Caroline Crocker

Caroline Crocker (b 1958) is an American immunopharmacologist who taught creationist claims about evolution and promoted intelligent design in a biology class at George Mason University in 2005, while employed in a non-tenure track contract position as “contingent faculty”, with no guarantee of a renewal. She also held another contract teaching position at Northern Virginia Community College. After her contract at George Mason University was not renewed, as is common with such positions, she claimed that she lost her job there "for teaching the problems with evolution" in a lecture which she repeated in a class at Northern Virginia Community College in the presence of a Washington Post reporter on November 2, 2005.

A GMU spokesman told the reporter that the university let her go at the end of her contract period for reasons unrelated to her views on intelligent design, but that teaching intelligent design belonged in a religion class, and was not part of the subject of biology. In January 2006 she began a postdoctorate year at the Uniformed Services University. Her case has been presented in a Discovery Institute intelligent design campaign as evidence of persecution, and features in the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Education and work

Crocker received an Associate of Arts from Des Moines Area Community College, a B.Sc. in microbiology and virology from University of Warwick, U.K. in 1979, an M.Sc. in medical microbiology from University of Birmingham, U.K in 1993, and a PhD in immunopharmacology from the University of Southampton, U.K. in 1999. As of 2006 she was reported as being a member of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia, where her husband was associate rector. She now lives in Southern California, and has four grown children.^{[citation needed]}

George Mason University

Crocker had a position as a part-time faculty member of George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. She alleges that, in December 2004, her department barred her from teaching evolution and intelligent design after she mentioned intelligent design while teaching her second-year cell biology course. The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences stated that the university did not have a policy or a rule on whether certain topics should be discussed, but questioned whether a concept with theological underpinnings belonged in a science course. He added "I'm a Buddhist, but I don't think we should teach reincarnation in biology classes."

Her lecture which raised concerns, as repeated at Northern Virginia Community College, included erroneous creationist claims which have long been discredited. Her claim that microevolution is quite different from macroevolution is a common and incorrect creationist distortion, and her assertion that the latter was not established as "No one has ever seen a dog turn into a cat in a laboratory" is completely incorrect, as no evolutionary biologist has proposed that this could happen, and if it did it would be disproof of evolution. She misrepresented peppered moth evolution experiments to claim that they were falsified, repeating an intelligent design creationist claim. In asserting that the Miller-Urey experiment was irrelevant as views on the atmospheric composition have been revised, she ignored more recent research including the experiment being re-run successfully with revised conditions. Having claimed that many scientists believe that complex life reveals the hand of an intelligent designer, she said that "The problem with evolution is that it is all supposition – this evolved into this – but there is no evidence", and that anti-Semitism, eugenics and death camps in Nazi Germany had been based on Darwin's ideas of natural selection. Biologist and critic of creationism PZ Myers, denounced Crocker's claims, pointing out that long running Christian antisemitic attitudes led to the holocaust. He advised her to read books in support of evolution instead of anti-evolution material from the pro-ID Discovery Institute.

On 28 April 2005 Crocker was reported as stating that being prevented from teaching both evolution and intelligent design was "an infringement of academic freedom", and appealing the case to a grievance committee. She was teaching material which was not part of the curriculum of the courses, and academic freedom does not give the freedom to ignore the expected course content or teach about anything you want. Crocker was allowed to continue teaching and complete her non-tenure track contract in the normal way, then her contract was not renewed. A university spokesman said this was for reasons unrelated to her views on intelligent design, and that though they wholeheartedly supported academic freedom, "teachers also have a responsibility to stick to subjects they were hired to teach, and intelligent design belonged in a religion class, not biology."

Northern Virginia Community College

At the same time Crocker taught at GMU, she was also an adjunct professor at Northern Virginia Community College(NVCC). On November 2, 2005, she gave a lecture which she told a reporter was the lecture that had led to her losing her job at a previous university. She said "I lost my job at George Mason University for teaching the problems with evolution. Lots of scientists question evolution, but they would lose their jobs if they spoke out." In reality evolutionary biology is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and there is no evidence of creationists being persecuted. Crocker had described the lecture beforehand as teaching "the strengths and weaknesses of evolution", and when asked afterwards if she would be discussing the evidence for evolution in another class, said that she would not as "There really is not a lot of evidence for evolution" and she was trying to balance other pro-evolution accounts. National Center for Science Education research affiliate Alan Gishlick has described Crocker's arguments as part of a familiar litany of half-truths and errors.

Subsequently, she resigned from NVCC and began work for the Department of Defense in cancer research.

Intelligent design

Crocker became the Executive Director of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center in early 2008. She left the Center in the summer of 2008 to "pursue other endeavors" She appeared in a Coral Ridge Ministries video entitled The Intelligent Design Controversy in Higher Education and in the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The claims she made in the Coral Ridge video about transitional fossils (and specifically Archaeopteryx and the evolution of the horse) were criticised by PZ Myers as being factually incorrect and repetitions of well-documented creationist falsehoods. Crocker currently runs a promotional website advertising her public speaking. According to the website topics include: The Censorship of Science, Evolution: Fact, Science, or Religion, along with an Alpha course.

Book

• Caroline Crocker, Free to Think: Why Scientific Integrity Matters Leafcutter Press (July 4, 2010) ISBN 0981873448