth” that Zimmermann finds objectionable:

The statement ‘… and creationism, the biblical myth that the universe was created by the “Judeo-Christian God in 7 days”‘ has not been proven. Such a statement is not science but an opinion of the textbook authors and reveals a decided bias. Such statements do not belong in a science textbook. [p. 1]

(To the complaint form question, “What do you believe is the main idea of this material?,” Zimmermann wrote, “A clear bias by the authors towards Christianity.” To the question, “What would you like your school to do about this material?,” he wrote, “Immediately remove the book.”)

To the statement in AAL that “creation ‘science’ is not science” (p. 319), Voss responded in unequivocal creationist language in the 2003 addendum:

The statement ‘But creation “science” is not science’ is very misleading in that by context it implies that evolution is science. . . . Any definition of science that can label the term ‘evolution’ as commonly used as science will also include creationism as science. [p. 1; emphasis added]

To the AAL statement, “In that book [The Origin of Species] Darwin rejected the idea that each species had been specially created,” Voss responded:

The statement ‘In that book, Darwin rejected the idea that each species had been specially created’ may have been accepted in Darwin’s time but it is not accepted today by creationists. Today’s thinking is that, in general, the ‘Biblical kind’ is equivalent to the family level and in a few instances a genus. [p.1; emphasis added] ["Biblical kind" is a traditional creationist term that refers to the "kinds" of living things as God created them in the Book of Genesis.]

Voss’s sources in the 2003 version of the addendum include Creation Research Quarterly and Creation Ex Nihilo (now Creation Magazine), both young-earth creationist journals. He included numerous citations of articles by “John Woodmorappe,” which is the false name under which creationist Jan Peczkis writes. He even cited the intelligent design (ID) creationist supplementary textbook, Of Pandas and People, as a source. (Pandas was thoroughly exposed in my testimony and expert witness report [pdf] in Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005.) Voss cited the seminal ID creationist book, The Mystery of Life’s Origin (1984), co-authored by Discovery Institute fellows Charles Thaxton and Walter Bradley (with Roger Olsen). He also cited Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1986), which helped bring about ID proponent Phillip Johnson’s creationist epiphany in 1987.

By August 2006, after the decisive verdict in the Kitzmiller case that teaching ID is unconstitutional, Voss had sanitized his addenda, just as Pandas had to be sanitized after the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard ruling that teaching “creation science” is unconstitutional. (The “creation science” language in Pandas was replaced with “intelligent design” language.) Most noticeably, he completely sidestepped AAL‘s statement about creationism and myth that Zimmermann finds objectionable, substituting instead an objection to the definition of evolution on p. 320. Here are his new TOC entries in the August 2006 addendum that Mr. Zimmermann is using:

1. What is Evolution? – p. 320
2. The Fossil Record Tells a Story of evolution – p. 327
3. Extinct Living Fossils – p. 328

Responding to AAL’s statements on p. 320 that Darwin’s theory of evolution includes the ideas of the common descent and natural selection, Voss voices his disagreement in terms of the traditional creationist objection to “macroevolution” but conspicuously avoids the word “creationism”:

Darwin observed the ability of organisms to adapt (micro-evolution) and assumed that on this basis macro-evolution was true. Macro-evolution could be said to occur if a dog became a cat or a dinosaur became a bird. It occurs at the genus or higher level and implies that all life on Earth descended from a few types of cells that somehow came into being in the past. Many scientists do not agree with this hypothesis. [p. 1]

The rest of the addendum is similarly sanitized — but only of the overtly creationist terminology, not the substantive creationist content. Nor did Voss cleanse out all the creationist citations. He retained Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and The Mystery of Life’s Origin. He also retained a citation of an article about Haeckel’s embryos that ID creationist and Discovery Institute fellow Jonathan Wells slipped past the gatekeepers at American Biology Teacher in 1999. In this article, Wells recites his now-signature complaints against using Ernst Haeckel’s 19th-century drawings of embryos as evidence for evolution. This horse has been dead for years, and Wells’s complaints have been addressed many times, including in a later issue of American Biology Teacher. Yet the citation remains in both the 2003 and 2006 versions of Voss’s AAL addendum. [Update 4/12/10: Ms. Dusheck also pointed out that no edition of AAL contains the Haeckel mistake about which Wells complains in his article. I would add that Voss's one-size-fits-all addendum is not an accurate critique of any of the books that he has targeted.]

Voss has simply followed a page out of the Discovery Institute code language playbook by revising his addenda to make them appear superficially to be about evolution rather than creationism, just as the Discovery Institute did with its newest ID textbook, the deceptively titled Explore Evolution.

So what does all this analysis boil down to with respect to the Zimmerman complaint?

Here’s the central point: Mr. Zimmermann cited Voss’s creationist textbook addendum as his sole review material for a textbook in which he ostensibly objects to the use of one word, “myth,” which he says offends Christians. Zimmermann’s complaint about AAL zeroes in on exactly the item in the book that is the first item in Voss’s 2003 addendum, making exactly the same point: that calling creationism a myth betrays the bias of the authors and does not belong in a textbook.

There is nothing new in this type of complaint, just as there is nothing inherently offensive about the book’s use of the word “myth.” But there seems to be more to the story, which Zimmermann voiced through the national megaphone of Fox News. (Despite commenting at the April 7 school board meeting on the unwelcome attention “that I have received, and my family — socially, at work, in the media — nationally, incidentally,” he has appeared on Fox News at least twice, on April 7 and again on April 8. In fact, his April 7 appearance was on the morning of April 7, before the evening school board meeting.) Zimmermann has said that he lodged the complaint about the book after his son and some other students complained about the word. But in the April 7 Fox News interview, he elaborated on this basic account:

Since I brought that issue up, there’s been a host of other parents that have come forward, and there are other things in that book that are pretty, uh, technically inaccurate and things of that nature. So it’s more than just the statement that I was concerned about. So it’s kind of grown a little bit.

So now there are other things in AAL that he is complaining about. (Mark Littleton, a supporter of Zimmermann’s who spoke at the April 7 board meeting, read a list of “historical and scientific inaccuracies” in the book — which he compiled after having looked at it for the first time only a couple of days before the meeting.) There is more “technically inaccurate” material in the book, says Zimmermann, who professed during the April 7 Fox News interview that “It was really the kids who identified it ['myth']. I’m not smart enough to pick that stuff up. They are.”

This comment raises the question of who identified the other, “technically inaccurate” aspects of the book. Who is advising Zimmermann? The kids? That is very unlikely if the Knox County case, like so many other past creationism episodes around the U.S., runs true to form. Even if Mr. Zimmermann has not been working in tandem with a creationist organization so far, some group will now likely beat a path to his door. And if the Louisiana Family Forum runs true to form, they may very well contact Zimmermann since he is using one of their preferred “supplementary materials” as advertised on the LFF website. Indeed, Voss himself may already be directly involved. In response to a statement about the addendum that board member Karen Carson made during the meeting, Zimmermann said, “You’re talking about the addendum that was provided by Dr. Voss?” (emphasis added) Zimmermann’s statement sounds as though Voss actually gave him the addendum. (There is a precedent among LFF creationists for their involving themselves in such issues. LFF operative Darrell White inserted himself [pdf] into the Texas textbook selection controversy on behalf of the Discovery Institute in 2003.)

Here is the Fox News interview, followed by a closing message from the Louisiana Coalition for Science to the Knox County School Board:

To the ladies and gentlemen of the Knox County School Board: Please don’t give in to these creationist demands. When you compromise good science education with creationism, you don’t solve your problem — you exacerbate and prolong it. Sometimes you just have to say no. Stand your ground, as the Louisiana legislature and the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education refused to do when we were faced here with an effort to inject creationism into science education — an effort in which Dr. Voss was integrally involved. Set a different precedent — one that says to your local constituents and to the rest of America that the integrity of authentic science education will be protected at every level in the state of Tennessee. The rest of the country will admire you for it. The scientific community will appreciate your courage. And the supporters of good science education who in 2008-2009 tried and failed to stop Voss and his creationist colleagues in Louisiana will cheer you on.