children.”49 “The result was a fundamentalist revolt,” explained Lewontin, “the invention of ‘Creation Science,’ and successful popular pressure on local school boards and state textbook purchasing agencies to revise subversive curricula and boycott blasphemous textbooks.”50 Lewontin concludes that there is a culture war, but “[t]he real war is between the traditional culture of those who think of themselves as powerless and . . . materialism.”51 Lewontin goes on to take a side in this “war,” noting that evolutionary scientists have “a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism,” further admitting “that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”52 If Lewontin is right, then some leading scientists see the teaching of evolution as a way to oppose traditional religion. In his 2002 book, What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee, University of North Carolina Charlotte anthropologist Jonathan Marks observes that cultural conflicts between science and religion are as much the result of scientists making anti-religious statements in the name of evolution as they are anything else: Evolution provides the most empirically valid explanation that we have for the present existence of life. Period. But why should it really matter whether we are descended from arboreal hairy primates or not? . . . . The reason it matters to so many people is that scientists have made it matter, and they’ve done so in the worst possible way. They’ve taken a proposition . . . . “We are descended from apes”—and stretched it into a series of additional propositions, often both authoritative and odious. Thirty years ago, in a widely read scientific-philosophical work called Chance and Necessity, the French molecular biologist Jacques Monod argued that evolution shows life to be meaningless.53
49 Richard C. Lewontin, Billions and Billions of Demons, N.Y. REV. OF BOOKS (Jan. 9, 1997) (reviewing CARL SAGAN, THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD: SCIENCE AS A CANDLE IN THE DARK (1997)) (emphasis added), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/jan/09/billions-and-billions-of-demons/. 50 Id. 51 Id. 52 Id. 53 JONATHAN MARKS, WHAT IT MEANS TO BE 98% CHIMPANZEE 281 (2002).
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