Science and Culture Today | Page 1436 | Discovering Design in Nature

The egregious case of copying text from plaintiffs’ attorneys by federal judge John E. Jones has drawn additional criticism from legal scholars who explain that such copying should be scrutinized and carefully examined.

Yesterday Discovery Institute released a report revealing that the key section of the widely-noted court decision in the Kitzmiller vs. Dover intelligent design case was copied nearly verbatim from a document written by ACLU lawyers.

“Discovery Institute is on solid ground in pointing out Judge Jones’ highly questionable practice in this case,” said Bruce Green, an attorney with the Center for Law and Policy. “While having no legal bearing at this stage, it is highly frowned upon by the federal judiciary for a judge to adopt wholesale the findings and conclusions of a party without making a case for independent investigation demonstrated in the record.”

The Associated Press and WorldNetDaily are both reporting that Judge John Jones has refused to respond to Discovery Institute’s study showing that he copied nearly verbatim 90.9% of his 6,004-word analysis of whether intelligent design is science from a document submitted to him by ACLU attorneys. Someone should ask Judge Jones why he is suddenly so reticent to talk about his ruling. During the past year, he has traversed the country to speak at public events and talk about his ruling at length, usually before friendly audiences. But now someone raises the uncomfortable fact that he copied the central part of his ruling from the ACLU, and mum’s the word.

WorldNetDaily is covering the Judge Jones’ copying story, as is the Associated Press, The York Dispatch, and the AgapePress (note: the last article inacurrately states that we are faulting Judge Jones for “plagiarism,” which we aren’t; he copied extensively from the ACLU, but in judicial circles that would not be called plagiarism).

The key section of the widely-noted court decision on intelligent design issued a year ago on December 20 was copied nearly verbatim from a document written by ACLU lawyers, according to a study released today by scholars affiliated with Discovery Institute.

“Judge John Jones copied verbatim or virtually verbatim 90.9% of his 6,004-word section on whether intelligent design is science from the ACLU’s proposed ‘Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law’ submitted to him nearly a month before his ruling,” said Dr. John West, Vice President for Public Policy and Legal Affairs at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.

Last week Michael Behe spoke at Kansas University as part of a series of “Difficult Dialogues,” with various speakers on the topic of intelligent design. There is an excellent report on Behe’s talk at Reasonable Kansans Blog which has some highlights worth noting. Behe primarily discussed and critiqued the Kitzmiller ruling. (We will have more news about this and related issues dealing with how Judge Jones wrote his ruling tomorrow, so be sure to check back here.) The Immunology Literature Dump: Misquotes by Judge Jones: (As noted earlier, Discovery Institute will have more news about this and related issues dealing with how Judge Jones wrote his ruling tomorrow, so be sure to check back here.) Media Misquotes on Astrology: Reasonable Read More ›

Thanks to a notice by William Dembski at UncommonDescent, people are becoming aware that video footage of the “Beyond belief: Science, religion, reason and survival” conference where scientists bashed religion at the Salk Institute is now online. A panel discussion, which included Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, and Michael Shermer, discussed why as many as 15% of National Academy of Sciences (NAS) scientists believe in God. Tyson expressed surprise that the number was as high as 15%: Tyson: I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t. That’s really what we’ve got to address here. Otherwise the Read More ›

Update: The link to the American Prospect article has been fixed. Sahotra Sarkar has become a revisionist of the first order. Not even 12 months have gone by since the Dover ID trial and he’s already rewriting history in this web post for the American Prospect. Apparently, the whole argument for the fine tuning of the universe from The Privileged Planet, published in 2004, almost 2 full years before the Dover ruling, was just a reaction to Dover, and an attempt to subvert Judge Jones’s (may he live forever) ruling banning ID from Dover area classrooms. Won’t those stealth creationists Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez be surprised. Not to mention those poor creationists Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee. All this Read More ›

If you want to keep tabs on the debate that’s heating up in the U.K., there is no better resource than the News Blog on Truth in Science’s website. Current and concise, Truth in Science does an excellent job compiling all the latest information on the controversy over ID in the government and the media.

As today’s update explains, “Truth in Science is faced by growing political opposition as Members of Parliament and Government ministers seek to discourage science teachers from using our resource packs. Forty MPs are calling for a ‘restriction’ on its use and one has suggested a ‘directive’ against it.” In addition to this summary information, TiS provides the play-by-play of what some government officials are doing to try to stop the teaching of intelligent design in schools.

Yesterday’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer (P-I) ran an opinion article by guest columnist Cathy Young titled “Campuses would benefit from political diversity” which laments the lack of intellectual diversity on college campuses. Young, who is also a contributing editor at Reason magazine, supports academic freedom in universities for suppressed “politically incorrect opinions” but seems to oppose academic freedom for the oft-suppressed and politically incorrect theory of intelligent design. She explains that David Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights” requiring inclusion of “balanced viewpoints” in college curricula is not the best solution because it could allow the teaching of intelligent design: Some conservatives advocate legislative interference as a solution. An advocate, David Horowitz, has been pushing for an “Academic Bill of Rights” that would Read More ›

Richard Buggs, a member of Truth in Science, an organization in the U.K. which supports teaching intelligent design in schools, recently published an editorial in the Liverpool Daily Post. Truth In Science reports that the headline above the original editorial originally read: “Should religion be part of science teaching? YES: Dr Richard Buggs is on the Scientific Panel of Truth in Science.” Yet Truth in Science does not advocate putting religion into science teaching, and in fact the question which Dr. Buggs was asked to answer by the newspaper was actually “Should Intelligent Design be taught in school science lessons?” It should be obvious that Buggs, a botanist with a special interest in the ecology and evolution of plants, firmly Read More ›