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Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul
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Average Rating:  out of 52 Reviews
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Price: $25.95
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Sale: $11.50
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Manufacturer: Ecco
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EAN (European Article Number): 9780060885489
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Hardcover
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Author: Edward Humes
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Publisher: Ecco
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Edition: 1st
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Dewey Decimal Number: 231.76520973
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Publication Date: 2007-02-01
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Reading Level: 380
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Description: What should we teach our children about where we come from? Is evolution good science? Is it a lie? Is it incompatible with faith? Did Charles Darwin really say man came from monkeys? Have scientists really detected "intelligent design"—evidence of a creator—in nature? What happens when a town school board decides to confront such questions head-on, thrusting its students, then an entire community, onto the front lines of Americas culture wars? From bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Edward Humes comes a dramatic story of faith, science, and courage unlike any since the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. Monkey Girl takes you behind the scenes of the recent war on evolution in Dover, Pennsylvania, the epic court case on teaching "intelligent design" it spawned, and the national struggle over what Americans believe about human origins. Told from the perspectives of all sides of the battle, Monkey Girl is about what happens when science and religion collide.
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Customer Reviews
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Review Summary: Deceptive Ignoramuses Monkeying Around |
Date: 2008-12-15 |
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Details: Campbell Brown, a CNN anchor, once stated "When Candidate A says it's raining and Candidate B says it's sunny, a journalist should be able to look outside." This is the essence of being a good reporter. Mr. Humes does an outstanding job of documenting and analyzing the Dover School Committee's misguided attempts to sneak creationism into the public schools' science classes. The author gives each side amply space to explain their stances and in the process exposes Intelligent Design for what it really is.
Mr. Humes shows a great deal of respect to most of the various characters involved in this philosophical struggle with the exception of a few wingnuts and obvious charlatans. Many of the people on the school committee were decent people, but like most Americans, didn't have a clue of even the most basic premises of evolution or the Bible. With that level of ignorance, this attack on science was and will continue to happen. Mr. Humes had written a informative, entertaining, honest and easy-to-read story about when good intentions go very awry. Read it and weep. |
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Review Summary: I wasn't sure I really wanted to read this book |
Date: 2008-10-05 |
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Details: I read a lot of science news online, even though I don't work in a science field. I've read quite a bit about intelligent design, and actually had read the Kitzmiller judge's decision. As a result, I wasn't sure this book would be interesting as I assumed it would mostly just be about things I already knew.
I was wrong - this book provides incredible detail about the personal lives and convictions of the various school board members in Dover, Pennsylvania and the events that led up to the famous case. The author also gives the reader histories of some of creationism and Intelligent Design's more public promotors, and their organizations. The personal history of the ACLU attorney was also very valuable.
I'm halfway through the book and am hoping to finish it before the weekend is over. I'm now in the section dealing with the ACLU and the NCSE.
Even if you follow the news carefully and know a bit about evolution, creationism, intelligent design and the battles in the US education system over these things you will find much that is new and interesting here.
I'll add more to this review after I finish the book. |
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Review Summary: Exposing Intelligent Design's Breathtaking Inanity |
Date: 2008-09-19 |
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Details: Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul by Edward Humes is an extraordinary book, allowing the reader to participate in the full details of the Dover Pennsylvania trial concerning Intelligent Design in a way that it seems likely that few even of those actually present would have been able to. The wealth of detail is impressive, and yet the narrative keeps the reader's interest as well as any great suspense novel - and this even though you know how the story ends! The characters in the story come alive and even the most flawed and stubborn individuals are not treated without sympathy and fairness.
Humes provides historical context for the controveries over evolution, noting both that Darwin's theories were simply the "last straw" in a growing encroachment of science onto the claims of the Bible, literally interpreted. Yet not everyone either then or now has found their religious faith and Darwin's explanation of biological evolution in terms of natural selection incompatible. In fact, while roughly the same number of Republicans and Democrats claim to believe in God, the number of Democrats that accept evolution is double that of the Republicans (p.346, where Humes analyses a three-sentence statement by Ann Coulter and finds it contains 5 lies and one serious error). I wonder whether this is a result of teachers avoiding evolution in areas where Conservatives predominate. What becomes incredibly clear over the course of the book is that the Americans who reject evolution do so without understanding it p.29). A classic moment in the book is a dialogue between a scientist and a couple of individuals talking about the problems with evolution. "Name some problems with it", the scientist challenges, and no actual problems that have any relevance to evolution are named. This matches with another clear statistical correlation: as education increases, so does acceptance of evolution (p.28). In many of the areas most strongly opposed to evolution, mandatory high school education hasn't been a reality in those communities for all that long. Nonetheless, throughout the book it becomes clear that, as one student is quoted as saying on the last page, "Facts have nothing to do with it" (p.351; see also p.250). People oppose evolution for a variety of reasons, but it is clear that they have nothing genuinely to do with the scientific evidence. Scientists keep answering so-called objections, and the same ones keep getting repeated over and over in spite of this.
What I found most remarkable about the book was how dishonest the supporters of Intelligent Design were. I knew from my past contact with Terry Mortenson here on campus that some ID proponents are at least not entirely up-front, but now I am inclined to simply say that the movement, like young-earth creationism before it, is characterized by dishonesty (pp.325-6), although there are exceptions. The impression that I once had, that ID deserves to be distinguished from creationism, has been largely undermined (although once again there are exceptions). The court subpoenaed earlier drafts and published copies of the ID textbook Of Pandas and People, and it was clear that after the 1987 court ruling that creationism could not be taught in schools, the publishers had simply gone through the book and replaced "creation" with "design" throughout the book, leaving everthing else exactly the same. Yet they consistently claim that they are not merely a rehash of creationism, and that their enterprise can be separated from religious questions (p.200).
The problematic mindset of fundamentalism is heard on the lips of school board dictator Bill Buckingham, who says of the Bible "It's either all truth or it's all lies. There's no in-between....And I know it's truth." If one was forced to make this decision then one really would have to choose between one's heart and the experience of the divine, and one's mind which, if it looks at the evidence seriously, cannot claim that the Bible is all true in the sense of all scientifically and historically factual. But of course, this is a false antithesis, and precisely the rhetoric that drives people of faith to abandon their faith when they learn what science, history and other disciplines have to say and all the evidence they can muster in favor of their conclusions. To use an example I have used before, if I tell you about my own personal experience of God, I do not have to be infallible or even completely trustworthy for what I tell you to be important, significant, meaningful and true. All I have to do is be honest about that point. Then you can go and test it for yourself.
Interesting ironies of the creation-evolution culture war are highlighted in the book. Dover, Pennsylvania as well as Kansas provide some of the strongest paleontological evidence for evolution available (see e.g. pp.16-17). There is a fairly easy test that could help prove or disprove the ID argument about irreducible complexity, yet the proponents of ID, who claim they are doing scientific research, have not done it and have no interest in doing it; and even more ironically, one of Behe's own papers actually shows evolution to be plausible as an explanation of the paper's subject matter (pp.304-306). The school board in Dover, rather than listen to the science teachers, to the scientific community, to existing science standards, decided to push their own agenda, yet they didn't read the ID books either (pp.226-227). And yet they have the audacity after all is said and done to accuse the Republican judge of the case of being yet another 'activist judge' - Humes rightly calls this response the rant of "sore losers" (p.344). The Discovery Institute has been active in misrepresenting the case (pp.343-344), while the school board members were shown to have lied under oath (pp.325-326). And (perhaps most amusingly) Behe admitted that, if the proposed ID definition of science were accepted, astrology would then be a science too (p.301).
In contrast, rather than redefining science as the proponents of ID would like, the theory of evolution makes predictions and they are consistently confirmed (see examples on pp.268-269, 341). There are, as in all areas of scientific inquiry, gaps in our knowledge, and new information sometimes demands that earlier assumptions and ideas be revised. The vast scientific literature on evolution shows evidence of all this. The biologists (with rare exceptions, in which the dishonesty is exposed not by creationist rhetoric, but by other scientists' further investigations) play by the rules, and their results are scientifically sound. Evolutionary biology is not about democracy, it is not about faith, it is about evidence and a wider theoretical framework to explain that evidence. That is why it works, why it fits the data, and why scientists continue to support it despite the ranting and raving of America's key proponents of pseudo-science.
Let me conclude by recommending once again the testimony of paleontologist Kevin Padian, whose presentation has been made available by the NCSE. It is too wonderful not to mention it again, especially as it has been made available online.
I've discussed more the substantive content of the book, but more than anything else Humes tells a story about real life that is a page-turner, and that may help those of us trying to play our part in promoting science education and a constructive interaction between science and religion to understand why there seem to be so many who adamantly oppose us and continue to do so even when shown that they don't have a good reason for doing so!
- James F. McGrath, author of The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith. [This review originally appeared on the Exploring Our Matrix blog]
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Review Summary: "Design" floored |
Date: 2008-08-25 |
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Details: The case of Kitzmiller versus Dover Area School District is the most significant court battle between creationists and secularism. It was not, however, a battle between Christians and Atheists because many of the plaintiffs were also Christians. They fought to keep religion out of school and for the right to have the sole responsibility of where their children should receive their religious learning. The court delivered its judgment on 20 December 2005. Several books had since been written about this case which demonstrated another instance of fact being stranger than fiction. Four of the better books were written by journalists and writers covering the trial and so their accounts were partly reporting and partly eye-witness. The books included "Monkey Girl" by Edward Humes, "The Battle over the Meaning of Everything" by Gordy Slack, "The Devil in Dover" by Lauri Lebo, and "40 Days & 40 Nights" by Matthew Chapman. In addition to these books, at least two of the experts at the trial have also written about it. Barbara Forrest updated her book "Creationism's Trojan Horse" and Kenneth Miller wrote "Only a Theory". The latter two books are philosophical and scientific assessment of "Intelligent Design". The others cover the issues and drama of the trial in Dover. If you have time for only one of these books, it would be hard to choose between Slack and Humes. Lebo's book is the shortest and so that might be a consideration. I prefer the wit and style of Slack, but Humes appears a little more detached. It is difficult not to note the implication of the Kitzmiller case. As the writers end their accounts, one is left with the distinct impression that the "Intelligent Design" movement has suffered a huge body blow. Slack, Humes, Lebo, and Chapman have shown how the attempt to pass off Intelligent Design as a science failed. Judge Jones' said in his judgment, after reviewing the evidence of the events and actions of the board members and the experts called on their behalf, "To assert a secular purpose against this backdrop is ludicrous". |
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Review Summary: Purposeful and Polemic |
Date: 2008-05-16 |
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Details: Monkey Girl is one of the most challenging, eye-opening, involving books I have read. Edward Humes' commitment to Evolution is strong throughout, but he presents in well-written detail an overall balanced account of the Darwinism/Intelligent Design court controversy in Kitzmiller v. Dover, PA.
Monkey Girl stumbles a bit (3-5) when Humes states that Copernicus showed the Earth was no longer "the apple of God's eye", that the Enlightenment's founding father deists believed in a distant creator, and that Darwinism showed that man was akin to a marsupial or a mollusk; that it provided the "proverbial last straw for the faithful." This is an interesting take on history. Millions of religious folk around the world still worship weekly, knowing full well the earth's proper placement in the cosmos. I don't think that people leave the faith because Copernicus made them do it. As well, the writings of the founding fathers sway more towards the concepts of Jonathan Edwards rather than Charles Darwin, and many people don't believe that humanity is a "happy accident", hence the court case and, of course, Monkey Child.
This aside, Humes presents clearly the ignorance of the Dover, PA school board in forcing the idea of Intelligent Design (ID) without knowing much about it, or much about Evolution, and discusses the implosion of the ID camp as the confrontation headed to court. Achieved too was the reality that ID, while argued to be scientific, seemingly is interchangeable with the religious idea of creationism, as even Rush Limbaugh stated (292). Kindly, Humes does not completely excoriate the Dover school board leader, but later shows the difficult circumstances he was under, and keeps him from being two-dimensional.
As a Christian, I was challenged at how the conservative Christian movement is seen through the eyes of others. The words of Pat Robertson, Ann Coulter and the exploits of Kent Hovind were sad to read. I now have a better idea of what Darwinism is, want to study more the stated proofs of the fossil record, and came away with stronger doubts about the young earth idea. The ID movement did not come across well, but it did not seem that Humes had an axe to grind. He did the work of a good investigative reporter, and was able to make a difficult topic readable to a non-science person like myself.
However, I did not "convert" to Evolution. It surprised me that the noted Evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould could not "destroy" the lawyer and anti-Darwinist Phillip Johnson in a debate (68), and thought that Humes too easily dismisses Michael Denton's book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (129-131), which impacted Michael Behe to study and promote the idea of Intelligent Design. Kenneth Miller's idea that ID turns God into a "tinkerer" (267) loses impact by suggesting that God would choose distant deism rather than a close relationship to creation. And, even though Darwin's theory did not discuss abiogenesis (how non-life became life), I think it needs to answer it: Evolution's biggest gain would be to show abiogenesis in action: until then both Evolution and Christianity claim origin non-empirically, that is, by faith. Too, Humes' epilogual comment that the Bible is "rife with proven geographic, scientific and historical inaccuracies", that outside of the scriptures there is no record of Christ, and that the Bible contains "no eyewitness accounts of Christ" (348) is embarrassing for Humes. As an investigative reporter he should have studied the works of Lee Strobel, another investigative reporter, rather than write such blatant inaccuracies. That he writes these things to me shows his being influenced by an a priori commitment to Darwinism, and I came away wondering if this commitment led him to shade other aspects of his book due to his beliefs.
Most decisive for me were the concerns of the Christian teacher Jill Gonzalez-Bravo, whose teaching of Evolution brought consternation to her students as it showed they were not "born for a purpose" (172). Humes' sympathetic portrayal of her loses force when he states that her concerns might be shown to be "baloney" (173), that questions of purpose could be answered outside of the classroom. The problem with this is the lecture I attended in May of 2008 at Colorado College where the renowned Darwinist Alex Rosenberg of Duke University stated unequivocally that Darwinism, which was fact, was incompatible with the Abrahamic Covenant, that is, with the Old Testament and by extension the New. Should I take the word of Humes, a journalist who claims that questions of purpose may have a role outside of the classroom, at home or in a church or synagogue, or of Rosenberg, who holds that Evolution has determined that religious purpose as practiced and believed in by many is a falsehood? It is this very issue, expressed ably by Gonzalez-Bravo and brushed asise by Humes, that gives me pause. True, the theories of gravity, the big bang, relativity, quantum theory, atomic theory and plate-tectonics are adhered to in spite of "gaps"(93), but none of these challenge the role of purpose and meaning as does Darwinism, and for that it should be judged more strictly, even as a science.
All that said, I came away as an avowed (non fundamental, non young earth toting, non ID spouting) theist, and I do this due to my worldview. I say this out of respect for Humes. He wrote a lucid, erudite, page-turning book so convincing I could have gone either way were it not for my a priori commitment to biblical theism. While Evolution could have been God's method of creating the world, it should not be used to replace the Almighty, and I value the words of Kenneth Miller that "science rules out the supernatural because it is science that is limited, whereas God is not." (267, as interpreted by Humes) The author Anthony Esolen has stated that life is remarkedly different for one whose view of the universe is not colored by a few beliefs that are in turn believed to be revealed by an almighty God. If God is the personal creator the universe is a deep and rich place; God is the "tinkerer" who enters into the lives of His children who are made in His own image and likeness. Without this the universe, to Esolen, is rather flat and only impacts us environmentally and in faddish moral good or evil. Darwinism might just be incompatible with Christianity as it has never encountered something so rich, but continues to intelligently develop computer programs to show that Intelligent Design (in whatever form it may have taken) might just be superfluous to world Evolution. There is much to consider in the ongoing debate about Evolution, much outside the scope of Monkey Child. It is worth the read as an account of Evolution in the culture wars, but does not deal well with some important questions, ones that are not "baloney".
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