The most interesting session I went to at the AAAS meeting was one yesterday afternoon about communicating with a religious America. The theme: scientists do a better job of alienating and antagonizing religious people than they do in explaining how evolution works and how it is real. Who better to speak on this topic then Ken Miller, Brown biology professor and one of the expert witnesses in the Dover, PA trial? If you remember, in that trial, the judge ruled that intelligent design has no place in the science classroom.

To a very crowded room (I had to sit on the floor), Miller gave an energetic speech about the ways scientists should combat the intelligent design movement. First, they need to understand why so many Americans reject evolution. Miller said it’s because evolution to them means that humans came about by accident, randomly, and that idea is just not very acceptable.

So, Miller says, rather than deny the existence of design in nature (because ‘design’ has theological connotations), scientists need to embrace the word and concept and reclaim it as their own (without the religious overtones). Scientists should be saying that evolution isn’t an accident; it is part of nature. It happens as a result of the laws of the natural world. That, he says, should make evolution seem less random and will make it easier for scientists to communicate with religious people without alienating them right away.

Miller went on to argue how the genome, proteins and the human body have design to them. He spoke quickly and I, being on the floor, couldn’t see his slides very well, so I didn’t fully get all of those arguments. Which worried me. If Miller, who has had a lot of practice already communicating science to a general audience, couldn’t explain clearly to me how there’s design in biology, then how can we expect anyone else to make that argument convincing to the most skeptical of people? I think it would be easy to explain how evolution unfolds as a result of natural forces, but trying to show evidence of design in nature might be a tad difficult. Some might argue that this would be pandering to people who like the idea of a grand designer.

Another speaker on the panel, “Steve Case”:https://home.everestkc.net/scase001/index.htm from the University of Kansas (who was involved in some of the public hearings in Kansas about evolution vs intelligent design) was quite critical of what he called scientists’ “big-stick” approach to communicating with anti-evolutionists: trying to “beat them into learning” and sending the message of “if you know what I know, you’ll think what I think.” That approach, Case said, doesn’t work. Instead, scientists need to find ways to make evolution relevant and applicable to people and their everyday lives.

“Barbara King”:https://www.wm.edu/anthropology/directory.php?personid=1228157, a biological anthropologist from the College of William and Mary, who studies African apes, in her talk said that scientists declaring their religion and their belief in God (a la Francis Collins) wasn’t helpful either because that doesn’t get at the science. Her recommended approach was to show how evolution is at work in other areas beyond just the origin of humans, such as religion. She gave an example of how bonobos display behavior when one of their own dies…behavior that can be seen as early evolutionary roots of religion.

What do you think of these recommended approaches? Do you think they could work?