Science and Culture Today | Page 1449 | Discovering Design in Nature

David Klinghoffer has a breaking story in the National Review about an investigation by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. The independent federal agency has now released a report about the discrimination that biology journal editor Richard Sternberg faced at the Smithsonian Institution for publishing an article arguing for intelligent design: The Smithsonian Institution is a national treasure of which every American can legitimately feel a sense of personal ownership. Considering this, I’d imagine widespread displeasure as more Americans become aware that senior scientists at the publicly funded Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History have reportedly been creating a “hostile work environment” for one of their colleagues merely because he published a controversial idea in a biology journal. The controversial Read More ›

The News Tribune (Tacoma, WA) this weekend ran three pieces about the evolution debate, one by CSC senior fellow Jonathan Witt contesting the idea that evolution is incontestable on any grounds, and two pieces of shrill polemics:

One by UW biologist Peter Ward stating that Darwinian evolution is a fact (and resorts to name calling to prove it), and an opinion piece by Peter Slevin from the Washington Post that has been masquerading in papers around the country as an objective news story for several months now (nothing like new news to keep your publication fresh and your readers up to date).

Yesterday, I blogged about Reuters’ inaccurate news report earlier this week, which wrongly claimed that the new Kansas science standards would remove evolution as part of the standard core curriculum in Kansas. That was before I read the revised and expanded version of Reuters’ report. Someone has now rewritten the original story. But instead of making it better, the writer has veered off into the realm of fabrication. Reuters’ revised report claims that Kansas is actually trying to include intelligent design in its science standards, as well as asserting as fact that intelligent design is “a form of creationism”:

Just when I think the major media are beginning to become a little more accurate in reporting on the evolution issue, something happens to bring me back to reality. Yesterday the international newswire Reuters sent out a story making the following preposterous claim:

The new science standards would… eliminate core evolution theory as required curriculum.

This claim is absolutely false. The draft science standards endorsed by the Kansas Board of Education continue to include evolution as part of the standard required curriculum. Indeed, the proposed benchmark on evolution is all but identical to the one in the current Kansas Science Standards. See for yourself:

CNN Reporter Ed Lavendera, who two years ago fabricated part of his story about the Texas textbook battle, has now been sent to Kansas to report on the controversy there. Not surprisingly, Ed gets the basic facts about Kansas wrong as well. He even recycles an old clip from his previous story while creating impression that it came from Kansas!

Nightline ran a story on intellingent design last night, and if the inane preview article is any indication, the segment was the sort of lopsided hatchet-job one used to expect from the folks at “60 Minutes”—but not nearly as intelligent. Nightline’s main point appears to be that there really isn’t any scientific controversy over Darwinism and intelligent design. How do they know this? They checked with several Darwinists, who told them so! That’s right.

According to Nightline, because Darwinists happen to believe there is no scientific controversy over evolution, there really must be no controversy.

Hmm. Nightline could apply this logic to a lot of other issues besides intelligent design:

Yesterday “Hardball with Chris Matthews” featured a short debate between Discovery president Bruce Chapman and NCSE director Eugenie Scott about intelligent design and whether it should be required instruction in science classes.

More interesting than that question though was the debates diversion into the issue of whether or not intelligent design is religion — it’s not — and if it inherently invokes “God.”

Science standards that allow for scientific challenges to Darwinism to be discussed in the classroom moved forward in Kansas today according to AP reports.

It fascinates me that people often assume that if you are an advocate of intelligent design — or even if you merely question Darwinism — you must be a religious zealot of one stripe or another.