Living Witness (38 page)

Eddie Block didn't bother to lock up, which Gregor thought was a very bold move. If Gregor had been a seventeen-year-old boy, bored
to Hell in trigonometry, the chance to take a police car on a joy ride with the sirens wailing would have been far too tempting to give up.

Of course, if Gregor had done something like that, when he was seventeen, the worst that would have happened to him was a fine and a lecture from a judge, or—if this was his third or fourth offense—maybe a night in jail, just to “scare some sense into him.” These days, any kid who tried it would probably actually be sent to jail, and kept there for a year or two.

“It doesn't make sense, what we do about incarceration these days,” Gregor said.

Eddie Block looked surprised. “Excuse me?” he said. “It's not a jail, it's the school. I mean, it felt like jail when I was here, you know, but it isn't really. I know that now. I've seen real jails.”

“Right,” Gregor said. He made a gesture toward the door, and Eddie started to lead him inside.

It really didn't make sense, what they did about incarceration these days. It was as if the whole country was in a rut. There was never any more than one answer to any question, and often only one answer to several questions. He suddenly wondered what would happen to Mallory Cornish, Judy Cornish's oldest daughter. Somebody had told him this morning that she had pushed another girl yesterday and the other girl had injured her knee and been forced to take a few days off school.

“But her mother had just been murdered,” Gregor said. Then, realizing he had said it out loud, he looked to see if Eddie Block had heard him.

Eddie was standing in the big front doorway with a tall, thin, no-nonsense-looking woman in late middle age.

“Mr. Demarkian,” he said, waving Gregor over. “This is Miss Marbledale.”

Gregor was impressed. Most school administrators these days would have put several layers of people between them and any kind of visitor. There would at least have been a secretary to come out and lead them to the office. Gregor walked over to the door and noticed
that Miss Marbledale wasn't wearing a coat. He looked inside and saw one of those vast open foyers that had been one of the defining characteristics of school architecture for several years in the early 1980s.

“Mr. Demarkian,” Miss Marbledale said, holding out her hand. “I'm so glad to see you here. Come inside and we'll get you a cup of coffee. The wind is awful here.”

The wind was awful. Gregor had been so distracted, he hadn't noticed it. Miss Marbledale held open the door and waited for him to walk through. He went into the foyer and looked at the big display case that lined one wall. There was some kind of exhibit up at the moment, but he couldn't puzzle out what it was supposed to be about.

“We turn the display case over to student groups every now and again,” Miss Marbledale said. “They do all sorts of things. This is where I'm supposed to be enthusiastic about their learning, but mostly I'm just grateful none of them have done anything drastic as of yet. We used to have the sports trophies in there, but eventually, I just couldn't stand it. So I had them moved to the gym. Will you come with me, please?”

The office was on the right side of the corridor as they stood looking into the school. Gregor went in through the office door and found, again, what he would have expected to find. There was a counter separating the public—or, in this case, the students—from the secretaries at the desks in the open area beyond, and then a small row of doors to the private offices. The offices were labeled generically: principal; vice principal; guidance counselor. Miss Marbledale lifted the movable part of the counter and waved him through.

“Didn't somebody tell me you have been here for many years?” Gregor asked.

“I've been here my entire career,” Miss Marbledale said. “It's been decades. Four, at least, and then some. I could work it out if I tried.”

“Have you been principal long?”

“For the last fifteen.”

Miss Marbledale had her office open. Gregor could see through the door and across the desk through the windows, to the big oval front
lawn ringed by the asphalt driveway that would let busses come in and out without getting in each other's way.

“You can't see the construction from here,” Gregor said.

“Ah, the construction,” Miss Marbledale said. “You have no idea how long I waited for this town to approve this project, and I've been waiting ever since. I don't understand people sometimes. There's work to be done here, real work, not arguing about whether teaching evolution gets students thinking that there is no God. I'll admit I wasn't happy when Franklin and the new board were elected, but I had some hopes for Annie-Vic. She's got her priorities straight. And then, of course, now this.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “This. Did Annie-Vic have her priorities straight, as you put it? I thought she was involved in this lawsuit.”

“Only pro forma,” Miss Marbledale said. “Henry Wackford went to the ACLU, and to the local chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The ACLU, I think, found him a lawyer, and the lawyer gave him some advice on how to put together a set of plaintiffs.”

“Henry Wackford is the old chairman of the school board?” Gregor said. “I thought he was a lawyer himself.”

“Oh, he is,” Miss Marbledale said. “And for all I know, he may be a good one. But this is a federal case, literally. A federal court and a Constitutional question. And the stakes are high. Nobody wants to take any chances.”

Gregor looked around the office. Miss Marbledale's degrees hung on the wall, including a doctorate. There was a picture in a frame on the desk, of Miss Marbledale with a woman who could have been her clone. Gregor supposed that was a sister.

“Try to help me understand something,” he said. “From Gary Albright, I've gotten the impression that no matter what I've heard on the news, this is not a case where the school board wants teachers to teach Creationism, or Intelligent Design, I suppose I should say, anyway, they don't actually want teachers to teach it in school.”

“That's right,” Miss Marbledale said. “The courts have been fairly
clear about that. There would be no point in trying that here or anywhere else, given the relevant case law.”

“What they want,” Gregor said, “is for there to be some kind of notice in the biology textbooks, saying something about how evolution is one way some people try to explain the great variety of living things on earth, and Intelligent Design is another way, and if students are interested in Intelligent Design, there's a book in the library they can go to see.”

“Yes,” Miss Marbledale said. “To be specific, the book is called
Of Pandas and People
. It's a famous book in its way. It started out as a straightforwardly Creationist text, and then with the outcome of the case in Arkansas, when it was clear the courts wouldn't allow it in the schools, the book was retooled for Intelligent Design. There's a woman named Barbara Forrest who's done excellent work tracking the history of that book.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “what occurs to me, and what I think would occur to a lot of other people, is that this lawsuit seems a little like overkill. It's a disclaimer, and a book in the library. It's not teaching Genesis in science class, or even mentioning Intelligent Design in science class. So why file a suit against the school board over something that innocuous.”

Catherine Marbledale looked Gregor Demarkian up and down and back and forth. Then she took her seat behind her desk.

“Are you a supporter of Intelligent Design?” she asked.

“To tell you the truth, I know nothing at all about it, except what I've heard since I came here,” Gregor said.

“That woman I mentioned, Barbara Forrest,” Miss Marbledale said. “She'd be a good place to start to understand why the fuss, as you put it. But let's start with me. The problem, for me, is just this: that disclaimer
is functionally
a lie, even though it may technically be true.”

“Which means what?”

“Which means,” Miss Marbledale said, “that it's true enough that ‘some people' accept evolution and ‘some people' reject it for Intelligent Design, or outright Creationism, for that matter, but putting a
disclaimer like that in a science textbook implies that the ‘some people' who reject evolution for Intelligent Design are scientists who have scientific reasons for rejecting evolution.”

“And that's not true?” Gregor said. “I thought I'd seen scientists who support Intelligent Design.”

“Oh, you have,” Miss Marbledale said. “There aren't many of them, and the only biologist of any standing is Michael Behe, who's from Lehigh, not that far up the road here. But he doesn't prefer Intelligent Design for scientific reasons. He prefers it for religious ones. And the one ‘scientific' idea he's come up with to ‘challenge' evolution is a recycled chestnut that's been around for a hundred and fifty years.”

“And that is?”

“He calls it irreducible complexity,” Miss Marbledale said. “To put it simply, it says that some organs are so complex, that if you take away even a single one of their parts, they'd cease to function. So natural selection can't account for those, because in order for those organs to evolve, they would have to come into existence,
poof
, all at once, with all their parts intact exactly as they are. And that is—and everybody agrees on this—impossible.”

“But you said it is an old chestnut,” Gregor said, “so I assume it's not impossible.”

“Oh, it's impossible, all right,” Miss Marbledale said, “but the fact is that nobody is claiming any of that. Certainly evolutionary biologists aren't. Behe assumes, like the people who have proposed the same idea before him, that each one of those parts has never had any other purpose but the one it has now in the organ in question. But that's not true. There are plenty of examples of parts of organs that serve purposes now that they didn't originally—Behe's big example, for instance, of the flagellum, has been exposed time and again. There's a good article by Kenneth Miller, if you want it. I have it around here somewhere.”

“Later, maybe,” Gregor said.

“And there's the eye and the inner ear,” Miss Marbledale said. “We've been able to trace prior uses for parts of those organs. The
whole concept of ‘irreducible complexity' depends on the entirely false idea that whatever function an organ or a part of an organ has now is the one it must always have had.”

“And that's it?” Gregor said. “The entire case for Intelligent Design rests on the work of one man?”

“It rests on nobody's work,” Miss Marbledale said. “At least, it rests on nobody's scientific work. There is no scientific work in Intelligent Design. There are no peer-reviewed papers. There are no reproducible experiments. There are no falsifiable predictions. None. The entire movement consists of people sitting around saying, ‘I don't see how evolution could have made that happen, so God must have done it.' And that, you see, is the point. They don't want to advance the cause of science. They don't want to expand human knowledge. All they want is to make it seem, to the general public, that there's something wrong with the theory of evolution, that it's just a guess, that it's probably not true.”

“And you think it's true?”

“Of course I think it's true,” Miss Marbledale said. “If you're actually willing to look at the evidence, there's nothing else to think. Evolution is a fact. Virtually everything that book says about it is false. Everything. Evidence in the fossil record? There's a ton of it, a huge, overwhelming mountain of it. Macroevolution? We can prove it. We have transitional fossils out the wazoo, full transitional sequences between reptiles and birds, for instance, and many more. The only point of that book is to lie and lie and lie again until it gets children so confused they don't know what's true, and the purpose of that, in the long run, is to discredit science. It's science that those people are afraid of.”

“Because science disproves religion?” Gregor asked.

“Because science disproves
their
religion,” Miss Marbledale said. “I've been a practicing Methodist for over sixty years, and evolution presents no challenge to my religion at all. But science is important and the scientific method is important. It doesn't solve everything, and it isn't the only thing people need in their lives, but it's important.
Antibiotics, heart transplants, even central heating and safe refrigeration for foods, we can't do without it. And science is the project of trying to find natural explanations for natural phenomenon. That's what distinguishes it from everything that came before. And if we don't teach that, if we teach children that it's all right to go back to the fifteenth century and look for supernatural causes instead of natural ones, we might as well fold up our tents and go back to the desert to eat locusts and honey.
Of Pandas and People
should not be in our school library because the things it says are lies. And evolution should be taught in our biology classes because evolution is true. And that ought to be enough of a reason for anybody.”

 

Back out at the front of the school, Gregor Demarkian looked around again and again at the skeleton of the new school building. He was carrying a little stack of books Miss Marbledale had given him, all hardbacks. She seemed to have dozens of copies of each one in boxes all around her office. There was Mark Isaak's
The Counter-Creationism Handbook
. There was Tim Berra's
Evolution and the Myth of Creationism
. There was Donald R. Prothero's
Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters
, sitting on top.

“That's the best book out there for a popular audience that not only lays out the evidence from the fossil record, but directly counters Creationism and Intelligent Design,” Miss Marbledale said. “I just wish it would come out in paperback. You have no idea how much it cost me to get all these in hardcover. And I give them to everybody. I even tried to give them to Franklin Hale and Alice McGuffie, but they ran, true to form. They wouldn't even take copies for the sake of being polite. And that's the enemy, Mr. Demarkian, and it really is an enemy. That small-minded, smug pride in being ignorant. I have no idea what Creationists are like outside of Snow Hill, or what the Intelligent Design people are like when they're attached to those big national think tanks, but the simple fact of the matter is that here, on the ground,
what you have are two kinds of people who want Intelligent Design. First are the people who just don't know much about evolution. Second are the people who don't want to know, because they've made up their minds, and they won't let you confuse them with facts. And those second kind of people are the ones who run for school board.”