The Little Atoms Road Trip: A Journey

Through the Frontiers and Battle-lines of

American Science

Report for the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust

Neil Denny

12th May to 9th June 2012

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Contents

1 Contents 2

2 About Me 3

3 My Fellowship 5

4 Itinerary 6

5 Conclusions 9

6 Scenes From the Trip 01 – The SETI Institute 11

7 Scenes From the Trip 02 – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 13

8 Scenes From the Trip 03 – The Creation Museum 16

9 Scenes From the Trip 04 – Fighting Creationism 19

10 Acknowledgements & Further Links 21

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About Me

I’m the producer and presenter of a radio show and podcast called Little Atoms. It’s a talk

show mainly concerned with popular science and rationalism, and encompassing the

“Skeptic” movement. We’re interested in how science and culture, and often how science

and religion rub up against each other. We created the Little Atoms Radio Show in

September 2005, and since then have broadcast nearly 250 shows, interviewing prominent

writers, scientists, philosophers and academics. An archive of these interviews is available

on our website.

I’m not a scientist by training, my interest in science and scepticism coming quite late in life.

As a child in the 1970’s I was obsessed by the Space race, and I was a keen fan of the

science fiction of the era, such as Star Wars and Close Encounters and Silent Running. I

read a lot of post-apocalyptic science fiction. I’d therefore have claimed that I was interested

in science, but what I would have really meant was weird phenomena: Bigfoot, UFO’s, and

the Bermuda Triangle. I presumed all of these things to be, if not true exactly, then at least

plausible and worthy of study by researchers. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to tell you

the difference between palaeontologists searching for ancient bones, and the search for the

Loch Ness Monster.

Then one day I accidentally bought Carl Sagan’s masterpiece The Demon Haunted World,

presuming from the title that it was another book about unexplained phenomena. And it

was, just not in the way I was expecting. Sagan calmly explains in the book that there are

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natural physical phenomena that are provable, and others that are not, and that there exists

in the scientific method a mechanism for telling this stuff apart. This was a revelation to me.

I’ll reiterate at the risk of looking foolish that I was in my mid-twenties when this happened.

From then on I obsessively devoured all of the popular science I could get my hands on.

Through reading Sagan I also discovered the work of magician and skeptic James Randi,

and the idea of organised scepticism. I’ve been an atheist as long as I can remember, and

have now been an observer of the UK Skeptical movement for the best part of the decade.

Having been introduced to that movement via the American version I’m interested in the

contrasts between skeptical and atheist campaigns in UK and the US.

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My Fellowship

There is a familiar cliché in the UK media of an overtly religious, backward looking, anti-

intellectual and anti-science America, an America under sustained attack from the forces of

irrationality. Professing atheism in America is still considered to be a brave and transgressive

act. American skeptics, atheists, scientists and science educators are engaged in numerous

battles. Creationists continue to push for the teaching of ‘intelligent design’ alongside

evolution in science classes. Campaigners fight to protect the right to legal and safe

abortion, for the use of stem cells in medical research, and against the growing anti-

vaccination movement. At the same time conspiracy theories about a wide range of events

from 9/11 to the moon landings remain widespread, and climate change denial continues to

be a significant political force. Yet it’s a fact that America was founded on explicitly

Enlightenment principles, is a bona fide secular state, remains for the foreseeable future the

number one country for science research in the world and contains a significant proportion of

the world’s top rated universities. This contradiction has always interested me.

So between 12th May and 9th June 2012 I travelled to America and embarked on a month-

long 6600 mile road trip, with the aim of making a series of podcasts which present a wide-

ranging overview of science and skepticism from an American perspective. I interviewed

scientists working on ground-breaking, cutting edge science, educators combatting the

encroachment of anti-science and irrationality into politics and the classroom, and writers

attempting to popularise amazing ideas and concepts to the wider public. I also spoke to a

geologist working on the other side of that debate.

I flew in to San Francisco and passed through Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Tucson,

Phoenix, Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Oklahoma City, St Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Washington

DC, Durham, Asheville, Philadelphia, New York and Ithaca en route to Boston. I visited the

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SETI Institute, the BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, the Los Alamos

National Laboratory and the American Museum of Natural History. I also paid a visit to

Kentucky’s Creation Museum. I spent a weekend at the annual conference of the Orange

County Freethought Alliance, and attended the 5th World Science Festival in New York. And

I recorded 35 interviews, a very short selection of which includes Leonard Susskind, Eugenie

Scott, Kip Thorne, Lucianne Walkowicz, Ann Druyan, Edward Stone, George Church, Priya

Natarayan, Paul Offit, Neil DeGrasse-Tyson and Sara Seager.

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Trip Itinerary

I flew to San Francisco on 12th May 2012 and drove around 6600 miles gradually heading

East across the continental United States, before flying home from Boston on 9th June 2012.

The map below shows the places I visited along the way, and following this is the complete

itinerary for the trip.

13th May – Free day in San Francisco. Walking tour of financial district, and Segway Tour of

waterfront. Overnight in San Francisco.

14th May – Interview at SETI Institute in Mountain View with Seth Shostak, Interview at

National Center for Science Education in Oakland with Eugenie Scott, Interview in Winters

with anthropologist Sarah Hrdy. Overnight in San Francisco.

15th May – Interview in Glen Ellen with sound recordist Bernie Krause, Interview in Palo Alto

with theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind, Interview in Oakland with science writer Mary

Roach. Overnight in San Francisco.

16th May – Day drive down Pacific Coast Highway, overnight in Santa Barbara.

17th May – Interviews at Caltech in Pasadena with theoretical physicists Sean Carroll and

Kip Thorne, and former director of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Edward Stone, interview

at JPL in Pasadena with planetary scientist Kevin Hand. Tour around JPL site. Overnight in

Newport Beach.

18th May – Interview at University of California, Irvine with evolutionary biologist Francisco

Ayala. Overnight in Newport Beach.

19th May – Various short interviews during day spent at Freethought Alliance Annual

Conference, at University of California, Irvine. Overnight in Newport Beach.

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20th May – Day drive into Arizona. Overnight in Tucson.

21st May – Interviews with cosmologist Paul Davies and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker at

BEYOND Center, Arizona State University, Phoenix. Drive on across Arizona. Overnight in

Winslow.

22nd May – Drive on to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Interview with historian Alan Carr at Los

Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM. Tour around LANL site. Overnight in Santa

Fe.

23rd May – Interviews with chemical engineer Jim Coons and biologist Babs Marrone at Los

Alamos National Laboratory. Drive on into Oklahoma via Amarillo, Texas and overnight in

Clinton, Oklahoma.

24th May – Day drive via Oklahoma City, Tulsa and St Louis, Missouri. Overnight in

Altamont, Illinois.

25th May –Drive on into Kentucky. Interview with geologist Andrew Snelling at Creation

Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky. Tour of Creation Museum. Drive on to Chicago, Illinois.

Overnight in Chicago.

26th May – Interview with evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne at University of Chicago.

Overnight in Chicago.

27th May – Free day in Chicago. Architectural walking tour and visit to Art Institute of

Chicago. Overnight in Chicago.

28th May – Telephone interview with paleo-anthropologist Ian Tattersall, drive via Louisville

to Lexington, Kentucky. Overnight in Lexington.

29th May – Drive on to North Carolina. Interview with science writer T. Delene Beeland in

Asheville. Overnight in Winston-Salem, NC.

30th May – Interviews with psychiatrist and skeptic Stephen Barratt in Chapel Hill, and

geneticist Misha Angrist at Duke University, Durham, NC. Drive on towards Washington DC

and overnight in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

31st May – Morning walk around Washington DC National Mall. Drive to Philadelphia.

Interview with paediatrician Paul Offit at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Drive on to New

York. Overnight in Brooklyn.

1st June – Interview at Columbia University with astrophysicist Britt Reichborn-Kjennerud.

Afternoon and evening attending events at World Science Festival. Overnight in Brooklyn.

2nd June – Attending events at World Science Festival, and interview with astronomer Neil

DeGrasse-Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium. Overnight in Brooklyn.

3rd June – Interview with planetary scientist Lucianne Walkowicz. Overnight in Brooklyn.

4th June – Various short interviews at American Museum of Natural History. Tour of behind

scenes at AMNH. Drive on across New York State to Ithaca, NY. Overnight in Ithaca.

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5th June – Interview in Ithaca with Ann Druyan. Drive on to Boston, Massachusetts.

Overnight in Cambridge, MA.

6th June – Interview with Marc Abrahams, founder of IgNobel Awards, in Cambridge.

Overnight in Cambridge.

7th June – Interview with science writer Seth Mnookin at MIT, Interview with geneticist

George Church at Harvard Medical School. Overnight in Cambridge.

8th June – Interviews with science writer Leslie Brunetta, theoretical physicist Priya Natarajan

at Harvard University, and planetary scientist Sara Seager at MIT. Drive on to Cape Cod.

Overnight in Orleans, MA.

9th June – Free day on Cape Cod. Whale-watching trip from Provincetown. Flight home from

Boston overnight.

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Conclusions

On my original application for the travelling fellowship I set out the aim to record at least 20

interviews while on my month long American trip. I ended up recording 35. My interview

schedule was inevitably quite flexible, and while some planned interviews were cancelled

along the way, mainly due to time planning and driving distances, a number of new interview

opportunities presented themselves during the trip.

I am still in the process of making these interviews available online in a podcast series called

Little Atoms Road Trip at the rate of one a week. At the time of writing there are 23 podcasts

online. These can be found either via this page on the Little Atoms website:

http://www.littleatoms.com/roadtrip.htm or via this link to the Feedburner podcast feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/littleatomsroadtrip. The podcasts can also be found of iTunes.

The Little Atoms Road Trip podcast feed currently has around 3000 subscribers, and this is

growing week by week as more interviews get posted. Once all the interviews are published

the archive will remain online as a permanent record of the trip. As expected, the majority of

these listeners are from the existing Little Atoms podcast subscriber pool. We have a large

contingent of listeners within the UK science, media and academic communities, and it is to

this group that the podcasts are aimed. I’m pleased to say though that we have picked up a

significant amount of new American listeners to both podcasts as a result of the trip. The

podcast series has been very well received by our audience so far. For example one Twitter

follower posted a message saying: “Little Atoms is a great podcast without doubt but the

Road Trip interviews have been even better, thanks Neil”.

I wrote a number of articles about my trip for the Skeptic Magazine before I travelled, and I

posted a weekly dispatch on the Guardian newspaper’s Science Blog while I was away. I

have included some of these Guardian articles below. I am also in the early stages of

discussion with a couple of publishers about a book project resulting from the trip.

I am in the process of writing a talk about my travelling fellowship, which I will be presenting

for the first time on the 14th October 2012 as one of a series of regular Sunday lectures at

Conway Hall in London. I am then embarking on a 15 date speaking tour of branches of the

Skeptics in the Pub organisation into 2013, and covering a number of towns in England and

The Republic of Ireland. Details of this tour can again be found on this page on the Little

Atoms Website: http://www.littleatoms.com/roadtrip.htm. I will also be giving this talk at the

November meeting of the East Anglia Churchill Fellows.

My American Odyssey was without doubt a life-changing experience, and I am immensely

grateful to the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for making it possible. I met a huge number

of amazing people, made many friends, and was able to experience things no ordinary

tourist would see. I worked incredibly hard on the trip, in retrospect perhaps a little too hard!

But I never lost sight of the fact that I was there to savour every moment, and despite driving

well over 6000 miles I remain convinced that this is by far the best was to see the many

contrasts of this amazing country. I also feel that I was able to develop my journalistic skills

on the trip, and if I take away one thought from the experience, it’s that I know I am an

accomplished interviewer and that this is the direction I would like my life to take in the

future. Now I just need to find somebody to fund another trip!

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Scenes from the Trip 01 – The SETI Institute

After a day off recovering from jet-lag, which I somehow end up spending whizzing up and

down the hills of San Francisco on a Segway, I head off to record the first interview of the

trip down Highway 101 to Mountain View, CA. I’m meeting up with Seth Shostak, Senior

Astronomer of the SETI Institute, and presenter of their excellent Big Picture Science radio

show and podcast. Seth is the public face of the SETI Institute, he’s the SETI GUY. At least

that’s what it says on his car registration plate. SETI is an abbreviation of Search for Extra-

terrestrial Intelligence, and that’s what Seth does. He’s a full-time alien hunter.

Founded in 1984, for 10 years the SETI Institute was initially part of a wider NASA funded

search for alien intelligence, until NASA’s project fell victim to budget cuts. Since then the

Institute has relied on private donations and endowments to keep it going, and judging by its

headquarters, they are doing ok for funding. The SETI Institute is in the middle of a huge

industrial estate, albeit the richest, most innovative and manicured industrial estate in the

world, otherwise known as Silicon Valley.

The search for aliens radio signals is only a tiny part of the work done by the SETI Institute,

most of its scientists are astrobiologists, who are looking for life of a less intelligent, more

microbial kind elsewhere in the solar system, mainly on the moons of the outer planets.

However it’s the image of a scientist listening out for a message from the cosmos, perhaps

one who looks a bit like Jodie Foster, which tends to catch the public’s imagination.

I meet up with Seth in his office, (he doesn’t look like Jodie Foster). He asks if I’d like to

record the interview in the Institute’s own recording studio. This is where Seth, Molly Bentley

and the team record Big Picture Science, of which I’m a huge fan, so I’m delighted to take

him up on the offer. It later transpires that Seth is something of an audiophile, and has built

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this studio himself; don’t expect the rest of the recordings on this trip to match this one in

sound quality!

So when did we begin to scour the skies for signals? Seth tells me that; “The modern idea of

using antenna to eavesdrop on ET goes back to Frank Drake’s original 1960 experiment

called Project Ozma”. That’s Frank Drake of the eponymous Drake Equation. He’s still a part

of the SETI Institute, and although he’s not in on the day of my visit, I later get a glimpse of

his office. Drake’s Project Ozma focused on just two nearby stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon

Eridani. Nowadays, SETI uses the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), funded by Microsoft co-

founder Paul Allen, to monitor thousands. However even before this, Seth reminds me,

Edison, Tesla and Marconi had all considered the possibility that radio waves might be

receivable from Mars or elsewhere.

I’m interested to know how the news of alien life, be they of vast intellect (hopefully not in

this case “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic”!) or simply microbial, would be greeted

on Earth, and whether this would provoke some great existential change. Seth thinks it

unlikely.

“In a sense we’ve run that experiment, in 1996 there was an announcement by NASA

that they had found dead microbes in a meteorite that had come from Mars. No doubt it had

come from Mars; the doubt was whether these were really microbes of course but, at least

for the couple of days of that story the assumption was, NASA is announcing this, these a

reputable scientists”.

Of course we know how that turned out, but as Seth points out; “It was the biggest science

story of the year – people didn’t riot in the streets. Nor did peace and brotherhood break

out”.

But this very issue remains one of the main concerns of the conspiracy theorists, who

believe that the US government wouldn’t trust the public with such knowledge. According to

Seth;

“There are a lot of people who think that finding life would be enormously disruptive.

In this country people say, well if you guys find a signal, the government would shut it down,

you’d keep it quiet, and the reason given for that is that it would disrupt society. Well there’s

no evidence for that at all”.

While it’s easy to picture scientists sitting around waiting to be surprised by an incoming

signal, the reality is that the ATA is constantly bombarded by radio waves. The trick is to

filter out the wheat from the chaff, most of which is as Seth describes, “All from an intelligent

society, namely ours”. And of course we haven’t identified a signal from an intelligent alien

species yet, we’d definitely know about it if we had, despite the doubts of the conspiratorially

minded. I ask Seth of all of the many false alarms, which one was the most interesting. He

tells me that “there was one that we got in the summer of 1997…It had us fooled for most of

a day”. It turned out to be an equipment failure, the signal coming from a European satellite.

As I mentioned previously, the vast majority of science regarding the possibility of alien life is

being done by astrobiologists, and a few days later I’m afforded a glimpse right at the heart

of a mission to look for signs of life on another planet in our solar system. But that’s a story

for the next scene.

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Scenes from the Trip 02 – NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

I’m standing in a large empty lot which somebody has covered in what looks like terracotta

coloured crazy paving. Dotted around are piles of red and orange igneous rock, from

boulders to pebbles. At the edge of the lot are a number of objects that resemble climbing

walls, sloping at odd angles. Imagine what the Devil’s patio would look like, and you’d not be

far off. I’m in Pasadena, California, somewhere on the huge campus like facility that is

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and this is the Mars Yard.

JPL is where NASA runs its non-human space program. Think space probes and space

telescopes. Voyager, Cassini-Huygens, Dawn, Juno, the Kepler, Planck and Hershel space

telescopes, and all the currently live Mars probes and rovers are ran from here. Later I get a

look at Mission Control, where boards show lines of multi-coloured data, streaming live from

33 active missions.

I’m being shown round the JPL facility by its Deputy Chief Scientist of Solar Exploration

Kevin Hand. Kevin is an astrobiologist and a planetary scientist by trade, and while his

primary area of research is the Jovian moon Europa, currently all the excitement at JPL is

focused on the red planet.

To my left a JPL scientist is remotely manipulating a robot in a large sandpit. This is the

Vehicle System Test Bed, a twin of the Mars Curiosity Rover. Its sibling is currently in transit

to Mars as part of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Mission. Curiosity is the most advanced

rover yet built by NASA. It’s also huge. I earlier got to see a version of the original Mars

Rover Sojourner, which landed on Mars in 1997 as part of the Mars Pathfinder Project. It’s

about the size of a Bigtrak. The Curiosity Rover is the size of a Mini. The Vehicle Test Bed is

quite sparse looking, divested of much of the bulk of the Mars bound version, not least the

RTG, or Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, the plutonium powered nuclear device that

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runs it. I must admit I feel a bit safer knowing this, although I later learn that the weight

reduction is in order to simulate Mars’ 3.711 m/s2 gravity.

This mission blasted off on 26th November 2011, and is due to deploy the Curiosity Rover in

the region of Mars’ Gale Crater on 6th August 2012. Gale Crater was chosen for the landing

site as its landscape shows the tell-tale signs of an ancient ocean. This is as likely place as

any to find fossilised life, and when it comes to Mars, fossilised life is all we can expect to

find. As Kevin Hand tells me;

“Most of our astrobiological research on Mars is focused on evidence of life in the

past as recorded in the rock record. That’s revolutionary, if the Curiosity Rover lands and

finds fossils at Gale Crater, that’s absolutely phenomenal, but fossils make it hard to connect

back to fundamental biochemistry”.

What Kevin wants to find most of all is living life, and so he focuses on Europa, but why

Europa? As he points out; “Europa has a global liquid water ocean today, and if we’ve

learned anything about life on Earth it’s that where you find liquid water you find life, So

Europa is the premier place to go to search for extant life”.

Of course we’re probably talking very basic life here, rather than green skinned Europans,

so why is this any more exciting than fossilised Martian microbes?

“One of the key aspects of finding life elsewhere is our ability to compare it to life as

we know it, to compare it to the tree of life here on Earth and see whether that life represents

a second origin of life in our solar system. Life on Earth is based on the same fundamental

biochemistry, DNA, RNA, proteins, whether you’re a microbe at a hydro-thermal vent, or a

computer programmer at a software company, we all function on that same biochemistry.”

So could life elsewhere function differently? As Kevin tells me; “I’m curious, is there another

game in town? Is there another way to get the business of life done? To answer that

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question we need to go to places that could harbour life, Europa, Enceladus, these ocean

worlds of the outer solar system, where there is liquid water. These are the places that

entice me the most.”

As he can’t actually travel to Europa just yet, he recreates the atmospheric conditions on

Europa in his lab, or travels to places on earth where the extreme conditions might be

analogous to that elsewhere in the Solar System. His travels have taken him to Antarctica,

and to deep sea hydrothermal vents, which he did as part of the team on James Cameron's

2005 IMAX documentary Aliens of the Deep, He was also got to accompany Cameron as a

science crew member on his recent record breaking 2012 Challenger Deep expedition.

Is he likely to see a mission to Europa in the near future? The Joint NASA and European

Space Agency (ESA) Europa Jupiter System Mission was proposed for 2020, but due to

budgetary constraints NASA now looks unlikely to participate. At the beginning of May ESA

announced that it was going to proceed with a revised mission, the Jupiter Icy Moon

Explorer (JUICE) which plans to put a probe into orbit around both Europa and Ganymede.

While Kevin Hand may not be directly involved, he’ll no doubt be following the mission

closely.

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Scenes from the Trip 04 – The Creation Museum

I’ve talked to a number of theoretical physicists during my tour, and often the subject of

parallel universes has come up. This week I actually got to visit one, when I spent a

disorientating afternoon in Petersburg, Kentucky at the Creation Museum. The Creation

Museum bills itself as a natural history museum, but it’s one from a world in which we are

certain that God created the Earth and everything in it, roughly 6000 years ago, and all in 6

days. Anything that looks older, fossilised dinosaur bones, multiple strata of sedimentary

rock, signs of ancient water erosion and the moving of the continents were all caused by one

catastrophic event, the flood that Noah and his family so adroitly survived by building a

massive floating menagerie. Nothing you wouldn’t see or hear in your average

fundamentalist church you might think, but what makes the Creation Museum different, and

controversial, is that they believe that not only is everything stated in Genesis chapters 1-11

about the creation of the Earth true, but that they can prove it; With science. And they have

teams of properly qualified palaeontologists, geologists, biologists and historians working on

this. Oh, and baraminologists too. I’d never heard of them either.

For anyone not familiar with the early parts of the Bible then, these be the facts: God created

everything in 6 x 24 hour days, Adam and Eve were the first humans, all the bad stuff in the

world, from murder to animals eating other animals is a result of Eve’s choice of afternoon

snack, Noah built an ark to house two of every kind of land dwelling animal (including

dinosaurs) and his extended family while God wiped everything clean with a worldwide flood,

and then later on God linguistically confused Noah’s descendants and dispersed them

around the world with the Tower of Babel incident.

The Creation Museum was founded by the organisation Answers in Genesis (AIG), led by

the Australian fundamentalist Ken Ham. It first opened in May 2007, and on the day I was

visiting it was celebrating its 5th anniversary. In those five years over a million people have

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been through its doors, many, if my visit was anything to go by, on school trips. The site is

huge, housing both the museum and the headquarters of AIG, and employing over 300

people. The museum is entirely privately funded.

Despite the erroneous claim to be a natural history museum, the displays of fossils, including

casts of many famous examples such as an archaeopteryx and Lucy the Australopithecus

soon give way to expensively mounted dioramas telling the biblical story of creation. There’s

also a section where a world that has abandoned God is depicted. Picture a Disneyfied

crack den where vulnerable teenagers watch porn and consider abortions. Any actual

attempts to present “science” inevitably have a creationist slant. A display on evolution

suggests that “Although often viewed as an icon of evolution, Darwin’s finches serve as a

perfect model of variation within a created kind <as> In Genesis 1:21 we learn that God

created “every winged bird according to its kind””, and so those baraminologists interpret

kind to mean species.

While at the museum I spent some time talking to geologist Andrew Snelling. Another

Australian, Snelling has a PhD in geology from the University of Sydney, and worked in

various capacities for the Australian mining industry before getting into “creation science” full

time, first for the Texas based Institute for Creation Research, and then since 2007 for AIG

and the Creation Museum. I mention to Andrew that I’m surprised to see animatronic models

and fossils of dinosaurs around the museum. Do they believe the dinosaurs existed then?

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“They were real, we have their bones…in fact the Bible even potentially describes

creatures that were dinosaurs. We don’t have to be afraid of the real evidence….we’re

looking at the fossil record, instead of being the order of creatures living and dying and

evolving over millions of years, as the burial order during the flood. In other words, dinosaurs

were alive during the pre-flood earth, so were trilobites, so were people.”

So I ask him how his background in geology is being used here, he tells me of his fieldwork

at the Grand Canyon;

“In my research I’ve been involved in sampling rocks, sending them to laboratories,

where analysis is done on radio isotopes…What we always emphasise is this, we all have

the same rocks, the same fossils, the same evidence…We all have the same geological

maps… As we emphasise in the museum it’s your starting point”.

This is a point that’s made over and over in the museum, to the extent that it begins to sound

reasonable. Their mantra is “Hey, were all doing science here, there’s just a disagreement

about the age”. Creation science has a big problem with orthodox radiometric dating and

carbon dating. They also use the example of the 1980 Mount St Helens eruption and

subsequent pyroclastic flow to show how both the formation of the Grand Canyon and the

tectonic shift of the continents could have happened in seconds rather than over millennia

during the flood.

As I head for the exit I’m struck with mixed feelings about the place. Sure I think, it’s wacky,

but each to their own delusion, and at least the government isn’t funding this. Then another

party of wide eyed, eager to learn schoolchildren is ushered past.

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Scenes from the Trip 04 – Fighting Creationism

I’d been in America for two days, and had spent the morning recording the first interview of

my trip at the magnificently appointed offices of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, deep in

the technocratic wonderland of Silicon Valley. My next appointment is 40 miles north in

Oakland, and as I follow the freeway along the east coast of San Francisco bay I try to

imagine what splendours await me at the headquarters of the National Center for Science

Education (NCSE). I’m picturing a lot of glass and steel, perhaps a bit of marble. The reality

couldn’t be more different, but I immediately feel right at home. This is the office of a small,

badly funded NGO or indie publisher. It’s the offices of CND, Index on Censorship, Private

Eye or Resonance FM. Piles of books and papers teeter and herbal tea is drunk. I’ve come

to talk with Eugenie Scott, currently the Executive Director of the NCSE, and active within

the organisation on and off since its inception back in the early Eighties. Why then was the

NCSE set up?

“It was started by scientists and teachers who were very concerned because at the

time there was legislation being submitted all over the country which would require that if you

taught evolution you had to teach something called creation science to balance it out.”

From this humble office a twenty-five year rear-guard action against the incursion of

creationism has been coordinated and numerous landmark court cases have been fought

including the recent high profile victory in Dover, Pennsylvania. So why the broad title then?

Why are we not sat in the offices of The National Center for Fighting Creationism? According

to Eugenie;

“The board of directors thought back then that teachers and scientists working together was

a really strong combination, and after the Creationism issue was taken care of then we could

continue working together”.

At this point Eugenie lets out a resigned sigh, and we share a bitter laugh at the expense of

the early eighties optimism that presumed this would be a brief skirmish.

The teaching of creation science in a science classroom is a clear violation of the First

Amendment, which insists on separation of church and state, so over the years the

arguments of the creationists have had to adapt and evolve, first mutating into intelligent

design, memorably described by the paleontologist Leonard Krishtalka as "nothing more

than creationism in a cheap tuxedo". The attempt to teach of intelligent design was central to

the Dover court case, where the school-board tried to introduce a biology textbook with a big

helping of ID called Of Pandas and People, A book described to me by biologist Jerry Coyne

as “execrable”. The Dover case saw ID’s attempt to be considered a legitimate scientific

theory thoroughly debunked. So creationists moved on to the next phase of their campaign,

and now tend to base their arguments around an attempt to present the Evolution/ID debate

as a scientific “controversy”. This suggests that the theory of ID and the theory of evolution

carry equal weight, and creationists wish to see this apparent controversy taught in the

biology classroom.

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At a glance this might seem like a reasonable compromise. I’m mulling this over as I sit in

Jerry Coyne’s office in the Department of Ecology and Evolution within the beautiful, gothic

campus of the University of Chicago.

The author of the brilliant popular science primer Why Evolution is True, Jerry is excellent

company, but he’s also a pugnacious, street-fighting veteran of the fight against creationism,

and I’m vaguely dreading asking him a question he must have been asked a thousand times

before. So what is wrong with “teaching the controversy” in the classroom? Jerry suggests a

couple of things;

“First of all there is no controversy, in biology at least, about the major tenets of evolution, so

it’s scientifically untenable. Secondly, it confuses children by throwing in good science with

pseudoscience and not giving them the tools to sort it out. Would we teach faith healing

alongside medicine in medical school?”

As well as being educators in biology and evolution, both Eugenie Scott and Jerry Coyne are

active in the American atheist and skeptical communities, so their antipathy towards

creationism is hardly surprising. I decide then to speak to somebody with a more conciliatory

outlook on religion. As I arrive at the University of California, Irvine in Orange County, Los

Angeles I can’t help noticing the huge Francisco J. Ayala Science Library. This will definitely

be the first time I’ve interviewed somebody who has a library named for them. The Donald

Bren Professor of Biological Sciences at UCI, Francisco Ayala is also a former Dominican

priest, and was the 2010 recipient of the Templeton Prize. While writing lucidly on evolution,

Ayala also writes extensively about the relationship between science and religion, and tends

towards the “non-overlapping magisterium”. I ask him where this impulse for biblical

literalism in America comes from. “Fundamentally creationists and fundamentalists survive

because of ignorance”.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks first and foremost to everyone at the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for seeing the

potential in my application and funding my trip. This was truly a life changing experience for

which I will be forever grateful. Thanks particularly to Julia Weston and Sara Venerus for

administrative help. Needless to say I am immensely grateful to everyone who spoke to me

on the journey. Every single person I interviewed was a joy to speak with. Particular mention

goes to Sarah Hrdy for her generous hospitality, Kevin Hand for a fantastic tour of JPL,

Delene Beeland who talked to me about wolves, then took me to visit some, despite being

due to give birth any day, Paul Davies who spoke to me an hour after getting off a flight from

Australia, Mary Roach and Lucianne Walkowicz for their infinite patience when mechanical

failure meant re-recording large sections of the interviews, and Ann Druyan for the

inspiration. I’d like to thank Kim Powell and Los Alamos National Laboratory and Kendra

Snyder at the American Museum of Natural History for helping to facilitate a number of

interviews. Finally I’d like to thank Churchill Fellow Anita Sethi for suggest I apply for a

travelling fellowship in the first place.

Further Links

Little Atoms Road Trip Podcast: http://feeds.feedburner.com/littleatomsroadtrip

Little Atoms Podcast: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/littleatomspodcast

Little Atoms website: http://www.littleatoms.com/

Winston Churchill Memorial Trust: http://www.wcmt.org.uk/

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