Don McLeroy, the dentist who wants to drill pupils in Creationism

Don McLeroy is generally available to journalists between 12.30 and 1.30pm. The rest of the time he is either fixing the teeth of patients he considers to be direct descendents of Adam and Eve, or making space for his “Young Earth” world view in the textbooks of Texan schoolchildren.
Dr McLeroy is probably the most influential dentist in the history of America’s culture wars. Cheerful, tireless and utterly single-minded, he sports a moustache reminiscent of Hergé’s Thompson twins. He describes himself as a Christian fundamentalist and believes Earth was created 10,000 years ago.

His views would matter little were he not also chairman of the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE), which oversees the biggest textbook-procurement programme in the United States and for the past two years has been dominated by creationists like himself.

One result is a document due to be signed this month that will require Texas teenagers, for the first time, to study gaps in the fossil record and look for other ways to question whether natural selection can account for diversity in the world. If the past is any guide the new Texas “standards” will determine the content of science textbooks in up to 48 of the 50 states for the next decade — in which case, as one despairing secularist put it, publishers will have “bowed at the altar of junk science simply to sell a book”.

It is not just in Texas that creationists are on the march. Recent polls suggest that between 44 and 46 per cent of Americans reject Darwin’s theory of evolution in favour of some form of creationism. In Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky and South Dakota, state legislators are seeking to bracket evolution with global warming as a theory subject to serious doubt rather than a scientific orthodoxy. The National Centre for Science Education, which defends the teaching of evolution in US public schools against inroads by creationists, is so alarmed that it has branded 2010 “the year of science denial” — yet nothing alarms it more than Dr McLeroy’s astonishing success in seeding the Texas high school curriculum with his literal interpretation of Genesis.


The dentist has not achieved everything he wanted. Creationism will not be taught alongside evolution as an alternative explanation for life on Earth. Even so, he says he is still “pumped”. By requiring students to probe for weaknesses in evolutionary theory the new standards will “restore the lustre of science”, he says at his surgery in College Station, near Houston.


“Take bones,” he says, offering a brief description of the collagen and amino acids in bones as an example of biological complexity. “Intuitively people have a tough time thinking nothing guided this. Are we supposed to believe that all of a sudden, say on April 1, five million years ago, the first bone appeared? The question is, how did evolution do this, and the evolutionists have been painted into a corner. They don’t even have a clue. How did that first piece of bone get there?”

As it happens the evolutionists do have answers — but in a fossil record spanning many more billions of years than a literal interpretation of Genesis allows. “If science was the issue here we wouldn’t be having this debate,” says Dan Quinn, of the Texas Freedom Network, set up to defend mainstream science in the school system. “This is about a particular group wanting to push its agenda.” An ally of Mr Quinn’s at the National Centre for Science Education offers some parallels: “Should creationism be taught with evolution? Should alchemy be taught with chemistry? Should astrology be taught with astronomy? No!”

Dr McLeroy is confident that the new standards will be incorporated in tests and online teaching materials as well as textbooks since publishers will be vulnerable to lawsuits if they are not. The question then is whether the other 49 states follow where Texas leads. Ordinarily a science textbook that appeared to offer too many concessions to the creationist position might be “poison” in more liberal states, Mr Quinn says. But mergers in US educational publishing have left only three big national players, each more responsive to Texas Board of Education curriculum standards than those of any other state because with $22 billion (£15 billion) to spend each year and annual orders for up to 48 million books it is by far their biggest customer.

What applies to science applies equally to social studies, to which Dr McLeroy has also applied himself with vigour. Like the other seven conservatives on the fifteen-member education board he is neither a teacher nor a history graduate. Yet in the past year they have passed more than 200 amendments to the state’s social studies standards with the effect of emphasising the role of conservatives in recent US history and downplaying that of liberals.

Newt Gingrich, author of the Republicans’ 1994 Contract with America, and Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-abortion activist, are named as standard-bearers of the late 20th-century “conservative resurgence”. So are the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association, the gun lobby’s main voice in Washington. The Civil Rights movement will still be taught but students will also be asked to consider its “unintended consequences” — a veiled reference to affirmative action programmes that some consider discriminatory towards whites. Pupils will also learn about the Venona Papers, decrypted Soviet intelligence intercepts used to support the McCarthyite view of an America under attack by a communist fifth column in the 1950s.

Dr McLeroy was especially concerned, on reading the social studies standards for the first time, that 14-year-olds were not being taught the role of religion in the foundations of representative government in the US. “So we just made sure they put that back in,” he said with a chuckle.

The dentist’s opponents have one reason to be cheerful: he was defeated last year when running for re-election to the education board and will stand down in November. In his absence the fight will continue for a creationist alternative to evolution to be taught in schools. In normally liberal Connecticut,voters recently returned a creationist to the state school board for the first time. In Illinois, the Republican candidate for governor will be a Darwin doubter.

In Christian universities in Virginia and Colorado, students study the “myth of evolution” as part of degree courses. Last month some of them took part in an annual trip to Washington to view — and debunk — fossils on display at the Museum of Natural History. Lauren Dunn, 19, from Liberty University, dismissed as arbitrary the age of 210 million years given to the Morganucodon rat. “They put that time to make up for what they don’t know,” she told a reporter. It was a view that one of her lecturers helped to rationalise by teaching her that carbon dating is unreliable.

Underpinning the efforts of creationists across America is a belief that the separation of Church and State is not, in fact, a sacred plank of the Constitution. Without such a separation it might become legal to teach creationism in public schools even though it is based on religious belief. So far, the Supreme Court has sided with Darwin, most recently in a landmark ruling in 2005. It is unlikely to reverse that ruling, forcing creationists to train their fire on lower courts and co-opt scientific controversy wherever they can find it. “They’re questioning Earth science, planetary science, plate tectonics and now global warming,” says Robert Luhn, a spokesman for the National Centre for Science Education. “They’re all basically anti-science when you get right down to it.”

Dr McLeroy demurs. “I love science.” When it comes to criticising Darwin, he says, “there is just a huge ideological resistance that I fail to understand”.