JB: How has the evolutionary idea itself evolved?

JONES: It has, in fact, evolved in some quite unnecessary ways, because if you look back on many of the evolutionary controversies of the last 30 years, they really have ebbed away as knowledge has grown. Take punctuated equilibrium, which was a useful controversy as it made biologists feel less smug about their understanding of evolution. Or the lengthy argument about co-adaptation, the idea that genes didn't work as individual particles but as harmoniously interacting universes, and that this slowed evolution down because it was hard to get from one point to another. Or Sewall Wright's great idea that most evolution happened by accident, when you went through small bottlenecks, simply because natural selection could never get from one form to a new one without going through maladaptive forms on the way.

Most of what seemed inexplicable fits, we can now see, into orthodox Darwinian theory. People have been inspecting Darwin's feet for signs of clay since the day he died. And although some traces have been found what's amazing is how well his edifice has lasted. Most of these evolving evolutionary ideas have gone extinct while the original one flourishes. The only important evolutionary piece missing in 1859 was the mechanism of inheritance, but once that appeared the edifice became so sound that much of what we've been arguing about has probably been fairly irrelevant.

JB: What is there about the public's understanding of science that can lead to Kansas and creationism?

JONES: The better the scientist, the narrower the mind, is a good general rule. And that's what science is, it's a collation of narrow minds all put together. Very occasionally we get a more open thinker (and I would put Gould into that category) who can see a pattern missed by the broad church of cramped imaginations. The great problem with the public understanding of science, and this shows in Kansas as much as anywhere else, is not to see that. People have no insight into what you might call the grammar of science, the way it works. Many people feel that because science is filled with disagreement it must be wrong. But it's not like religion, which is filled with agreement, at least within one faith. Again, unlike religion, we tend not to talk much about the stuff we agree on and concentrate on the difficulties. That, though, is a sign of strength and not weakness. Any science in which everyone agrees about everything is dead. Compare that to faith in the Bible story of creation!