Each year, the Ontario Library Association showcases selected titles for its Forest of Reading® program — a heavily-promoted recreational reading initiative, widely supported throughout Ontario’s public schools and public libraries. Among the 250,000 participating young readers, kids who read a minimum of five of the 10 books in their reading category will become eligible to vote for the award in that category.

The Forest of Reading program runs throughout the Spring, culminating with award ceremonies in front of an audience of several thousand at Canada’s largest literary event for younger readers: the Festival of Trees™ at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto (May 11 and 12, 2011).

Last year’s Silver Birch Fiction Award winner describes the experience:

I’ve never seen anything like it. More to the point, I’ve never seen thousands of kids screaming — like really screaming – about books.

Which is not to say I wasn’t warned beforehand. The organizers, as well as other writers who had attended the ceremony in the past, all told me what to expect. The massive stage. The lights. The screaming (did I mention the screaming?) children. “It’s like being a rock star for a day,” they told me.

Nomination is the Victory

Also competing for the Silver Birch: this skeptical book from my kids' science colleagues at Yes Mag

Also competing for the Silver Birch: a book written by veteran author Valerie Wyatt — my esteemed editor on Evolution!

For my own part, I’ve been walking around in a sort of daze this weekend — not because Evolution could perhaps win (competition in my category is stiff, including two other books from my own publisher, Kids Can Press) but because it’s already achieved more than I could have hoped. This nomination means that the topic of evolution will be massively promoted to grade school kids throughout Canada’s largest public school system.

Thanks to my colleagues at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, my related Portuguese-language book Evolução was distributed for free to thousands of public school students in Portugal in 2009. But despite recommendations from the (US) National Science Teachers Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and National Center for Science Education, the nomination to Ontario’s Forest of Reading program is Evolution’s first major breakthrough into English-speaking schools.

This matters, in outreach terms. Ontario’s educational system in particular has struggled (and sometimes failed) to give any reasonable coverage to the topic of evolution. As recently as 2000, Ontario curricula omitted evolution entirely. Even today, the central organizing principle of biology is taught only as a component of Biology 11. That seems insufficient for a province where only 59% of adults agree that “Human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years” (Angus Reid 2008 — PDF).

More to the point, biological evolution is not mentioned at all in Grades 1 through 10! (See the current Grade 1 – 8 Science and Technology curriculum PDF and current Grade 9 – 10 Science curriculum PDF.)

No matter how I think about this, it only becomes more humbling and incredible: this Spring, for many thousands of grade school kids, my book will be the only class-supported exposure to the subject of evolution.

Postscript

This project was a long road: years of nights-and-weekends work, out of pocket expense (for me, and for producer Pat Linse), and knocking on the doors of publishers who found fundamental biology too controversial.

I knew all that had paid off in the deepest possible way the moment parents started writing to tell me, “another month has passed, and she’s still having me read the book to her in the tub.” That’s what this is all about. The book has reached a lot of youngsters, and it ain’t done yet. (A Slovenian translation is on sale now, and a Korean edition is on its way.)

Looking at this project as a science outreach success, I’m reminded of the heat it took from hardline atheists. At issue was my brief passage explaining, “Science is our most reliable method for sorting out how the natural world functions, but it can’’t tell us what those discoveries mean in a spiritual sense.” (See long comment threads at this post and this followup post). Critics argued that my children’s book about the history of life should either have attacked theism, or else ignored one of the most common student questions about evolution.

That tiny subsection remains my honest answer. I would not, with the benefit of hindsight, do more than tweak it today. Still, in light of the criticism and the book’s success, it’s interesting to reflect: would Evolution have reached so many kids if I’d approached that topic in some other way? I suppose we’ll never know.

Creation is one of the most beautifully produced, artfully directed, factually accurate, and powerfully acted biopic films ever made. Full stop. It stars Paul Bettany as the Charles Darwin almost no one knows (and looking almost eerily similar if you match him to portraits of Darwin at that time), and Jennifer Connelly as the Emma Darwin almost invisible to history (and whose stunning Hollywood beauty is forgotten as she morphs into a realistic portrayal of a 19th century Englishwoman). The script is based on Randal Keynes’s biographical work, Annie’s Box, a moving portrait of the middle-aged Darwin—after the five-year voyage of the Beagle and before the white-bearded sage of Down basked in scientific triumph—as he struggled intellectually and emotionally to put the pieces of natural history together into a cogent theory. It is also about Charles Darwin the man, husband and father, besieged by health problems that curtailed his work days to only a few hours, stressed by the normal strains of marriage, and agonizing over the death from a mysterious disease of his beloved 10-year old daughter.

The film opens with the capture and return of indigenous natives of Tierra del Fuego, in the hopes that such “savages” could be saved by culture (British of course) and seeded to their native lands to spread the Queen’s English (and manners) and save their souls for God and country. (Of course, the Fuegians promptly ripped their clothes off and returned to the lifestyle appropriate for their culture.) Thankfully, the film wisely steers wide of the myth that Darwin discovered natural selection in the Galapagos Islands, and instead reveals what really happened (and what almost always happens in science) in Darwin’s halting and desultory steps to putting all the pieces of his theory together over many years after his return to England.

The hindsight bias that dictates so much of historical reconstruction—where every step along the way is pregnant with meaning for what we know is coming—is mercifully absent in Creation. Instead we find a Darwin unsure of himself. He doesn’t know what we know, and the films takes us on the intellectual journey of discovery with Darwin, as he also tries to balance work with family life and his incessant physical problems that finds him on regular visits to the town of Malvern to undergo James Manby Gully’s water cure therapy—what we would today call quack science—involving a naked Darwin standing in a shower-like stall being bombarded by waves of water. Presumably the shock to the system would shake up his innards enough to cure him. It didn’t.

The leitmotif of Creation, however, is not evolution so much as it is life and death and love. The love of a man and a woman, the love of a father and a child, and the life and death of an idea (God) and a child (Annie). Darwin has many children (almost everyone did in his time), but he was especially fond of his eldest daughter Annie, and one part of the leitmotif is Darwin’s recounting to her of the story of the death of Jenny, a young orangutan captured in Borneo and transported to the London Zoo, where it subsequently died of pneumonia in the arms of her caretaker. It’s a metaphor, of course, for Annie dying in the arms of her father, in a hotel room in Malvern when Darwin took her there for a worthless water cure therapy treatment. Since I have a daughter about whom I feel the same way Darwin did for his beloved Annie, the scene where Darwin subsequently returns to the Malvern hotel room and sobs uncontrollably on the bed where Annie died was so empathically painful that I could barely sit through it. And the portrayal of the strain Annie’s death puts the Darwin marriage through is surely not an exaggeration.

The other stress in Darwin’s marriage was his science and Emma’s religion. Darwin knew that people would think that his theory, in Thomas Huxley’s words, “killed god,” and he also knew that this fact would pain his wife, who worried for her husband’s soul to the point that she wrote him letters to that effect. It is, in fact, the likeliest reason why Darwin avoided the growing conflict between science and religion. Toward the end of his life he received many letters querying him on his religious attitudes. Darwin’s long-silence gave way to a few revelations. In one letter penned in 1879, just three years before he died, Darwin explained: “In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.”

A year later, in 1880, Darwin clarified his reasoning to the British socialist Edward Aveling, who solicited Darwin’s endorsement of a group of radical atheists. Darwin declined the offer, elaborating his reason: “It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follow[s] from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.” Emma was a deeply religious woman, so out of love and respect for her, Darwin kept the public side of his religious skepticism in check, an admirable feat of self-discipline by a man of high moral character.

Go see this beautiful film about such an estimable man, an honorable woman, and an enduring love.

“News flash: skeptics hack the Answers in Genesis website!” Or, at least, that was the joke  Skeptic co-publisher Pat Linse made when I read her some pro-natural selection material from the young Earth creationist organization’s slick online portal.

For years, I’ve been surprised how rarely this is mentioned: young Earth creationists need Darwin to be right — and when you press them on it, they often agree that he was.

Doesn’t sound like the creationism you know? It’s not a hacker’s prank, and it’s not a radical re-thinking of creationism. It is, however, a nuance as important as it is surprising: creationist leaders share Darwin’s belief that species routinely change (and even originate) through mutation and natural selection.

Indeed, according to Answers In Genesis’ (AiG) current web feature “Top 10 Myths About Creation,” it’s a straw-man to suppose creationists think otherwise:

A popular caricature of creationists is that we teach the fixity of species (i.e., species don’t change). And since species obviously do change, evolutionists enjoy setting up this straw-man argument to win a debate that was never really there in the first place.

Lest we have doubt about what they mean when they insist that “species obviously do change,” the same AiG article clarifies,

Species changing via natural selection and mutations is perfectly in accord with what the Bible teaches.

Moreover, many creationist organizations agree that new species originate through these well-understood Darwinian processes. As Creation Ministries International (CMI) explains,

Thirteen species of finches live on the Galápagos, the famous island group visited by Charles Darwin in the 1830s. The finches have a variety of bill shapes and sizes, all suited to their varying diets and lifestyles. The explanation given by Darwin was that they are all the offspring of an original pair of finches, and that natural selection is responsible for the differences.

Surprisingly to some, this is the explanation now held by most modern creationists.

Think about that for a moment. Given the super-heated rhetoric creationists use against Darwin, the magnitude of this concession is staggering: it is nothing less than the assertion that Darwin was right.

Nor do creationists merely concede that new species could, in principle, arise from natural evolutionary processes: they assert that this actually happens. For example, this is emphasized in AiG’s Answer magazine article “Do Species Change?”:

To his credit, Darwin corrected a popular misunderstanding. Species do change. Since Darwin’s day, many observations have confirmed this. In fact, new species have even been shown to arise within a single human lifetime. For example, one study gave evidence that sockeye salmon introduced into Lake Washington, USA, between 1937 and 1945 had split into two reproductively isolated populations (i.e., two separate species) in fewer than 13 generations (a maximum of 56 years).

Likewise, Philip Johnson, an architect of intelligent design creationism, argues that

Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence. If a small population of birds happens to migrate to an isolated island, for example, a combination of inbreeding, mutation, and natural selection may cause this isolated population to develop different characteristics from those possessed by the ancestral population on the mainland. When the theory is understood in this limited sense, Darwinian evolution is uncontroversial, and has no important philosophical or theological implications.

This process of adaptive radiation was Darwin’s key Galápagos discovery. It is also, bizarrely enough, essential for those biblical literalists who accept a world-wide flood. The reason, of course, is that the Earth has far more extant and extinct animal species than could possibly fit inside Noah’s ark. CMI explains,

Creationists have long proposed such ‘splitting under selection’ from the original kinds, explaining for example wolves, coyotes, dingoes and other wild dogs from one pair on the Ark.

The need for adaptive radiation puts creationists in the unexpected position of arguing that evolutionary processes are even more powerful than mainstream scientists suppose.

The question of time has, however, been seized upon by anti-creationists. They insist that it would take a much longer time than Scripture allows. … Instead, it is real, observed evidence that such (downhill) adaptive formation of several species from the one created kind can easily take place in a few centuries. It doesn’t need millions of years. The argument is strengthened by the fact that, after the Flood, selection pressure would have been much more intense — with rapid migration into new, empty niches, residual catastrophism and changing climate as the Earth was settling down and drying out, and simultaneous adaptive radiation of differing food species.

Now, before I am accused of quote-mining, let me be very clear: all of these authors and organizations emphatically reject the idea that evolutionary processes are sufficient to explain the diversity of life. All insist that intentional, intelligent design played a creative role in biological history — and that there are strict limits to the amount of biological change that may be generated by Darwinian processes.

As Answers in Genesis puts it,

Modern creationists need to challenge both the unbiblical essentialist ideas that underlie species fixity and the naturalistic ideas that underpin evolution from a common ancestor. The truth lies somewhere between these two extremes: yes, species change, but variation has clear limits.

You’re probably familiar with the distinction creationists draw here, between what they term “microevolution” and “macroevolution.” As Creation Ministries International clarifies,

Natural selection, yes. But to infer that this equates to evolution, in the sense in which we are meant to take it (microbes-to-microbiologists), no.

According to this common view, living things may adapt, through evolutionary processes, in response to new ecological niches, genetic novelty, or environmental conditions — but only so far.

How far? Young Earth creationists hypothesize an additional unobserved cap upon the regular evolutionary processes we observe in nature: living things may vary only “within created kinds.”

That’s easy to say, but elusive as smoke to nail down — because no one knows what a “created kind” might be in practical terms. As used currently, the definition seems completely fluid, meaning whatever is convenient. Sometimes “created kind” means “species,” but sometimes not. Sometimes it seems to go much higher up the taxonomic chain: genus, or family, or even order.

Trying to make heads or tails of this is a creationist project called “Baraminology,” or “creation biosystematics.” This, according to Creationwiki, is an effort “to determine which forms of life are related, and which are not” from a young Earth creationist perspective; that is, to figure out where observed evolution ends and creation takes over.

The fossil record shows no such “created kinds” limit (quite the opposite — common descent is a clear fact of biological history), but let’s set that aside for a second.

As it stands today, biologists, intelligent design creationists, young Earth creationists, and mainstream religious leaders (such as the Pope) agree that species may change and arise through the processes Darwin identified.

Let’s just stop for a moment and enjoy that.

The title, “Religion, Evolution can Live Side by Side,” was written by the CNN editors, but it does capture the thrust of the piece which I concluded by noting that if you are a believer in an eternal god, what difference does six zeros make on when the creation happened — 10,000 or 10,000,000,000 years ago — or by what method of creation was used: spoken word or big bang?

Well, this set off a mild firestorm among some observers of the science-and-religion debate, most prominently the estimable Jerry Coyne, the author of one of the best books ever written on the subject, Why Evolution is True, in his website of the same title called me an “accommodationist” and even a “faitheist” (“faith atheist”?)

I responded to Jerry on my TRUE/SLANT blog, and had a good horselaugh (which according to Martin Gardner trumps 10,000 syllogisms) at the comment by Lewis Grossberger (who also blogs at True/Slant): “As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one thing worse than a faitheist — and that’s a fundagnostical. I hope you’re not one of those.”

Continuing in the neologistic theme, “Furcas” says that my writing is “faitheistic accommodationism in its purest and most disgusting form.”

Another good horselaugh was provided by a physicist at his own blog: “Michael Freakin’ Shermer’s heart is not pure enough for Jerry Coyne. If Jerry Falwell’s circle of orthodoxy was, say, 1 meter in radius, then His Worshipfulness The Right Reverend Jerry Coyne’s circle of orthodoxy has a radius of, roughly, a Planck Length.”

This comment well captured my position and needs no further comment:

What Shermer is trying to make peace with are sensible moderate theists, not fundamentalists. It is the people in the middle, not those on the fringes, who will, ultimately, determine the virulence of religion and irreligion. Shermer is trying to reduce religion’s virulence, not embracing fundamentalist ownership of the Bible, and it’s ridiculous interpretations of it. Shermer is right to reclaim the Bible as part of the Western cultural patrimony, and not leave it to fundamentalists to tell us what it means, and the implications to be drawn from it.

How one responds to theists all depends on the context and goals of the response. I think we nonbelievers have fallen into black-and-white thinking on the question of “what is the ‘right way’ to respond?” The answer is that there is more than one way. There are multiple ways, all of which work, depending on the context. Sometimes a head-on, take-no-prisoners, full-frontal assault á la Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, or Jerry Coyne is the way to go. Sometimes a more conciliatory approach á la Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, or your humble servant is best. It all depends on the context and what you are trying to accomplish.

By the way, agreeing with my alleged critics for a moment, I do not actually think that Dawkins and Hitchens are rude or disrespectful. If you read their works or listen to them in public lectures and debates, they are forceful, clear, and unwaivering, but they are not disrespectful. Watch, for example, the recent body slam Hitchens and Stephen Fry gave the Catholic Church for its stance on women’s rights, birth control, and 3rd-world poverty. It was focused and direct, but not disrespectful.

It is my goal, and the goal of the Skeptics Society, to educate as many people as possible about the power and wonders of science and to employ science to solve social, political, economic, medical and environmental problems. As such, we need as many people as we can get on board with a common goal, whatever it may be (starvation in Africa, disease in India, poverty in South America, global warming everywhere … pick your battle). My concern is that if we insist that people of faith renounce every last ounce of their beliefs before they are allowed to join the common fight against these scourges of humanity, we have just alienated the vast majority of the world’s population from our project.

Sometimes religion is the problem — and when it is let’s not hesitate to call it out. I did so myself on the day before Thanksgiving on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show in a debate with Dinesh D’Souza when Hewitt insisted that we thank God for our abundance and that believing in God leads to a prosperous nation like America. I pointed out — without accommodationism, faitheism, or fundagnosticalism — that 99% of everyone in Peru is Christian and yet they are dirt poor. Why? Because of warring political factions, governmental corruption, lack of education, resource depletion, currency debasement, inflation, and especially the lack of property rights and the rule of law.

So let’s not accommodate or pander in those areas where religion is clearly a problem or unmistakably mistaken. But not all (or even very many) social problems are caused by religion, so let’s pick our battles carefully and choose our strategies wisely.

Adam Savage and his Darwin 08 shirt.

So I was very pleased to see on last week’s episode of the show that Adam was wearing a t-shirt that had “Darwin ’08″ emblazoned across the chest. These shirts were created (haha! get it? Created!) by the New York City Skeptics, and one was given to Adam at TAM 6.

You can check him out proudly displaying his support of reality at the NYC Skeptics’ webpage, and they have YouTube clips of the show as well.