Science Reporting

Today, Discovery Institute, the nation’s leading think tank researching intelligent design, filed an Amicus Curiae (i.e. “Friend of the Court”) brief in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case urging the judge to rule that it is not unconstitutional to teach about the scientific theory of intelligent design.

The filing of the brief coincides with the beginning of the defense offered by the Dover School Board, which has required students to be notified about the existence of the theory of intelligent design as an alternative to Darwinian theory.

“The ACLU is claiming that no matter how carefully intelligent design is presented, and no matter what good educational reasons there might be for teaching it, doing so is just plain illegal and we think that’s nonsense,” said David DeWolf, a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and a law professor at Gonzaga University in Spokane.

A parent in California is suing the National Science Foundation for using more than a half-million federal dollars to develop a website that encourages science teachers to use religion to promote evolution in public schools.

In announcing the suit Larry Caldwell, President of Quality Science Education for All, who is co-counsel in the suit with the Pacific Justice Institute, said, “the same people who so loudly proclaim that they oppose discussion of religion in science classes are clamoring for public school teachers to expressly use theology in order to convince students to support evolution.”

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Austria discomfited Darwinists last July when he published an article in the New York Times taking them to task for claims the Church backs Darwin’s theory of evolution. Now on his website, his staff points out that some in “the English-speaking press” misreported a lecture two weeks ago in Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral as “somehow drawing back from his essay in the New York Times.”

Annotation: It has come to our attention that the content of Cardinal Schönborn‘s first catechesis has been mis-reported in the English-speaking press as somehow drawing back from his essay in The New York Times. This is inaccurate, as will be apparent from the full text. In order to clear up this misunderstanding, we are posting here an initial draft of an English translation. (Official and final German and English versions will follow when the lectures are compiled into book form.)

Academic Freedom is still under siege at the University of Idaho, and Discovery Institute fellow Dr. Scott Minnich is unfortunately just the latest target of a national campaign to stifle dissent from Darwinism and suppress information about intelligent design.

Dr. Jerry Coyne’s flimsy and coarse demolition of what in fact is a straw man version of intelligent design would not warrant response if The New Republic had not promoted it as a cover story recently. We asked TNR’s editors if they would like an article in rebuttal, but the editors apparently thought such would not be needed.

“A California parent, Jeanne Caldwell, is filing a federal lawsuit today against officials of the National Science Foundation and the University of California at Berkeley for spending more than $500,000 of federal money on a website that encourages teachers to use religion to promote evolution in violation of the First Amendment,” according to a news release from Quality Science Education for All.”

More than a year ago, CSC associate director John West wrote about the establishment of state-funded Church of Darwin when he reported on the NSF’s funding of a website developed in conjunction with the NCSE that explicitly uses religion to justify teaching Darwinian evolution. So, who is it that keeps bringing up religion? The Darwinists, naturally.

I see that a couple of fascinating new websites have “evolved” on the Internet (and if you think sites really do evolve, there are some web “designers” I’d like you to meet). For reporters and others who imagine that only the likes of Discovery Institute fellows believe that Darwin’s theory is in the process of imploding, go to the new Stephen J. Gould Initiative for Non-Darwinian Evolution site and its companion, Biological Self Organization: Evolution by Mechanical Causation.

There is much to read there. It’s a curiosity, to say the least.

Jodi Wilgoren’s wry account of her two successive boat trips down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon last summer-first with a group of creationists, then with Eugenie Scott’s Darwinists–must qualify as one of the more inventive and evocative ways to convey differences on origins issues, as well as a reason to nominate the writer for some kind of federal fitness award. I’m sure I was not the only one amused by the delicious contrast in styles in the two passenger manifests, though each congregation came off as religious in its own ways. A creationist wore a Jesus fish symbol, a Darwinist the Darwin amphibian symbol that mocks the Jesus fish. The creationists were earnest, the Darwinistas ironic. The creationists sang hymns, the Darwinists a ditty for evolution.

AP reporter John Miller broke the story of University of Idaho President Timothy White’s edict banning “views that differ from evolution” in any “life, earth, and physical science courses or curricula” as inappropriate for the university. (see our original post here)

Nowhere does the statement say what a differing view on evolution might be. And differing from what exactly? Darwinism? Intelligent design? Structuralism? Self-organization? What is appropriate for UI science classes? Can a professor present research critical of any of these theories or only critical of some? What about evidence that supports these theories can that be discussed with students?

In 1999 someone posted on the internet an early fundraising proposal for Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. Dubbed the “Wedge Document,” this proposal soon took on a life of its own, popping up in all sorts of places and eventually spawning what can only be called a giant urban legend. Among true-believers on the Darwinist fringe the document came to be viewed as evidence for a secret conspiracy to fuse religion with science and impose a theocracy.