The Cover-Up Gets Underway
After a conference of 160 biologists rejected Darwinism in 1980, Harvard University’s famous evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould declared the theory “dead” in a scientific journal. In 1981, however, Gould noticed a trend among his colleagues to “mute” debate on theory so as not to encourage the creationists , and he said, “Perhaps we should all lie low and rally around the flag of strict Darwinism—a kind of old time religion on our part.”
As a case in point, in 1999 I was amused to see how Gould rode to the rescue of Darwinism in Kansas, where the state school board voted to let the local school boards decide what to teach about evolution. Apparently outraged by this attack on the Darwinists’ united front, Gould wrote for Time magazine an essay titled, “Dorothy, It’s Really Oz.” In it the Harvard professor skillfully ridiculed the Kansas plan and he eloquently defended evolution as fact—without ever mentioning Darwin or his theory…In effect, Gould defended textbook Darwinism, which he had declared “dead,” while not saying a word about it.
Sitting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, did Gould know what exactly he was defending in Kansas (maybe that [fraudulent] giraffe?). I could not find out. Wanting to obtain a list of the state’s biology books, I telephoned long distance to the Kansas School Board, and a very uncooperative employee told me I would have to ask the individual schools—as if the board did not know what books it had authorized. The telephone company helped me to reach a high school, where a panicky biology teacher demanded, “Why are you singling me out?” Nothing would persuade the man to let me know what biology books were being used in his school.
How did public education get to be secret education? Sir Walter Scoff understood that sort of thing. In his familiar words, “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive.”