Creationists’ Last Stand at the State Board of Education
“Will anti-evolutionists be able to adapt and survive in a new textbook market?” Hopefully the answer to that question is no. Evolution is fundamental to biology. like it or not, accept it or not. Also one can believe in God and accept evolution, contrary to what many will claim, the two are not mutually exclusive.
Raymond Bohlin holds a doctorate in molecular biology. He received his master’s degree in population genetics, the study of how adaptation and speciation is expressed by DNA. In other words, he possesses more than a passing knowledge about the theory of evolution. At the University of North Texas, he participated in research revealing that colonies of pocket gophers in Oklahoma and Texas, once indistinguishable, had diverged somewhere along the way into two identifiably distinct species.
In a way, so had Bohlin. He never accepted the hypothesis central to his discipline, hardened in the crucible of 150 years of experimentation, validated by the advent of modern genetics. He could not believe that evolutionary mechanisms could account for the dizzying complexity he saw in the living world. It was easier for him to detect the work of some unseen force — a designer’s hand guiding a spontaneous appearance of species — behind the rise of complex life. It’s the sort of completely untestable idea that doesn’t gain much traction among the editors and reviewers of scholarly journals.
And so, according to his own list of published work, Bohlin’s name was never attached to another peer-reviewed scientific study after his paper on gophers in 1982. Faith in a theory for which there is no experiment turned out to be a dead end. Yet he may be the only creationist to have participated in naming a new species, which is exactly what makes him so valuable to a movement that has worked for decades to scrub Charles Darwin from Texas public schools.