The first time he testified before a committee of Louisiana legislators, Zack Kopplin was just 17 years old. In November 2010, he stood in front of a semicircle of state senators, all seated behind tables at the front of a cramped room. They were buried in the bowels of the state's department of education building in Baton Rouge.
Kopplin was there to speak against a bill that would ban biology textbooks from Louisiana classrooms — specifically, any that claimed evolution as the only theory for species diversity.
The new legislation followed the Louisiana Science Education Act, which had passed in March, 2008. That act was an "academic freedom" law, the first of its kind to pass in the United States. It allowed teachers to use "supplemental materials" alongside the textbook versions of politicized issues, such as evolution.
Image courtesy TEDxLSU
A line at the end stated that the law must not be used to "promote any religious doctrine." But Kopplin's father, who had been chief of staff to the two governors before Republican Bobby Jindal took office, saw the bill as a cover for educators to teach alternative theories to evolution with no supporting evidence.
His father would talk at the dinner table about how embarrassing the Louisiana Science Education Act was to the state. He told Zack it allowed teachers to lecture on a concept called "intelligent design," the idea that a supreme designer or architect created life the way it looks now, a concept the courts link to the religious notion of "creationism."
Kopplin's grandfather died just a few days before he found out about the fast-approaching textbook hearing, but he had to get that out of his head. He wrote a speech and spent two days reading it over and over, preparing for a moment he hadn't anticipated would happen for months.
Kopplin was third to testify. He stood before the legislators, wondering if they assumed he was another homeschooler there to speak on the bill's behalf.
He placed the written speech on the table in front of him and told the crowd: Anyone who believes there is controversy over the validity of evolution is wrong.
"And frankly," he said, "the LSEA is an unconstitutional law, and it needs to be repealed."
For a moment, the room hushed. Then the next speaker rose and began what turned into hours of debate.
Until 2004, most Americans knew Dover as the capital of Delaware, not a town in Pennsylvania. But the borough of 2,000 people began making national headlines in December, 2004, when William Buckingham, a member of the Dover Area School District Board of Education, mentioned creationism at a meeting. He said a biology textbook that taught only evolution was "inexcusable."
The Discovery Institute, a think tank founded by Dr. Stephen Meyer and other proponents of intelligent design, called Buckingham, urging him to ask that the "pitfalls" of evolution be taught, without openly advocating for religion in the classroom. They knew references to creationism or intelligent design in school could lead to court.
They were right, but powerless to stop the Dover school board from ignoring their advice. The board instead took legal counsel from the Thomas Moore Law Center, a conservative Christian group. A 6-3 vote that October forced district teachers to lecture on intelligent design.
The three dissenting board members resigned in protest, and a group of parents challenged the new curriculum in court within a few months. All the Discovery Institute could do was watch from its office in Seattle, as federal Judge John Jones III equated intelligent design with creationism, which was already not legally allowed inside science classrooms.
"It knocked them on their butts," said Dr. Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. Forrest, who co-wrote a book on the history of "academic freedom," has also served as Kopplin's mentor is his fight to repeal the LSEA. "They had to regroup after [Dover]. They wanted to make sure that whoever they had working with them in a particular state, they were going to be real allies of the Discovery Institute and do what they were told."
Image courtesy WikimediaCommons, BDEngler
The Discovery Institute hosted events in small churches throughout the South, where they described its new "academic freedom" approach to science education. They tapped what Forrest calls a "ready-made" infrastructure of conservative religious organizations to lobby state legislatures. The Louisiana Family Forum, an affiliate of Christian group Focus on the Family, provided access to state senators and representatives.
By 2007, the Discovery Institute was most rooted in Louisiana. Republican Governor Bobby Jindal was elected the same year, and a new crop of conservative Christian legislators took office.
"The minute Bobby Jindal was sworn in, in January ... they filed the bill," Forrest said.
The Louisiana Science Education Act, also known as SB733, bolted through the pre-greased state legislature. Forrest couldn't get the Louisiana Academy of Sciences to take a public stance on the "academic freedom" bill. Soon she and five others stood in front of pro-education act legislators surrounded by hollering bill supporters and hordes of homeschooled children, who all wore stickers that read, "Ask me about SB733." The group of six testified against the legislation, but they were small stones before a tidal wave of activists.
The bill passed, no problem.
Days later, Jindal signed the education act into law.
The battle over these bills starts with language.
"Academic freedom" supporters say the wording is about balance, fairness, telling every side of the story.
"The point of teaching like this is to teach kids to think like scientists; to argue, to learn," said Joshua Youngkin, who works for the Discovery Institute in part by traveling across the country informing legislators about these bills.
Detractors believe it's just a pass to let religion into the classroom.
"This is about a kind of a wink and a nudge to creationist teachers to say, 'Okay, go ahead and do what you may have been doing before,'" said Dr. Steven Newton, a geologist and policy director at the National Center for Science Education.
The law's supporters point to the text's "no religion" clause. But if it's not meant to let in creationism, say those opposed, why is the "no religion" clause there to begin with?
"You have to make it perfectly clear that when you're allowing strengths and weaknesses on Darwin's theory," Youngkin said, "that doesn't mean you can bring in creationism."
Instead, the Discovery Institute and others support a "teach the controversy" philosophy, whereby an instructor could bring in "supplemental materials," Youngkin says, such as "an article from Science or Nature" that questions Darwin's tree of life.
The problem is that no such article exists in any peer-reviewed publication, and there is virtually no controversy in the scientific community over the validity of evolution.
"Evolution is some of the most robust and widely accepted principles of modern science," said Erin Heath, an associate director at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "Presenting it as controversial is not accurate, and it does students a disservice."
Youngkin advocates for a point-counterpoint method where kids can learn about evolution in a classroom centered on debate.
Forrest maintains that's what Youngkin is paid to say.
"You are wasting the time of teachers and students by asking them to debate something that no longer requires any debate," Forrest said. "By using this talking point of the Discovery Institute, it's their way of saying, 'If we can't get their stuff out, we have to get our stuff in.'"
The "our stuff" Forrest referenced is creationism. Although Youngkin insisted time and again that the legislation has nothing to do with religion, plenty of people have trouble swallowing that message, given the company kept by Discovery.
Focus on the Family believes Christianity should influence everything from a person's life at home to his political decisions. Along with its affiliate, the Louisiana Family Forum, Focus on the Family has worked with Discovery since 2008 to get "academic freedom" legislation passed.
Youngkin calls the Discovery Institute and Focus "strange bedfellows," but the two have spent a lot of time together over the last five years, via Focus' Louisiana branch.
"Because of them, I get introduced to people on the ground in Louisiana, and I teach them about what academic freedom is," Youngkin said.
Despite their close relationship, the two groups seem to have different ideas about what is and isn't allowed under "academic freedom."
"Focus on the Family supports public school policies that allow academic freedom in the classroom, when it comes to students' and teachers' freedoms to discuss intelligent design...." wrote Candi Cushman, an education analyst at Focus on the Family, in an email.
For Forrest and others, this causes concern about Discovery Institute's motivations. The institute's own website even seems to contradict what Youngkin advocates.
Under Discovery's "About" page, it lists "Study and Activity Areas." Those areas are laid out as bullet points, the first of which is "Science and Culture." Part of that subsection reads: "Our Center for Science and Culture works to defend free inquiry. It also seeks to counter the materialistic interpretation of science by demonstrating that life and the universe are the products of intelligent design…."
When this was pointed out to Youngkin, all he could muster was, "I've never noticed the juxtaposition before, of these different viewpoints," both free inquiry and the promotion of one theory. "I can appreciate how this might look scattered a bit."
Kopplin was furious. The hearing's testimony regarding evolution textbooks had dragged well into the afternoon, mainly because bill supporters had been permitted to speak for a half-hour, while Kopplin's group was stopped after the standard two-and-a-half minutes.
The good news was they seemed to have been caught off guard, Kopplin said, as if bill supporters had expected to win before lunch but were now locked in a day-long drag-out.
Kopplin spoke once more toward the end of the hearing. One of the bill's supporters mentioned they had 800 scientists behind them, so Kopplin assured the room that his group was backed by the 10-million-member American Association for the Advancement of Science.
If it was a simple numbers game these guys wanted to play, Kopplin was going to win.
The testimony took all afternoon. After everyone's voices wore out, the board members took a vote.
Kopplin's crew won that day, 8-4, plus twice more a month later, when debating the same bill in front of a panel of still more legislators. The textbooks could stay.
Months later, now seasoned and supported by dozens of Nobel laureates, Kopplin and Forrest had enlisted Democratic State Senator Karen Peterson to sponsor their repeal of the Louisiana Science Education Act. So what if they were underdogs? This April was no different from last November, and they knew how that had ended.
But this time the tone had changed. Republican State Senator Julie Quinn, whom Kopplin and Forrest thought they could pull to their side during the committee hearing, attacked the repeal from the start. She said the qualifications of the Ph.D.s who testified for the repeal were just "little letters" behind their names. And she rolled her eyes at the list of science organizations that favored the repeal.
"It made it very difficult for the other legislators to be anything close to supportive," Kopplin said.
The repeal lost, 5-1.
Louisiana may be ground zero for "academic freedom" legislation, but it's also emblematic of a trend unfolding in America since 2001.
That year, Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum tried to sneak a clause into the No Child Left Behind Act, using language crafted by David DeWolf and Phillip Johnson, both associated with the Discovery Institute. It looked strikingly similar to the wording used in Louisiana's science education law. The addition read, "Where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why the subject generates so much controversy…"
It was the Discovery Institute's shot at the national stage, but the clause was cut.
Over the next few years, legislators in Alabama, Oklahoma and a few other states introduced a string of bills touting "alternative positions" to evolution. But then the Dover trial hit, and the Discovery Institute retreated from headlines until Feb. 7, 2008, when it published the blueprint for the modern version of "academic freedom" legislation.
The institute grabbed its first major legislative win that year, with the Louisiana Science Education Act. Within months, eight nearly identical bills were proposed in five different states.
In 2012, Tennessee passed a law like Louisiana's, and 2013 has already seen 11 bills introduced in nine states across the country, the most widespread the legislation has been in a single year.
Since 2008, 18 states from Alabama to Michigan to Colorado have introduced "academic freedom" bills. That number doesn't include local measures; in Ohio, the Springboro school board is still deciding whether it will implement a district-wide plan that would force instructors to teach creationism.
It also doesn't include states with voucher programs that siphon money from public schools to fund private institutions, which are free to teach creationism. Kopplin has found such schools in Washington, D.C. and in nine states, including Georgia, Wisconsin and Utah.
It is unclear why "academic freedom" has gained favor over the past five years, but it may be in part because there isn't always overt public opposition to it. That's partly because, Kopplin said, many people don't have a solid grasp of what intelligent design actually means.
According to a 2005 Gallup poll, 31% of Americans believe in "God-guided evolution," which sounds like intelligent design. The problem is, it's not. Intelligent design means everything alive was created the way it appears now, which rules out evolution.
The potential misunderstanding, combined with the words "academic freedom," can create sympathy for a cause that the average person knows little about, said Forrest.
"They're trying to exploit people's understandable desire to be fair," Forrest said. "But they're presenting an argument in which there are not two legitimate sides."
In the same Gallup poll, 51% of respondents said they believed in creationism outright, a number that still startles Kopplin. His supporters are swelling, but it may be a long time before his side can match such a foundation.
Kopplin was humbled by the 5-1 defeat in 2011. He realized he had hurt "academic freedom" bills just by punching at them. In the months after that first hearing in November 2010, he appeared on local radio, had his face plastered on the front page of the Baton Rouge Advocate, and the day after the repeal effort, found himself on PBS talking to Bill Moyers.
Since then, national outlets from Reuters to The Washington Post have written about him and the potential repeal in Louisiana, while questioning the law's alleged creationist intentions. He's appeared on Bill Maher and NPR to talk about creationism and science education, and now writes regularly for outlets such as Slate and The Guardian U.S.
After high school, Kopplin enrolled at Rice University in Houston, but has decided to take an indefinite amount of time off now that his sophomore year is over. Now 19 years old, he all-too-often found himself finishing articles instead of term papers, or flying to an out-of-state conference instead of taking an exam.
Kopplin and two others recently incorporated a nonprofit called Second Giant Leap for Humankind, which he says will call for "an end to science denial" and will raise funds to invest in scientific research.
In a field full of Nobel laureates and Ph.D.s, a teenager has become the face of evolution's defense.
His detractors have tried to tarnish that face. Ken Ham, president of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., wrote an article that called Kopplin "brainwashed," and Discovery Institute website evolutionnews.org has accused him of "grossly misleading the public about science and education."
"No matter how uncomfortable it gets, I'm not going to stop," Kopplin said. "It's a simple matter of right and wrong. That's where I am.
"If I back down, who else is going to pick it up?"
This past April, the science education act survived by a 3-2 vote. Kopplin had finals to wrap up afterward, and says he has since focused on writing and completing the mounds of paperwork required to get the nonprofit off the ground.
More notably, he's looking for even more supporters, because, he said, he'll be back in Louisiana next year.
Lead illustration by Mashable, Bob Al-Greene
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