The Science Of Dissent

By Josh Tyrangiel

If it's been too long since you've heard the word golly! uttered without irony, head to Faribault, Minn., a hamlet one hour south of the Twin Cities, and ask for Rod LeVake. Maybe LeVake will meet you for some apple pie at the Happy Chef and talk a little football. Whatever you chat about, he will be solicitous of your opinion and take pains not to overwhelm you with his. Of his job teaching high school science, he says, "It's just kinda fun to teach kids, to kinda show them how complex living things are, I guess. That's what I really kinda enjoy." LeVake is so profoundly nonconfrontational that he inspires instant trust. Which is why he is the perfect weapon in the new war over how evolution is--or isn't--being taught in public schools across the U.S. LeVake believes evolution is flat-out bad science. He can be very convincing.

This summer, which happens to mark the 75th anniversary of the Scopes "Monkey Trial," LeVake will take his cause to Minnesota's Court of Appeals, where, after losing in district court, he is suing the Faribault school district for discrimination. Really, he's suing for the opportunity to teach evolution in a new way. LeVake is a Fundamentalist Christian, but his biology lesson plan doesn't include the word God or creationism. All he asks is that as a scientist, he be allowed to let students know about some of the holes in Darwin's theory.

LeVake started teaching biology at Faribault High School in 1997 after 13 years as a seventh-grade general-science instructor. It wasn't long before colleagues suspected he might have trouble teaching Darwin's theory to his 10th-graders. "We'd just sort of talk informally," says LeVake of his chats with fellow teachers. "I'd bring up things like 'Look at how complex this system is. It's hard for me to believe this all came about by chance mutations over billions of years.'" When department chair Ken Hubert asked LeVake point-blank how he planned to teach evolution, LeVake said, "I can't teach evolution." He instantly regretted it. "I said, 'Man, there's something wrong with what I just said,' because I think kids, when they go off to college...they have to know about Charles Darwin." LeVake says he simply meant that he couldn't teach evolution as fact. But after a series of meetings, LeVake was demoted to teaching ninth-grade general science.

Usually sanguine, LeVake was genuinely hurt. "I had been waiting for 13 years to get a shot," he says. "I felt like 'Golly, I was shortchanged.'" He sent out a series of letters explaining his case to conservative advocacy groups and got a bite from Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice. "This is a landmark case," says LeVake's pro-bono attorney, Frank Manion. "For the first time, we have a teacher who is not asking to teach creationism. He simply wants to teach science the way he thinks--and the way a lot of people think--it should be taught, in a more balanced way."

In a six-page "Position Paper on the Teaching of Evolution," LeVake pledges to teach evolution while also taking "an honest look at the difficulties and inconsistencies of the theory." He lists examples of irreducible complexity in nature for which, he says, Darwin has no explanation, such as the eggshell and the woodpecker's tongue. LeVake cites "the amazing lack of transitional forms in the fossil record. There has never been a creature discovered that could be considered a logical intermediate of any two major classes of animals or plants."

He sounds reasonable, but reputable scientists who agree with LeVake can be counted on one hand. "There are transitional fossils out the ying-yang," says Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education. "The problem is [antievolutionists] will never tell you what they would accept as a transitional fossil." Scott, one of the school district's expert witnesses against LeVake, says, "If you look at the content of his curriculum guide, it's the same thing that five years ago they called creation science. He's just left out the C word." Indeed, creationists have become a lot more shrewd. For years they'd propose antievolution laws and lesson plans brimming with religious language, and for years their cases were struck down on constitutional grounds. But creationists have evolved. Like LeVake, they began co-opting the logic of Darwinists and speaking in a softer voice. In fact, LeVake's case has barely stirred blue-collar Faribault (pop. 19,177). This is Minnesota, after all, and as just about anyone here will tell you, Minnesotans are nice. Laura Cesafsky, a recent Faribault High graduate who calls herself a proud liberal, wrote an editorial in the school paper decrying creationism but avoided using LeVake's name. She agrees that "he's a great guy." That helps explain why, even if he ultimately loses, LeVake isn't going anywhere. He and his family have found their place in the universe. "We're real Faribault people."