John G. West

Time magazine demonstrates yet again why fewer and fewer people are turning to the old-guard media for their news. In its Jan. 31 issue, the once venerable news organ is running a hackneyed article on intelligent design as a secret conspiracy (yawn!). Bearing the hysterical title “Stealth Attack on Evolution,” the piece comes with an even more fevered subtitle: “Who is behind the movement to give equal time to Darwin’s critics, and what do they really want?!!!! ” Okay, I added the emphasis and exclamation points. But the title deserves it. It reads like something you’d see in a supermarket tabloid. Time lists three authors for the story: Michael Lemonick, Noah Isakson, and Jeffrey Ressner. But in the interest of full disclosure, the magazine should have listed a fourth: Eugenie Scott, head of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) and Darwin spin-doctor extraordinaire. Scott is quoted in the article, but she should have been credited as one of the writers, for Time’s reporters simply recycled her spin in their own words. The writers’ effort to attack ID as a sinister secret plot to foist religion on unsuspecting students comes straight out of the NCSE’s playbook.

In a future post, I will catalog some of the more egregious errors and omissions of the Time piece. Here I’d simply like to tell about my encounter with Time reporter Jeffrey Ressner, with whom I had a lengthy phone conversation. After talking with dozens of reporters on the science education issue, I have become rather skeptical of most reporters’ ability to report fairly about the evolution controversy. Usually they have visions of “Inherit the Wind” dancing around in their heads, and they simply recycle stereotypes from the Scopes trial, regardless of the actual facts. Even reporters from places like The Washington Post produce shoddy and inaccurate stories on the subject (see here and here for examples). Because of the pervasively poor reporting of the old-guard media on this issue, I now begin many interviews by listing for reporters some of the most egregious inaccuracies and stereotypes in recent news reports. Usually when I do this, reporters respond that they just want to present the story accurately and fairly. They assure me that they don’t have any preconceived agenda. I’ve learned to be more than a little skeptical of such protestations; indeed, in my experience, reporters who protest too loudly about their fairness sometimes turn out to be the most biased.

The tasteless, over-the-top effort by some Darwinists (especially those at the ACLU) to castigate anyone who disagrees with them on evolution as Nazis or Holocaust deniers continues unabated. In a recent article in the Cleveland Jewish News, Jeffrey Selman, whom the ACLU represented in the Cobb County case, implies that if we allow students to hear about scientific criticisms of evolutionary theory we are one step away from putting Jews in the ovens:

When a federal judge in Georgia ruled last week that a local school board’s decision to put a small sticker on its science textbooks labeling evolution “a theory, not a fact” was unconstitutional, Jeffrey Selman said it was primarily an American issue.

Still, he said, he could not help but view it through the lens of his Jewishness.

“Look what happened in Germany,” said Selman…”The German Jews said, ‘We’re Germans. We’ll be fine.’ The next thing you know, they were opening the oven doors for us.”

The Berkshire Eagle newspaper in Massachusetts is running an absurd editorial with the histrionic title, “Ayatollahs in the classroom”. To get the full effect, you might want to turn on a CD of some suitably melodramatic music from a horror film before you start reading: A movement to drag the teaching of science in the United States back into the Dark Ages continues to gain momentum. So far, it’s a handful of judges — “activist judges” in the view of their critics — who are preventing the spread of Saudi-style religious dogma into more and more of America’s public-school classrooms. According to this Berkshire editorialist, discussing scientific criticisms of modern evolutionary theory in the classroom is tantamount to turning America Read More ›

Constitutional attorney Brian Fahling has a sensible discussion of the Cobb County decision in the Union-Leader, here. Especially pertinent is his paragraph responding to the charge that it was illegitimate for the school district to single out evolution in its disclaimer. Fahling hits the proverbial nail on the head when he says: I suspect that evolution was singled out because it is the only scientific theory whose adherents are utterly intolerant of criticism, and it is the only scientific theory taught in public schools as the gospel truth that no reasonable person could question. This is not only troubling for parents whose religion rejects the theory, but it is equally troubling from an academic, scientific, and intellectual perspective for obvious Read More ›

Darwinian biologist Ken Miller ventures into the field of constitutional law and flops. In an op-ed in the Boston Globe, Miller mangles a key finding of the judge in the Cobb County case. According to Miller: The judge simply read the sticker and saw that it served no scientific or educational purpose. Once that was clear, he looked to the reasons for slapping it in the textbooks of thousands of students, and here the record was equally clear. The sticker was inserted to advance a particular set of religious beliefs… While the ACLU claimed that the Cobb County school board adopted its textbook sticker in order to advance religion, the judge rejected that claim. Instead, the judge found that the Read More ›

A California school district has been sued in federal court for allegedly violating a parent’s civil rights during a controversy over how to teach evolution. For more than a year, Larry Caldwell tried to get the Roseville Joint Union High School District outside of Sacramento to consider changing how it taught the theory of evolution in its biology classes. Caldwell, who has three children, says he wanted the district to correct factual errors in its biology textbooks as well as to introduce students to some scientific criticisms of modern evolutionary theory. Caldwell did not propose that the district teach creationism or alternatives to evolution. The Roseville district ultimately rejected Caldwell’s recommendations. But in the process of trying to scuttle his Read More ›