Vatican Astronomer Rebuts Cardinal's Attack on Darwinism
Constance Holden in Science august 12

Is the Catholic Church rethinking its support for evolution? That's what Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the archbishop of Vienna, suggested last month in The New York Times when he asserted that the church does not accept "neo-Darwinism." His 7 July opinion piece disturbed many scientists, especially those in the United States already worried about a resurgence of creationism and its "scientific" cousin, intelligent design.

Last week, with no utterance forthcoming from the new pope, the Vatican's chief astronomer George Coyne took it upon himself to rebut Schönborn. Writing in the 5 August edition of The Tablet, Britain's Catholic weekly, the Jesuit priest accused the cardinal of "darken[ing] the already murky waters" of the evolution debate. He also pointed out that the International Theological Commission under the presidency of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, issued a statement last year that saw no conflict between Darwin's ideas and the teachings of the Church.

In his Times piece "Finding Design in Nature," Schönborn last month dismissed as "vague and unimportant" the declaration of Pope John Paul II in 1996 that evolutionary theory is compatible with Catholic doctrine. "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true," the cardinal wrote, "but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense--an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection--is not."

It didn't take scientists long to react. On 13 July, three figures prominent in defending the teaching of evolution in the United States sent a letter to the new pope urging him to reaffirm his predecessor's statement. In these "difficult and contentious times," wrote physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, Francisco Ayala of the University of California, Irvine, and Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, "the Catholic Church [must] not build a new divide ... between scientific method and religious belief."

Biologist Peter Raven, head of the Missouri Botanical Garden and a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, thinks scientists may have "overreacted" to Cardinal Schönborn's comments. In fact, Raven says, there is no evidence that the statement was cleared with the pope. It reflects "a pretty serious misunderstanding of what evolution is and what the church had done before," he adds. Raven doubts that Benedict, who was an honorary member of the Pontifical Academy before he succeeded John Paul II, is about to switch course. "The church has had the same view on evolution for about 75 years," he says. But Krauss is not so optimistic. "Based on what I've read about this pope," he says, "it's not at all clear" where he stands. Cardinal Schönborn's spokesperson Erich Laetenberger did not make the matter any clearer: "The cardinal only expresses what the church thinks about the issue," he told Science.

The academy's president, physicist Nicola Cabibbo of the University of Rome, has promised to look into the issue, says academy member and astronomer Vera Rubin of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. In an interview in the 18 July issue of the National Catholic Reporter, Cabibbo indicated that he endorses the views held by Pope John Paul II on evolution. Although some scientists think that "evolutionism" rules out God, Cabibbo declared, "this extension of Darwin's theory is not part of what has been discovered by science." Coyne makes reference to this debate in his recent essay, noting that "there appears to exist a nagging fear in the church" that the universe as defined by science "escapes God's dominion."

Meanwhile, defenders of evolution are still lamenting a comment last week by a vacationing President George W. Bush, in response to a reporter's question, suggesting that public schools should teach students about intelligent design (Science, 5 August, p. 861). Groups representing biologists, astronomers, and science teachers, among others, have shot off letters to the White House expressing their dismay.