Going Ape: Florida's Battles over Evolution in the Classroom

11. “Standing Up for the Little Guy”

220 | “Standing Up for the Little Guy” Darwin Day is an unofficial holiday in mid-February that celebrates the famous naturalist’s birth, and many museums, universities, and clubs worldwide host celebrations. There were a few events in Florida in 2008 that coincidentally served as ironic counterpoints to the evolution battles raging in the state capital at the same time. For instance, there was a day of guest lectures at Florida State University and birthday cake at Fern Forest Nature Preserve in Coconut Creek.1 An event hosted by the Friends of Brooker Creek Preserve in Pinellas County was to feature University of South Florida professor Dr. Lorena Madrigal. The anthropologist was obviously expected to talk about Darwin and evolution, which were subjects she had extensive professional knowledge about. However, a week before the celebration she was disinvited . “They told me very clearly they felt their budget was in danger if the lecture took place,” Madrigal told the Tampa Tribune. The reporter verified that with Pinellas County’s director of environmental services, William Davis. “Her topic was about evolution,” he said. “I flinched on that. I canceled her out after discussing it with my supervisors. We are not the platform for debate on creationism versus evolution.”2 This was Madrigal’s second brush with the controversy between evolution and creationism. She had participated in a debate event about 11 “Standing Up for the Little Guy” | 221 the subject in 1992, which she later regretted. Now she found herself in the middle of a controversy she hadn’t foreseen. “I got invited a long time before the event, and at the time there were no hints that anything was wrong at all,” she said. “I don’t think they ever thought that such problems would arise.” Madrigal was notified of cancellation by a staff person. “He apologized numerous times, and asked if I would consider coming back if the storm passed,” she recalled. “I said yes. Public service is part of my assignment as a professor.”3 The storm did pass, and Madrigal gave a Darwin Day talk in 2009, the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth and sesquicentennial of the publication of On the Origin of Species. Despite the kerfuffle over evolution in the opening months of 2008, there was little excitement for the subject throughout the remainder of the year. A few candidates for local school boards faced questions on the subject, but regardless of which side they stood on, they didn’t turn it into a major campaign issue. In October, the ACCENT Speaker’s Bureau at the University of Florida hosted a debate titled “Science, Man and God: A Creation vs. Evolution Debate.” Dr. Douglas Jacoby, a Christian author and minister who was billed as a creationism advocate, faced off against Dr. Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and an evolution advocate. An overflow crowd of more than a thousand people attended, but the debate had a slight twist to it. Rather than take a hard-line creationist approach, Jacoby argued that science and religion are compatible. He called himself an “evolutionary creationist” who believes that God used the process of evolution in his creation. Shermer countered that evolution is a purely natural process with nothing supernatural involved.4 “Which Political Party Has Evolved” Early in 2009 it looked like it would be another banner year for the evolution conflict in Florida. Sen. Stephen Wise announced in February that he planned to introduce a new bill about evolution during the next legislative session. The bill would require teachers to introduce intelligent design whenever evolution was discussed in the classroom. “If you’re going to teach evolution, then you have to teach the other side so you can have critical thinking,” he told the Florida Times-Union.5 222 | Going Ape The sixty-seven-year-old senator had been a fixture in the capital since winning a seat in the House during a 1988 special election. In 2001 he was elected to the Senate. Wise had co-sponsored Sen. Ronda Storms’s 2008 “academic freedom” bill. In the light of that failed effort, his plan for 2009 was to make sure that intelligent design bills in both houses of the legislature stayed on the same course. Even though he hadn’t been a vocal figure in the 2008 bills’ efforts, Wise had received a lot of hate mail. “You’d think I’d never gone to...