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Antonio Lazcano

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Antonio Lazcano, a biology professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) inMexico City, has studied the origin and early evolution of life for more than 30 years. He was trainedboth as an undergraduate and graduate student at UNAM, where he focused on the study of prebioticevolution and the emergence of life. An academic deeply committed to public education, he hasdevoted considerable efforts to scientific journalism and teaching. He is the author of several bookspublished in Spanish, including The Origin of Life, first printed in 1984 and which has become a bestsellerwith more than 600,000 copies sold.He is an avid promoter of evolutionary biology and the study of theorigins of life in Latin America, and has been professor-in-residence or visiting scientist in France, Spain,Cuba, Switzerland, Russia, and the United States. In addition, he has served on many internationaladvisory and review boards, including ones for NASA and other international organizations. He has justbeen reelected president of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life, the first LatinAmerican scientist to occupy this position.

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In some of his writings, Charles Darwinexpressed his interest in visiting Mexico.Although he never fulfilled that wish,

Mexicans have reciprocated his interestwith a long-standing commit-ment to his ideas. Based on thecommon misapprehension thatMexico’s strong Catholic back-ground has led to a rejectionof evolution, many people inthe United States remain convincedthat teaching and research onthe origins of life must be severelylimited in my country. Deriv-ing in part from Spain’s BlackLegend—in which the stunningintolerance exercised by the Inquisi-tion became unfairly viewed insubsequent centuries as iconic ofthe country and its colonial exploitsas a whole—this self-assuring American pre-judice has led many uninformed observers tobelieve that today’s Mexicans are the intellec-tually suffocated children of the Counter-Reformation, still ruled by a taciturn Papistchurch that rejects the notion of Darwinianevolution and other major scientific advanceswhile clinging to its theological obsessions.

I am always amused when I am asked bymy American colleagues about the problemsand pressures they imagine I face in Mexicobecause of my interest in life’s beginnings.However, pressure to include creationism in

public pedagogical and research settings hasbeen primarily a phenomenon in the UnitedStates. Only twice during my 30 yearsof teaching about evolutionary biology

and research into the origins oflife, have I encountered religious-based opposition to my work. Inboth cases, it came from evangeli-cal zealots from the United Statespreaching in Mexico. One of thelittle recognized U.S. imports intoMexico is a small flow of cre-ationists, who, through religion,are trying to impose their funda-mentalist beliefs and hinder theteaching of Darwinian evolutionin all levels of schooling.

It is true that the arrival ofDarwinism was an unsettling eventfor a number of Latin American

Catholics, and led to criticism from varioussectors of the Church. However, historianshave recorded no major controversies develop-ing in Mexican society after the publication in1859 of The Origin of Species. Such quietudestemmed in part from the fact that Rome doesnot advocate the literal reading of the Biblethe way Protestant evangelists do. Withtime, the clash between the Old Testamentand Darwin’s ideas faded into a more or lesspeaceful coexistence between the theoriesand discoveries of evolutionary biology,on the one side, and the teachings of

the Church, on theother. Although it mightnot be generally or frequently acknowledged,there has been an age-old tradition of compati-bility between science and the Catholic Church.The Galileo affair stands out as an anomalousmoment of extreme intolerance.

Of course, neither the Church nor its mem-bers are monolithic entities. As in other placeswith a strong Catholic background, such asFrance, Italy, Spain, and most Latin Americancountries, Mexican society as a whole is notonly predominantly secular, but it also takes forgranted the existence of strong laical institu-tions. This is a subtle but important distinctionthat explains why Mexico and many largelyCatholic countries succeed at maintaining anextended form of secularism while alsosupporting religious freedom. This works solong as citizens in these countries express thisfreedom within the realm of their personalbeliefs and not within a context of publicpolicy-making. It helps here that in LatinAmerica most Catholics tend to read the OldTestament not as the literal truth, but as adepiction of the ways in which divine creationmay have taken place. It is thus possible to be aCatholic Bible-reader, or more generally abeliever in the supernatural origin of life, with-out being a card-carrying creationist who hasto reject Darwinian evolution in order tomaintain logical consistency within a frame-work of fundamentalist Christian premises.

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Teaching Evolution in Mexico:

Preaching to the ChoirAntonio Lazcano

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A Love Affair with DarwinThe study of the origin of life and other issuesof evolutionary biology run deep in Mexicanculture. This shows up in many ways, includ-ing Diego Rivera’s cheerful mural paintings ofCharles Darwin in public buildings and thepopularity of Aleksandr Oparin’s ideas aboutlife emerging from a primordial soup. Morethan 70 editions of The Origins of Life, one ofOparin’s earliest books, have been publishedhere and read by generation after generationof high-school students since it was first trans-lated in 1937. Perhaps even more important isthe nationwide exposure for many decades ofMexico’s schoolchildren to evolutionary ideasincluded in the textbooks published by theMexican Secretary of Public Education,which are provided free to all students. Thelessons based on these materials are a pre-amble to in-depth teaching of evolution insecondary (middle school)and high schools.

In the early part of the20th century, the Mexicannaturalist Alfonso L. Herrera(1865–1942) became oneof the most active earlypopularizers of evolution-ary ideas. With relentlessenergy, he lectured, wrote,and established publicmuseums devoted to thepromotion of Darwinism.He also contributed to thescience of evolutionary biology by develop-ing a theory on the autotrophic origins of life,according to which the first cells had beenendowed since their emergence with theplantlike ability to synthesize their owncomponents from carbon dioxide. Althoughnone of Herrera’s associates built upon histheory, he had a lasting influence in Mexicanbiology. Many years after he died, his con-tributions are still acknowledged, a factthat indirectly helped my own early pro-fessional development.

Some 30 years ago, I became intenselyinterested in the prebiotic significance ofextraterrestrial organic compounds, anddecided to teach a course on the origins of lifeat the Universidad Nacional Autónoma deMéxico (UNAM). In large part because of theintellectual foundation Herrera had laid downmany decades ago, and the sympathy thatDarwin’s ideas inspire in Mexico, my pro-posal to teach the course—in spite of myyouth and lack of experience—was greetedwith considerable enthusiasm by my col-leagues, the university administration, andthe students. To this day, new generations ofstudents continue to flock to this and othercourses on evolutionary biology.

In yet another sign that Mexico’s educa-

tors and students embrace Darwinism, myassociates and I are often invited to speak inpublic and private schools, including thoserun by Catholic nuns and priests, to talk aboutthe origin and evolution of life. The list ofvenues includes a conference at the oldestMexican Catholic seminary. Many of the stu-dents and professors at the seminary mayhave seen evolution as the unfolding of adivine plan, but they also saw no doctrinalconflict between their own personal faith andDarwin’s scientific ideas. They even foundhilarious the idea of teaching creationismbased on biblical literalism.

As shown by the opinion article publishedon 7 July 2005 in the New York Times byChristoph Cardinal Schönborn, not all mem-bers of the Catholic hierarchy feel comfort-able with the premises and results of evolu-tionary theory. It is equally true that some

Church thinkers and theologianshave tried to criticize the philosophi-cal tenets of evolutionary theory, butmost tend to accept the results of

experimental research and the gen-eral evolutionary framework, whilemaintaining a spiritualist stand. Thisattitude, which has been prevalentamong Vatican theologians espe-cially since the times of Pope Pius

XII in the middle of the last century, owesmuch to the intellectual sophistication oforders like the Jesuits and the Dominicans.

In his famous 1996 address to thePontifical Academy of Sciences, the late PopeJohn Paul II acknowledged that the theory ofevolution is not a mere hypothesis, while alsoreiterating the supernatural origin of thehuman soul. By shifting emphasis from cre-ation per se, to the origin of the soul, Pope JohnPaul II found a relatively safe common groundto stand on, since scientists are entirely unableto prove (or have no interest in proving) theexistence or nonexistence of the soul. In spiteof such subtleties, most Mexican Catholicsclearly do not view the premises and develop-ments of evolutionary theory as a battlegroundor as major theological risk. Stealing the spot-light for the moment for Mexican Catholicsand other Christians are ethical controversiesassociated with new and emerging biotech-nologies, especially those based on stem cells,fertility research, and genetic manipulation

Science Be DamnedIt is hard for Mexicans to understand thehold that religion has in America, and manyof us are baffled by the lax attitude of policy-makers in the United States to the religious

right, who manage to influence andsometimes undermine the public educa-tional system. Thomas Jefferson’s famousphrase about “the wall of separation”between the Church and State may be aguiding principle of American politics,but the huge cultural space that evangeli-cal Protestantism and other politicallyactive religious movements have gained inthe United States demonstrates how tenu-ous are the boundaries between the secularand the religious.

As summarized by Noah Feldman in hisbook Divided by God, the belief that the Oldand New Testaments were literally and ver-bally inspired is deeply rooted in Americanmainstream culture, and remains a pervasiveinfluence in many aspects of everyday life,including elementary and higher education. Incontrast, Mexico still maintains some anticler-ical attitudes, and public education bears thesecular trademark of the Enlightenment,whose introduction into the country was facil-itated by some prominent priests and Jesuits.

Feldman’s thesis itself has deep roots. “Formore than a thousand years,” wrote ThomasH. Huxley in 1843 in the preface to his bookScience and Hebrew Tradition, “the greatmajority of the most highly civilized andinstructed nations in the world…have held itto be an indisputable truth that, whoever maybe the ostensible writers of the Jewish,Christian, and Mahometan [Islamic] scrip-tures, God Himself is their real author; and,since their conception of the attributes of theDeity excludes the possibility of error and—at least in relation to this particular matter—of willful deception, they have drawn the log-ical conclusion that the denier of the accuracyof any statement, the questioner of the bind-ing force of any command, to be found inthese documents is not merely a fool, but ablasphemer. From the point of view of reasonhe grossly blunders; from that of religion hegrievously sins.”

Although many American churches appearto reject the fundamentalist campaign againstDarwinism, some of the most aggressive ver-sions of creationism—including the latestone dubbed “intelligent design” by its champ-ions—have been growing rapidly in thefertile soil provided by some of the evangeli-cal churches that sprung up in the 19th andearly 20th centuries. The United States isunique among Western countries for itsreligiosity. Polls consistently show that only asmall percentage of Americans hold a secularview of the world, compared with an over-whelming 40% of the population thatbelieves in strict biblical creationism.

This explains in part why following the1987 United States Supreme Court ruling thatopposed the teaching of so-called creation

What a guy. In Mexico, Darwin doesn’tget a lot of grief.

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science in the classroom, a new, recycled,highly pragmatic creationism has evolved (ifyou pardon the pun). It is a movement that haseliminated open references to Christianity;built networks of lecturers and researchers thatpropagate the creationist theology; introducednew players like the intelligent design move-ment; found major sources of funding fromfoundations run by politically active Christianconservatives; and adapted its fundamentalistliteralism not only to the rhythm of pop musicbut also to the Web.

Their accomplishments can be measurednot only by their emerging success in under-mining the separation of Church and State inthe context of science education in publicschools in some states like Kansas, Ohio, andPennsylvania, but also in the statements bymajor political figures, including PresidentBush, that attempt, if not to appease the reli-gious right, at least to assure the public oftheir unwillingness to take a firm stand insupport of evolutionary theory.

Dangerous ExportsSince we can never know in full detail howthe origin of life took place, it is not surpris-ing that it is becoming a target for intelli-gent design creationists. The geological andchemical evidence required to understandlife’s beginnings remains insufficient anddifficult to understand. For creationists, thatevidentiary gap provides an opportunity toerect a framework of controversy and end-less discussion around the study of prebi-otic evolution and the origin of life, whichthey assume are best explained by an intel-ligent cause rather than by an undirectedprocess like natural selection.

It is true that there is a huge gap in the cur-rent descriptions of the evolutionary transi-tion between the prebiotic synthesis of bio-chemical compounds and the last commonancestor of all extant living beings. Even theunanticipated discovery in 1982—by theresearch teams directed by Thomas Cech andSidney Altman—of catalytic RNA molecules(ribozymes), which can be loosely describedas nucleic acids that simultaneously havecharacteristics of DNA and enzymes, has notclosed this gap. Instead, that and related dis-coveries have led to a more precise definition

of what should be understood as the origin oflife. The origin of protein synthesis is still notunderstood, but the surprising conservationof widely distributed polypeptide sequencesrelated to RNA metabolism has led my groupand others to suggest that these sequencesprovide insights into an RNA/protein worldthat may have resulted from the interaction ofribozymes with amino acids, and that verylikely preceded our familiar DNA/RNA/pro-tein world. Our understanding of the originand early stages of biological evolution stillhas major unsolved problems, but they arerecognized by the scientific community asintellectual challenges, and not as requiringmetaphysical explanations, as proponents ofcreationism would have it.

Scientists from other countries could takea certain solace in the fact that the creationistmovement appears to be largely confined tothe United States. I find it extremely encour-aging that Mexican students, for the most part,are not driven by gaps in the scientific view oflife to search for religious explanations or tovitiate evolutionary theory by advocatingintelligent design. Our teachers and pupilsalike generally view the framework of intelli-gent design as a thinly disguised attempt tointroduce religious preconceptions into theclassroom. Even so, it would be unwise to

simply sit back and watch withincredulity as our American colleaguesstruggle against intelligent design cre-ationists and other fundamentalisms.There are, in fact, manifold indicationsthat the creationism movement has beenflexing its muscles and looking to pros-elytize far and wide. Its potential threatto science education in Mexico andother Latin American countries shouldnot be underestimated.

In the United States, Hispanicsaccount for 14% of the population, butthe demography of American sciencedoes not reflect this figure. The successof the American educational system inattracting Latinos (many of whom livein the Bible belt) into science careers hasbeen limited, but the evangelical move-ment has not lost time in recruitingthem. Its progress in the United Stateshas been extended by many fundamen-

talist Mormons and Pentecostalist missionar-ies who travel abroad to search for adherentsin other countries. Their followers nowinclude growing numbers of legal and illegalMexican migrants, driven by the Americandream, who go back and forth across the bor-der. Steeped in the parochial thinking of bibli-cal literalism, the open commitment by thesemissionaries to impose nonsecular views ineducation is an indication of a looming con-frontation in both countries. Tall fences makegood neighbors, but stronger new forms ofcooperation between the academic commu-nities on both sides of the Mexican-Americanfrontier could do better.

Creationism is a danger to science educa-tion that should be addressed by a construc-

tive dialogue and collective actionsled by imaginative researchers andeducators on both sides of the border.Our answer to the fundamentalistchallenge could include better aca-demic exchange programs, commonstrategies designed to promote theteaching of evolutionary biology, andjoint outreach activities for bothMexican and U.S. Latino students,who share important cultural back-

grounds. The potential benefits of such com-mon strategies could be manifold, includinga proper honoring of the freedom of all tofollow (or not) religious beliefs, while ren-dering to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,to God the things that are God’s…and toDarwin those that are Darwin’s.

Darwin’s place. At this elementary school, namedEvolución, in the small Mexican city of Pachuca, childrencelebrate Darwin’s birthday (12 February) with a cere-mony and display of murals on his life and theory.

G L O B A L VO I C E S O F S C I E N C E

The author is in the Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM,Apdo. Postal 70-407, Cd. Universitaria, Mexico D.F.,04510 Mexico. E-mail: alar@correo.unam.mx

10.1126/science.1115180

One of the little recognized U.S. imports into Mexicois a small flow of creationists, who, through religion,are trying to impose their fundamentalist beliefsand hinder the teaching of Darwinian evolution in alllevels of schooling.

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Teaching Evolution in Mexico: Preaching to the ChoirAntonio Lazcano

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