Omaha World Herald, Thursday September 8, 2005 - original

BY KEVIN COLE, WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

Eugenie Scott's rapier wit and engaging personality helped make her speech in defense of the science of evolution Wednesday night at UNO anything but a dreary college lecture.

Creationists, Scott said, "are fearful that if their kids are taught evolution, they will give up their faith in God, turn into bad people.

"Bad people who will go out and rape and pillage, rob and kill. Things that I haven't done for weeks!"

Scott, an anthropologist who holds a doctorate from the University of Missouri, is the executive director of the National Center for Science.

About 175 people heard her lecture and answer questions for about 90 minutes at the University of Nebraska at Omaha's Milo Bail Student Center.

Scott's lecture, "Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Teach Evolution," was part of the sixth annual forum sponsored by Rationalists, Empiricists and Skeptics of Nebraska.

Accompanied by a slide show, Scott breezed through the history of creationism, its (pardon her pun) evolution into the theory of intelligent design and reasons that people of science should be on guard against political power plays that undercut the teaching of evolution.

Creationists, Scott said, are religious fundamentalists who are convinced that God created the Earth in a six-day period about 10,000 years ago. Blocked by the First Amendment from teaching religion in school, creationists work to discredit evolution.

"They think all you have to do is disprove evolution, and you have what's left, creationism," Scott said. "It's a neat trick."

Intelligent design and creation science both contend that the science of evolution is flawed, Scott said, and both rely on the intervention of God.

People who believe in intelligent design, however, believe that anything that is unexplained must be the work of God, she said. Teachers are then left with little to teach other than "evolution didn't happen."

When religious conservatives flex their political muscles, they often target school boards, Scott said. The standards set by the 17,000 U.S. school boards are critical to whether the science of evolution will continue to be taught.

"Seventeen thousand school boards - that's why education is so politicized in the United States," she said. "Foreign reporters can't believe we don't have a national curriculum.

"School board members have to be constantly looking over their shoulders at the powerful minority that might be getting out the vote against them."