Antievolution Legislation Shows Descent with Modification

反进化论立法通过修改呈现弱化趋势

Nicholas Matzke, an American evolutionary biologist currently at the Australian National University in Canberra, performed a phylogenetic-style analysis of dozens of antievolution education bills in various state legislatures to track their relatedness

美国进化生物学家尼古拉斯·马茨克（Nicholas Matzke）最近在堪培拉澳大利亚国立大学对不同州议会的几十个反进化教育法案进行了系统的分析，从中找出它们之间的关系。

撰文/播音 史蒂夫·米尔斯基（Steve Mirsky）

翻译 惠丹丹

审校 邰伦玥

"Creationism evolves and sometimes those new strategies succeed."

Nicholas Matzke, an evolutionary biologist currently on a fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra.

So I think a lot of people, it might not have been on their radar, that we have two states that have a statewide policy that encourages teachers to introduce sort-of false criticisms of evolution… and it also more explicitly tries to prevent administrators from doing anything about it."

“神造论在不断演化，有时那些新的说法会被接受。”最近在堪培拉澳大利亚国立大学获得研究员基金资助的进化生物学家尼古拉斯·马茨克说，“因此我认为有很多人，也许并不知道有两个州在全州范围内提出政策鼓励老师讲一些批判进化论的错误思想... ...而且非常明确地尽量防止行政人员对此作出应对。”

Those states are Tennessee and Louisiana. Matzke used to work for theNational Center for Science Education, the NCSE, which tracks these legislative efforts to get religiously motivated creationism and its thinly disguised offshoots like Intelligent Design into public school classrooms.

这两个州分别是田纳西州和路易斯安那州。马茨克曾经在国家教育中心（NCSE）工作，国家教育中心会调查这些立法机构是如何让起源于宗教的神造说和如智能设计[1]等的稍作改变后的分支进入公立学校的。

Matzke and the NCSE were involved in the Kitzmiller versus Dover case in Pennsylvania in which the judge found the inclusion of Intelligent Design in the biology curriculum to be a violation of the First Amendment. December 20th marks the 10th anniversary of that decision. But dozens of similar bills that do not explicitly mention creationism or intelligent design have been proposed since.

马茨克和国家教育中心曾卷入宾夕法尼亚州的“基斯米勒对多佛”[2]案件中，在该案件中，法官发现生物课程中包含的智能设计是违反美国第一修正案的。（2015年）12月20日是这一决定的10周年纪念日。然而，从那以后还是有很多类似的未明确提及神造论和智能设计的法案被提出。

"Over the years I'd kept in touch with NCSE people and we had always talked about, you know, these bills look like they’re just being copied and modified, we should do a phylogeny at some point—do an evolutionary analysis of them… so it had gotten up to being about 60 bills… I took all those bills, lined up all those texts, coded all the characteristics, all the variations between these texts, and then ran them through the standard phylogenetic analyses that we use for DNA. We use them for dinosaurs, they can be used to study virus evolution. Those same programs can be used on texts that have been copied and modified."

“这些年，我依旧与国家教育中心的人保持着联系，我们经常谈到，这些法案好像仍然在不断被复制、修改，我们应该找一个时间做一个法案发展系统——对这些法案的演化进行分析...因此，当累计大约60份法案时...我把所有的法案的内容进行了整理，对其所有特性和这些内容间的变化进行了编码，然后在一个用来分析DNA的标准系统发展分析程序中运行，我们用这个程序分析恐龙，可以研究病毒进化。这些程序也可以用来研究被复制和修改的文本内容。”

Matzke's tongue in cheek, or rather panda's thumb in a creationist's eye, analysis is in the journal Science. [Nicholas J. Matzke, The evolution of antievolution policies after?Kitzmiller v. Dover]

在神灵论者的眼中的马茨克脸上的舌头，或者熊猫的拇指，关于这些的分析文章发表在《科学》杂志上[Nicholas J. Matzke, The evolution of antievolution policies after?Kitzmiller v. Dover]。

It reveals a high degree of relatedness among the bills—that is, legislators make slight alterations in bills either from their own state or other states in the hopes that this time the particular wording will get the bill passed.

分析结果显示，这些法案是非常相似的——那就是，立法者们在他们自己所在的州或者其他州的法案中做了轻微的改变，希望这一次用的特定的措辞就能使法案通过。

"With the phylogenetic analysis we can tell when do these steps happen and how influential are they on future antievolution legislation… so it's worth alerting people to the fact that these bills exist and alerting people to how these strategies change through time."

“通过这些系统的分析，我们可以确定这些变化什么时候发生以及它们对未来反进化立法机构的影响...因此，提醒人们这些法案依旧存在、以及这些策略是如何随着时间而变化的有非常重要的意义。”