Science Education

A Darwinist blog is trumpeting a quote by George Gilder in yesterday’s Boston Globe which they have taken out of context in an attempt to make him look bad.

“Intelligent design itself does not have any content.”

First, it would be helpful to see the quote in context of what was being discussed, namely Discovery Institute’s position on education policy.

“I’m not pushing to have [ID] taught as an ‘alternative’ to Darwin, and neither are they,” he says in response to one question about Discovery’s agenda. “What’s being pushed is to have Darwinism critiqued, to teach there’s a controversy. Intelligent design itself does not have any content.”

Eighty years ago Thursday the famous Scopes Monkey Trial ended in Dayton, Tennessee. Time for a quiz:

History tells us that two great lawyers faced off. On the one side was (A) a progressive and a pacifist, an educated man who rejected the idea of a young earth and worried about efforts to peddle racism and eugenics in the South. On the other side was (B) a master orator who defended some flagrantly racist ideas long since discredited by science. Lawyer A sought a full and fair debate over the evidence. Lawyer B used a procedural tactic to shut down the debate so that only his position was heard.

Surely Mr. A would be the darling of any contemporary liberal journalist, right? But Mr. A was William Jennings Bryan, the creationist.

Just in time for the anniversary of the Scopes trial, the folks over at Panda’s Thumb are continuing their unseemly crusade against Ohio State doctoral candidate Bryan Leonard. Even though these Darwinian fundamentalists don’t support academic freedom for teachers and scientists who are skeptical of Darwin, you’d think they might draw the line at going after students. Apparently, however, their bigotry and intolerance knows no bounds. Unhappy that Leonard’s dissertation committee has effectively refuted the misinformation spread by Panda’s Thumb and others, blogger Richard Hoppe has responded with even more smears. Here are replies to some of the new disinformation put out by Hoppe:

Many news stories and editorials from hyper-Darwinists and/or opponents of the theory of intelligent design (ID) have claimed that 12, 15 or even 20 states are considering legislation to MANDATE the teaching of ID in schools. This is completely false. Most of the stories and op-eds making these claims have lumped together local school board, state school board and state legislative activity relating IN SOME WAY to the teaching of evolution, misrepresenting the situation by lumping them all together as “states considering the mandating of ID.”

Mark Franek had a piece in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer showing off his ignorance on intelligent design. Here’s his attempt to describe ID:

“The basic tenet of intelligent design takes about five seconds to teach – the mechanisms of life are so complex that they could have only been orchestrated by a supreme power – but the implications of this belief are better taught and served in a religion or philosophy class, or better yet, in a place of worship.”

He’s right, his definition of ID would be better suited for a religion class. But, that’s not the standard definition of ID and is in fact a definiton that we reject outright.

You’d think that after the Jayson Blair scandal, the New York Times would be exceptionally careful about questions of journalistic ethics. Why, then, is the Times allowing a reporter who regularly covers the evolution controversy on its news pages to ALSO write opinion articles on the same subject?

Cornelia Dean has written a number of news stories for the Times about the the controversy over evolution, including one about the Kansas science standards and another one last weekend about the Catholic church and evolution.

But the day after Dean’s news piece appeared about Catholics and evolution, a commentary by her promoting evolution appeared on the op-ed page of the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania! In this op-ed, Dean advised evolutionists about how they can win the public debate over evolution:

Over the past month, Darwinists have been waging a vicious campaign of defamation against Ohio State University science education doctoral candidate Bryan Leonard. (For more information about Leonard’s situation, see here.) Mr. Leonard’s doctoral dissertation defense has been put in limbo after certain Darwinist professors alleged that his research was “unethical” because it involved teaching students about scientific criticisms of Darwin’s theory, an approach called for in Ohio’s official science standards!

Darwinists have variously claimed that members of Leonard’s doctoral committee were improperly selected, that Leonard engaged in “unethical” research, or that he taught his students intelligent design. According to members of Leonard’s dissertation committee, however, all of these charges are false. Two members of the committee have just issued a detailed public statement correcting the record about Leonard’s dissertation. Discovery Institute has posted the statement on its website as a public service, here.

Science magazine has published an article about what it is calling a “mea culpa” by Eugenie Scott of the NCSE for spreading false information about California parent Larry Caldwell. (For background on Scott’s defamation of Caldwell, see here.)

Today’s New York Times has a fascinating page-one article about Catholic Cardinal Christoph Schönborn’s recent op-ed declaring that Darwinism is incompatible with Roman Catholic doctrine as well as the findings of human reason. As we’ve come to expect from the major media, this “news” article contains errors of fact as well as editorializing by reporters Cornelia Dean and Laurie Goodstein, but it is nevertheless informative — and for a piece by the major media, relatively balanced. The article quotes both Bruce Chapman and Mark Ryland from Discovery Institute. The main thrust of the story is summarized early on in the following paragraphs:

AP education reporter Ben Feller has a wire story about the debate over how to teach evolution. I was pleased to see that Feller actually got our position correct, and let us describe our policy in our own words. This is what he got from a recent interview with Discovery president Bruce Chapman: “The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that represents many scholars who support intelligent design, is not seeking to require schools to teach the theory. Nor is it out to diminish the teaching of evolution, said Bruce Chapman, the institute’s president.“We want the scientific evidence for and against Darwin’s theory taught. That’s it,” Chapman said. And he has a better definition of intelligent design than we usually Read More ›