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Where did we come from? Where are we going? Why are there so few public restrooms?

Wandering across the landscape of the "evolution controversy," it's easy to feel that we've entered a sequel to Alice in Wonderland. Everything seems topsy-turvy, and non sequiturs multiply like, well, universes. We're in a muddle. Oddly enough, it is precisely in such conditions that people are likely to dig in their heels and claim a degree of certainty they don't possess.

Consider this a brief report on some of the curious aspects of the evolution controversy.

Faithful readers of The New York Times will recall historian Garry Wills's op-ed, "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out," published immediately after George W. Bush's reelection in November 2004. For a time, it appeared that Wills's dire pronouncement was merely the sober truth. Attempts were being made to smuggle Intelligent Design into America's classrooms. But the forces of Enlightenment rallied. One weekly science magazine featured a cover story with this stark warning: "The End of Reason?" Wired magazine joined the fray with a cover story devoted to "The Plot to Kill Evolution." Rolling Stone chimed in with a banner headline, "Science vs. Faith: Evolution on Trial." The rest is history.

According to a recent story in the Times, Reason is resting comfortably and is expected to make a full recovery.

News coverage and commentary have focused on the threat to the teaching of evolution. But except for occasional flare-ups, that's not really the problem. At this very moment, evolution is being taught all over our fair land. The real problem, as an article in Science magazine explains ("Darwin's Place on Campus Is Secure—But Not Supreme"), is that "students are learning about evolution without abandoning their belief in some form of creationism." The sheer effrontery of those students!

Of course, even Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, believes in "some form of creationism," the orthodox Christian version, in fact, as he explains in his excellent forthcoming book, The Language of God. He simply believes—along with many of his fellow Christians, and in opposition to many others—that God employed "the elegant mechanism of evolution."

You may not have heard about the controversy involving Intelligent Design and chirality in elephant pheromones. The original article by David R. Greenwood, et al., appeared in Nature; a summary for the ordinary reader followed in New Scientist:

He is a hot-blooded, 30-year-old male in peak physical condition. He has mucus oozing from his cheeks and green urine streaming down his legs. His penis has a green sheen to it, and he gives off a smell that can be picked up half a mile away. He wafts his ears back and forth and makes a low rumble. He looks confident: After all, many females find him irresistible.

Male elephants enter this state, known as "musth" (and pronounced "must"), every year for a month or two. The chemical signals they emit during musth—yielding that overpowering mixture of odors—turn out to be packed with information. Their breath and urine include a chemical called frontalin, which exists in two forms that mirror one another in their molecular structure (hence they are "chiral"). In musth, male elephants emit both forms, and the ratio between the two "depends on the elephant's age and the stage of its musth cycle," so that "females can accurately assess his reproductive success and male contemporaries can judge how strong he is before attempting to pick a fight."

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April 2006, Vol. 50, No. 4