科学美国人60秒 SSS 反进化说

Antievolution Legislation Shows Descent with Modification

 “Creationism evolves and sometimes those new strategies succeed.”

“创世论得到发展，有时候，是新的策略取得的成就。”

Nicholas Matzke, an evolutionary biologist currently on a fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Nicholas Matzke是堪培拉澳大利亚国立大学资助的一位进化物理学家。

“So I think a lot of people, it might not have been on their radar, that we have two states that have a statewide policy that encourages teachers to introduce sort-of false criticisms of evolution…and it also more explicitly tries to prevent administrators from doing anything about it.”

“我认为许多人，可能还不知道，我们有两个州有政策鼓励教师引入对进化论错误批评的概念，...尽管非常明显，立法阻止管理人员这样做。”

Those states are Tennessee and Louisiana. Matzke used to work for the National Center for Science Education, the NCSE, which tracks these legislative efforts to get religiously motivated creationism and its thinly disguised offshoots like Intelligent Design into public school classrooms.

这两个州是路易安那州和田纳西州。Matzke过去在国家科学教育中心NCSE工作，NCSE跟踪记录宗教神创论的立法实施过程，以及其分支，例如公立教室学校的智能设计。

Matzke and the NCSE were involved in the Kitzmiller versus Dover case in Pennsylvania in which the judge found the inclusion of Intelligent Design in the biology curriculum to be a violation of the First Amendment. December 20th marks the 10th anniversary of that decision. But dozens of similar bills that do not explicitly mention creationism or intelligent design have been proposed since.

Matzke和NCSE参与了宾夕法尼亚州的奇兹米勒诉多佛学区案，法官判定生物课程引入智能设计违反了美国宪法第一修正案。12月20日，是这一决定的10周年纪念日，但是数十个类似的法案，并没有明显提及神创论或者智能设计。

“Over the years I’d kept in touch with NCSE people and we had always talked about, you know, these bills look like they’re just being copied and modified, we should do a phylogeny at some point—do an evolutionary analysis of them…so it had gotten up to being about 60 bills…

这些年，我一直和NCSE的同事保持联系，我们总是会谈论，这些法案就复制，然后修改。我们应该做一个发展史——对这些法案进行进化分析——现在已经有60个类似的法案了....

I took all those bills, lined up all those texts, coded all the characteristics, all the variations between these texts, and then ran them through the standard phylogenetic analyses that we use for DNA. We use them for dinosaurs, they get used to study virus evolution. Those same programs can be used on texts that have been copied and modified.”

我仔细看了这些法案，将所有的内容逐行分析，编码其特征，并总结这些文本之间的差别，然后利用DNA使用的标准同源分析浏览这些法案。我们使用这些方法研究恐龙、研究病毒进化。同样的程序可用于复制修改的文本。

Matzke’s tongue in cheek, or rather panda’s thumb in a creationist’s eye, analysis is in the journal Science.

Matzke的脸颊上的舌头，或者在创始者眼睛里，这是熊猫的拇指，该研究结果发表在《科学》杂志上。

It reveals a high degree of relatedness among the bills—that is, legislators make slight alterations in bills either from their own state or other states in the hopes that this time the particular wording will get the bill passed.

研究结果揭示了法案之间高度的相关性——也就是说，立法者仅是对本州或其他州的法案做了轻微的改动，希望这次这种特殊的措辞可以让法案通过。

“With the phylogenetic analysis we can tell when do these steps happen and how influential are they on future antievolution legislation…so it’s worth alerting people to the fact that these bills exist and alerting people to how these strategies change through time.”

通过同源分析，我们可以判定，这些举措发生的时间以及其对未来反创世论立法的影响...所以，需要警示人们这些法案是存在的，并提醒人们，随着时间的推移，这些策略将如何变化。