An interesting story from the NYT yesterday:

There is nothing much unusual about the 197-page dissertation Marcus R. Ross submitted in December to complete his doctoral degree in geosciences here at theUniversity of Rhode Island.

His subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that, as he wrote, vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago.

But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a “young earth creationist” — he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.

There are lots of issues in the article, a couple of them worth touching on.

First, there’s the question of whether graduate schools should reject applicants who hold to creationism. “It’s not a matter of religion,” say the proponents, “But of science.”

In this case, Ross’ work is impeccable, from a scientific point of view. That he doesn’t actually believe what he discusses in his dissertation is a philosophical oddity, which Ross explains by saying he’s working in a different paradigm: Just as a Marxist could do the work in an economics department with a free-market bent, he explains, so he as a creationist could work in a department that teaches the scientifically standard position of evolution.

But the issue is larger than that, and feeds into the second concern I have:

While still a graduate student, [Ross] appeared on a DVD arguing that intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism, is a better explanation than evolution for the Cambrian explosion, a rapid diversification of animal life that occurred about 500 million years ago.

Online information about the DVD identifies Dr. Ross as “pursuing a Ph.D. in geosciences” at the University of Rhode Island. It is this use of a secular credential to support creationist views that worries many scientists.

Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, a private group on the front line of the battle for the teaching of evolution, said fundamentalists who capitalized on secular credentials “to miseducate the public” were doing a disservice. (Link)

This would put a university geology department in the odd position of asking applicants about the motivation and eventual use of their degree, and the morally questionable position of using that to make decisions about admission.

But the larger issue for me is the phrase “to miseducate the public.” Here, creationists have an advantage, because they generally get their worldview confirmed on a weekly basis, in church. Educating the public about evolution, however, is a bit tricker, for not only is it culturally competing with creationism, but the amount of time it’s presented is significantly less than creationism. Unless an individual majors in science, his exposure to systematic education about evolution is limited only to a few years in school. Creationism, however, puts forward its case on a weekly basis.