August 18: Nobelists Against Creationism

Dr. Murray Gell-Mann, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics, led a group of 72 Nobel laureate scientists and 24 scientific organizations who filed a legal brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on this date in 1986 that challenged the constitutionality of a Louisiana law requiring schools that teach evolution to also teach “creation-science.” A press release characterized the brief as coming from “the largest group of Nobel laureates ever to support a single statement on any subject” — namely, a warning that the Louisiana law “threatened scientific education by disparaging proven scientific facts to promote fundamentalist Christian beliefs.” The Supreme Court struck down the law in June, 1987. Gell-Mann, born in 1929, pioneered research into elementary subatomic particles and their interactions.
“Teaching religious ideas mislabeled as science is detrimental to science education. It misleads our youth about the nature of scientific inquiry . . . and strips our citizens of the power to distinguish between the phenomena of nature and the supernatural articles of faith.” — from the legal brief