American Scientist

It is not in the least surprising that the distinguished Harvard scientist E. O. Wilson, described in his obituary in The New York Times as a “pioneer of evolutionary biology,” was hostile to creationism. In his 2014 bestseller The Meaning of Human Existence, Wilson insists that “the explicit denial of evolution presented as a part of a ‘creation science’ is an outright falsehood, the adult equivalent of plugging one’s ears, and a deficit to any society that chooses to acquiesce in this manner to a fundamentalist faith.”

And he was no more amenable to the less explicit approach represented by creation science’s cousin, intelligent design. Endorsing Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross’s 2004 critique of intelligent design, Creationism’s Trojan Horse, he wrote, “This is the definitive work on modern creationism, an exhaustively detailed and compelling exposure of the attempt—by the well-known process in nature called by biologists ‘aggressive mimicry’—to corrupt science in the service of sectarian religion.” (Intelligent design was to meet its Waterloo the following year, in Kitzmiller v. Dover.)

Wilson was willing to take a stand against creationism even as a young graduate student at the University of Tennessee in 1955. In his 1994 memoir Naturalist, he describes how he willfully violated Tennessee’s Butler Act, the law that had been enacted and used to prosecute John Thomas Scopes in 1925. (The Butler Act forbade instructors in the state’s public universities and public schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of Man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”) Having read about the recently renamed hominin Homo erectus, Wilson was hankering to share the information with the Tennessee undergraduates he was teaching. “I also had a mischievous itch to shake things up just to see what would happen,” he explained. “I might get into the same trouble as Scopes, but I would spring out of it immediately—I guessed—because the evidence was so much more solid—I felt sure—and the faculty would support me—I hoped.” In the event, after his lecture on human evolution, he received only one question from the students: “Will this be on the final exam?”

Despite his contemptuous words for creationism and its promoters, Wilson’s attitude toward rank-and-file creationists was consistently compassionate. Raised as a Southern Baptist, he fell away from the faith while he was a student, and he described himself later as a “provisional deist”—willing to entertain the possibility of a deity, although not a personal deity interested in guiding the course of evolution or human affairs. But he retained a sincere affection for the culture. “I drifted away,” he said in a 2006 interview in Grist, “but I understood it, and I enjoyed returning to it. It felt natural. The people are wonderful.”

Wilson thus generally refrained from attacking religion in making the case against creationism. In his 1994 book Consilience, he unequivocally proclaims that “in every scrap of data from every level of biology, from the chemistry of DNA to the dating of fossils, it has been the case that organic evolution by natural selection beats Creationism.” But he is quick to ward off any misconception about the implications of that victory: “God may exist, He may be delighted with what we are up to on this minor planet,” he concedes, “but His fine hand is not needed to explain the biosphere.”

A more detailed discussion appears in Wilson’s 2006 book The Creation, in which he tries to recruit evangelical Christians to defend biodiversity by appealing to shared values, such as “a love of the Creation.” To be sure, Wilson and his intended audience—personified by a notional Southern Baptist pastor to whom the book is addressed—conceive of the creation in quite different terms. In the final chapter, after acknowledging that the pastor believes that “God made the Creation,” Wilson issues a respectful demurral.

Despite disagreeing with the pastor about the creation, Wilson seeks to engage constructively with him on evolution. He urges acceptance of evolution not only by citing the consensus of the scientific community but also by arguing that rejecting that consensus will be harmful to the pastor’s own goals. He tells the pastor, “It is a dangerous step for theologians to summon the default argument of Intelligent Design as scientific evidence for religious belief.” In Wilson’s view, to invoke the actions of a supernatural designer to account for natural phenomena that have not yet been explained scientifically is to hold religious faith hostage to scientific fortune.

In 2014, in The Meaning of Human Existence, Wilson seemed to be somewhat pessimistic about the public’s acceptance of evolution: “About one-half of Americans (46 percent in 2013, up from 44 percent in 1980 [sic]), most of whom are evangelical Christians, together with a comparable fraction of Muslims worldwide, believe that no such process [as evolution] has ever occurred,” he lamented. (He was apparently referring to Gallup’s polling on views of the origin of human beings, which began in 1982, not 1980.)

But Wilson was overstating the degree of rejection of evolution, because the creationist option in the Gallup polls explicitly rejects only human evolution. More importantly, although polling results did not vary much between 1982 and 2013, there is now a trend toward increasing acceptance of evolution, and belief in creationism has dropped to the vicinity of 40 percent in recent polls. This trend is even more apparent in a study by Jon D. Miller and colleagues of a series of surveys carried out from 1985 to 2020; the study’s findings are described in a recent article in Reports of the National Center for Science Education.

The uptick in public acceptance of evolution in the United States doubtless struck Wilson as excellent news, for he regarded evolution as the most illuminating result in all of science. He also regarded it as a crucial part of science education, telling The American Biology Teacher in 1996 that he continued to teach biology to nonscience majors at Harvard because “the kind of information and ideas that can be transmitted from biology, particularly evolutionary biology, to this group of students is potentially among the most important information they can learn.”

Yet plenty of work remains to be done, especially in science education. A recent study by researchers at Penn State and the National Center for Science Education found that in 2019, 18 percent of public high school biology teachers in the United States were still presenting creationism as a scientifically credible alternative to evolution. Could there be any better way to honor the legacy of E. O. Wilson than to support the honest, accurate, and thorough teaching of the subject to which he made such substantial contributions?