Does Kamala Harris believe in evolution?

Seventeen years ago, a moderator at a presidential debate asked what was then considered a trick question: “Do you believe in evolution?” he asked John McCain. The senator froze for a moment before answering “yes.” After several other candidates expressed their disagreement, he clarified: “I believe in evolution,” he said, “but I also believe that when I walk through the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, the hand of God is there.”

During Tuesday night’s debate, not a single synthetic theory to explain the history of life was mentioned—not a single one! In fact, the moderators barely asked candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump about science. It’s 2024, just a year and a few changes since the coronavirus pandemic formally ended, and already we’re facing another global pathogen threat. And we’re also experiencing the hottest period on record. Of course, science issues like these are at least as important to the public interest now as they were in previous elections. But aside from Trump’s halfhearted defense of his administration’s response to Covid—”we have gowns, we have masks”—there was no mention of pandemic policy, and the topic of climate change didn’t come up until the 87th minute of a 90-minute live event.

Otherwise, our incoming presidents’ thoughts on science policy and innovation simply didn’t set the tone. They were asked to talk about the economy, abortion, immigration and the war in Ukraine, but not how they would handle the next emerging virus, or what they think about vaccine policy, or why a military operation first deployed during the Trump administration spread anti-vaccine propaganda abroad. The moderators didn’t mention technology at all. They didn’t discuss AI. This debate, likely the only one these two candidates will have, was U.Nscientific through and through.

Not long ago, issues like these were considered central to the presidential project. If the evolution question could be raised at all in 2007—if it could be a litmus test at all—it was because the country was in the midst of a debate over whether public schools should be allowed or required to teach biblical creation stories. Shortly after McCain laid out his divine canyon-creator theory, Barack Obama faced a similar challenge on a live CNN broadcast. “If one of your daughters asked you—and maybe she already has—’Dad, did God really create the world in six days?'” a moderator asked him, “what would you say?” Obama responded hesitantly: “I believe that the story the Bible tells of how God created this great earth that we live on is essentially true, that is fundamentally true,” he said. “Whether it happened exactly as we might understand it when we read the text of the Bible, I cannot know.”

Such questions, however thorny, aim at something big: how would America teach its future citizens to understand the fact of our existence, and whether science or religion should play a primary role in public life (or what the balance between the two should really be). During this campaign cycle, an entire grassroots movement arose to persuade both Obama and McCain to engage in a full debate on scientific issues. That effort eventually culminated in the bipartisan group Science Debate. Its supporters were numerous and impressive—many Nobel laureates as well as several scientists who later became senior members of the Obama administration. Two of the group’s main organizers, Lawrence Krauss and Chris Mooney, noted in The Science Debate that science was “at the foundation of some of the thorniest political questions in recent history.” Los Angeles Times in the fall that “a presidential debate on science would help voters decide which of the candidates is up to the task of dealing with what comes next.”

As boldly as the candidates answered questions about phylogeny and the Big Bang, they did not agree that scientific issues deserved a nationally televised debate. But Obama and McCain responded in writing to 14 questions, laying out their views on issues such as promoting innovation, protecting the oceans, managing stem cell research and, yes, preventing the next pandemic. In 2012, the major candidates again submitted statements in response to Science Debate. (And again, pandemics were on the list of topics for debate: “I will empower the private sector to pursue the breakthroughs that will enable society” to prevent them, Mitt Romney wrote.)

In 2016, Science Debate needed to bolster its arguments, so it hired a group of cute kids to ask the candidates if they would share their views on “fixing our climate,” “the bee extinction,” “wobots and jobs,” and other issues of national importance. They ended up getting some written responses, not just from Trump and Hillary Clinton, but also from Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Ironically, the pandemic issue was downplayed this time, but the candidates did provide answers on the issue of scientific integrity. “Science is science and facts are facts,” Trump wrote at the time. “My administration will ensure that there will be complete transparency and accountability without political bias.”

Trump was not exactly fixated on a rigid adherence to empirical reality; a few years later, he was literally revising his administration’s hurricane forecasts, as if to manipulate the atmosphere in the service of his pride. Of course, the statements that Science Debate produced were never binding, and Trump (or whoever on his campaign team actually wrote those answers) may well have lied about whether he believed facts were facts. But they symbolized a mindset, or at least the pretense of a mindset. As a scientist would say, they were data. And even if the answers were not always insightful, they attracted a lot of attention, which is notable in itself. Not long ago, a presidential candidate could or could be held accountable, at least to some degree, for his views on ocean health, the internet, vaccinations, or cosmology.

In 2020, twelve years after it began, the Science Debate ran aground. Both candidates that year refused to answer any of its questions. Even Joe Biden, who campaigned explicitly on the promise of restoring science—in his victory speech he promised to “join the forces of science and the forces of hope in the great battles of our time”—couldn’t bring himself to engage. Covid was still raging, and the candidates did debate pandemic policy (as well as climate change) in their regular debates. “We have the gowns. We have the masks,” Trump said then, almost exactly as he did this week. But at the same time, in the fall of our last election—when science was so clearly tied to pressing policy puzzles, when acting on the data (whatever that meant) was both difficult and divisive, and when public health measures could lead to inflammatory protests—our would-be presidents were also distancing themselves from the notion that science policy should be debated more broadly.

Science Debate, which eventually folded into the National Science Policy Network, now has more diffuse goals, namely getting candidates at all levels to fill out a science policy questionnaire. There is no sign whatsoever that it is seriously trying to elicit answers from the 2024 presidential candidates. The website where the project began, ScienceDebate2008.com, is a questionable Russian news site. (Stories published there include “There’s No Place to Store Sugar in Russia” by a “graduate student” and “How to Exchange Money in Kharkov at a Favorable Rate.”) ScienceDebate.com has also gone offline, and the group’s social media presence has been all but nonexistent even in this election year.

This week’s debate provided further confirmation: a long period in which science was treated as if it mattered both to America and to presidential politics is over.