Why can't Americans accept evolution?

	Pamela R. Winnick is the author of "A Jealous God: Science's Crusade Against Religion" (Thomas Nelson). A lawyer and a former Post-Gazette reporter, she is working on a book about the religious community's defection from the Democratic Party (pamRW@aol.com).

The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held that creationism cannot be taught in science classes because it advances a particular religion, i.e. Christian fundamentalist. Most Americans don't care. According to a recent Pew Research Center Poll, 65 percent of our population believes that creationism should be taught alongside evolution. This is up from 50 percent in years past. Something is terribly amiss.

It's common to hear the platitude that religion and science can peacefully co-exist. "We study the heavens. Religion tells us how to get there," wrote the late paleontologist and writer Stephen Jay Gould. Maybe, but that assumes that each stays within its own boundaries.

We all know that many fundamentalists exceed the boundaries of religion, particularly those who pass off the Bible as science.

But many scientists likewise exceed their boundaries, venturing into the existential to promote their own philosophies. While the religious are readily dismissed as stupid and ignorant, scientists who philosophize about life carry the prestige of science and prevail in the courts of intellectual opinion.

Often they're every bit as fire-and-brimstone as Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell; their audiences would be the envy of any television evangelist.

Richard Dawkins is an Oxford University zoologist and best-selling author who writes about evolution and its social implications. In his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene," he argues that humans and animals are mere "machines," repositories for selfish genes whose sole goal is self-replication. It may sometimes appear that we are acting charitably, when all we're really doing is protecting our genes.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Dawkins doesn't have much use for religion, which he refers to as a "virus of the mind." He says that anyone who doesn't believe in evolution is "stupid, ignorant or wicked."

Another great scientist was the late Francis Crick, who co-discovered the double helix nature of DNA. "Your joys, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules," Mr. Crick wrote in his 1994 book, "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul." Like Mr. Dawkins, Mr. Crick preached a debased view of mankind that challenges the Judeo-Christian belief that man was created in the image of God and is responsible for his actions.

Evolutionary psychology holds that certain behaviors, including rape and murder, persist today because we once needed them to survive. They are Calvinistic in their belief that man has no choice in his behavior, that he is governed solely by traits he acquired from his survival-minded ancestors.

In a 1997 piece in The New York Times, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker offered a "scientific" reason why two teenage girls, in separate incidents, murdered their newborns: "A new mother will coolly assess the infant and current situation," he wrote. "In those first few days, it would seem that killing an infant would be perfectly natural and appropriate."

Most scientists -- and most Americans -- don't agree with these debased and reductionist views of mankind. Stephen Jay Gould, referred to Richard Dawkins as a "fundamentalist at heart," an "ultra-Darwinist" who twists Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection to suit his political philosophies. Still, these "ultra-Darwinists" represent the best of the scientific community. Crick was a Nobel laureate. Mr. Pinker is a professor at Harvard. Mr. Dawkins occupies a special chair at Oxford for "the public understanding of science."

For the past 80 years, the scientific community has been trying to persuade Americans to accept evolution, but no avail. Local school districts throughout the country continue to insert religious belief into the science classroom.

Having covered these disputes for five years, I believe that the real problem is cultural: In many cases, creationists hail from the lower social, educational and economic class, those who resent the political power of the so-called elite. They revolt not really against science, but against an intellectual community that tramples on core religious beliefs and condescends to them. Opposition only hardens their resolve.

Here's something more frightening than creeping creationism: According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal body that monitors education statistics, only 12 percent of graduating seniors in this country are proficient in science. Year after year, international comparisons continue to show that American high school students lag far behind their counterparts in other industrialized countries in their understanding of science.

The reasons for scientific illiteracy are complex, not easily reduced to the "science versus religion" stereotype that informs the evolution battles and the culture wars overall.

According to a 2001 study produced by the Packard Foundation, science textbooks are riddled with error, confusing key concepts such as gravity and acceleration -- one even shows the Equator running through the United States. Assuming the political will exists, textbooks should be an easy fix, and much more effective than vilifying the religious. More importantly, we need teachers who are adequately trained in the sciences -- and compensated for their expertise.

Here's another statistic: According to Gallup polls, among Americans with a background in science -- not just Ph.D.s, but those who have studied science in high school and college-- only 15 percent are creationists.

In other words, an overall science education is the best means of lifting religious barriers to the teaching of evolution.

In the end, a scientifically literate public -- not an embittered and fractured one -- is in the best position to decide where religion and science diverge.