Listen to an interview (MP3) with Randy Moore, co-author of the new book More than Darwin: An Encyclopedia of the People and Places of the Evolution-Creationism Controversy.
STEPHANIE XENOS: Welcome to CBS SoundBites, an audio production of University of Minnesota’s College of Biological Sciences. Today, we talk with Randy Moore, an award-winning teacher with the college’s biology program and co-author, along with Mark Decker, of a forthcoming book that puts the evolution-creationism debate in perspective. The book, More than Darwin: The People and Places of the Evolution-Creationism Controversy, comes out in March.
RANDY MOORE: When you teach it or even study it, the history of it is more interesting and a better way to learn it than the logic of it for evolutionary biology if not most of science. If you can understand the history of it, you have a very good appreciation of where the field is now. There is very little new in this controversy.
STEPHANIE XENOS: Moore says that studying the history of the evolution-creationism debate revealed some overarching themes running through the arguments of proponents and opponents alike.
RANDY MOORE: One of the most clear cut ones is how people try to reconcile their personal faith with science and the extent that people will go to, to do just that. Today, Francis Collins has a book out about reconciling his view of DNA and molecular biology with a Christian God. That’s a very, very old idea, not with DNA but there are people back way before Darwin that went along lots of intellectual twists and contortions to try to fit things together. Some just defined data like the Young Earth creationists do today—to remarkably—some who viewed no data as data. There was one person who came up with an idea called a tranquil flood, that there was a flood but it left no evidence, and the fact that you can’t see evidence of a flood is evidence of a flood.
STEPHANIE XENOS: The author spent time on location researching primary sources; seeing original documents opened their eyes to the incredible scope of the debate.
RANDY MOORE: We went all over just trying to track this stuff down. We went out to Oakland and looked at some original first editions of books and when you see those kinds of things, you get a much clearer picture and you understand not only evolution better, but certainly the controversy much better—where it started. You know, it didn’t start with Darwin, far from it. These new words, intelligent design, that’s a very, very old idea.
STEPHANIE XENOS: The influence of evangelists in early 20th century popular culture and the role in transmitting creationist ideas is one of the influences Decker and Moore detail in the book. Moore compares their popularity to that of rock stars today.
RANDY MOORE: One of the surprises in this was learning about how the evangelists in the nineteen teens and twenties and thirties—how popular they were. The Rolling Stones could not get crowds that Billy Sunday got, gigantic crowds. He would build his own tabernacle seating twenty thousand before he would come into town for a revival. And he would have twenty thousand people a night, every night for three weeks in Philadelphia. A staggering impact, and when someone—Billy Sunday—did a revival in Memphis for three weeks and ten percent of the people in the state came to hear it and when you start reading about them, you see why. The first people who put theater into church, they had a huge impact.
STEPHANIE XENOS: Moore points to the entry in the book on James Hutton, who made groundbreaking discoveries about the age of the earth, as an example of a person rarely tied to the history of evolution, but instrumental to its development. He describes Hutton as one of many such examples that the authors drew from politics, theology, science and beyond.
RANDY MOORE: When Darwin wrote his book and even before that, virtually all biologists accepted evolution—they didn’t know how it happened—they accepted it though. In Hutton’s day, no one accepted an Old Earth. Iconic people like Isaac Newton, people like that promoted a Young Earth and for Hutton to, by himself, out of… not out of nowhere, but seeing some very plain geological sites and interpreting them different, to come up with that idea, in my book, is up there with what Darwin did. It changed geology and therefore biology. The entries in the book—many of those entries are just theological, some are just political, and some are just science—but they all are important parts when you look at the controversy it pulls from so many areas: age of the earth, free speech, constitutional issues, science issues, that you go from James Hutton looking at some rocks to the Supreme Court and high school teachers and preachers and everything in between.
