Science and Culture Today | Page 1464 | Discovering Design in Nature

Somebody forgot to get the word to Paul McHugh: Respectable intellectuals don’t doubt Darwin — ever! McHugh is a university distinguished service professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and former psychiatrist in chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. In the new issue of The Weekly Standard, he provides detailed evidence that Darwin’s narrative of the origin of species is in crisis, and that civilized discourse about the growing controversy surrounding his theory is all to the good:

Those who would expel all challenges to the Darwinian narrative from the high school classroom are false to their mission of teaching the scientific method.

“Scientists as they engage in dialogue with others should abhor attempts to close off the conversation by excessive claims for any privileged access to truth. Scientists should tell what they actually know and how they know it, as distinct from what they believe and are trying to advance. If all of us, scientists and non-scientists alike, accepted that guiding principle, the 80-year history of attempts to use law to stifle the teaching of science — stretching as it does from the courtrooms of Dayton, Tennessee, to those of Cobb County, Georgia — could perhaps finally be brought to a close.

McHugh essay is not pithy. He actually takes the time to wrestle with some specific problem’s with Darwin’s theory. One example I hope will encourage your reading of the full article:

Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews is a courageous man to be sure to write an article (“Who’s Afraid of Intelligent Design?”) that goes against the crusade of his employer.

Specifically, Mathews argues that it would be good for science education to teach the scientific criticisms of Darwinian evolution. This is exactly the approach that CSC has always advocated.

Thank you for your patience as we’ve been working to upgrade software and hardware for this blog. For several days running we’ve been unable to keep the blog up and running properly, but I’m happy to say that we’ve turned a corner and should soon be running at 100%.

David Berlinski sent me the following e-mail this morning and encouraged me to share it here. The exchange below comes after the recent publication of David’s op-ed in the Wichita Eagle. Someone named PZ Myers posted an indignant response to my op-ed piece to the Panda’s Thumb. Our correspondence follows. By all means post it to the Discovery Institute’s web site. Best,D Dear Dr. Myers: I read with interest your criticisms of my little op-ed piece for the Wichita Eagle; and very indignant they were. Your references to my most recent book, “The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky”, were, however, in error, the result, no doubt, of the fact that you have not read the book, and, I am sure, Read More ›

Apologies for the blog’s outages yesterday. We’re updating our servers and software and some downtime is inevitable. Previously, this blog was accessible at both https://scienceandculture.com, and at https://www.discovery.org/id/. However, only https://scienceandculture.com now points to this page so be sure to update any bookmarks you may have. Thanks for your patience.

Last week U.S District Court Judge John E. Jones III issued a memorandum and order in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. Kitzmiller is the lawsuit brought by the ACLU against the school board in Dover, PA, for its policy requiring students in science class be read a statement by administrators mentioning both intelligent design and problems with evolution. Discovery Institute’s prior press release concerning the Dover School Board policy can be found here.

Judge Jones’ memorandum and order concerned two pre-trial motions, namely; (1) a motion of the Rutherford Institute to intervene as a third-party in the lawsuit on behalf of Dover parents; and (2) the motion to dismiss by the Defendant Dover Area School District (represented by the Thomas More Law Center). Continuation of the lawsuit to trial did not directly hinge one way or the other upon the Judge’s ruling on these motions.

In a blog post a couple of weeks ago, I wondered aloud whether the Washington Post’s Peter Slevin would fairly report on our lengthy conversation about public policy battles over evolution. Well, Slevin’s article is out, and now I know. In my previous post, I listed six main points from our interview and asked whether Slevin would accurately convey the points. Slevin basically ignored most of what I told him (in fact, I’m not even quoted in the story). Instead, he misleadingly stitched together some quotes from my colleague Steve Meyer all the while ignoring most of what Steve told him as well. (See here for a discussion of how Slevin mischaracterized Steve’s comments.) As I indicated earlier, I liked Slevin. He seemed like a nice guy. But I don’t like his one-sided reporting. True, he does make clear that Discovery Institute is NOT trying to require the teaching of intelligent design. But that’s about the only good thing in his lopsided potpourri of stereotypes that completely ignores the substance of the science education controversy and only delves into motives and funding on one side of the debate. If you want to see just how slanted Slevin’s report is, please read my previous blog post. Here I want to focus just on one point, because it relates to the central claim of Slevin’s piece.

Slevin tries to assert that the the evolution issue is gaining traction now because of the forces of the so-called religious right. He takes this talking point straight from the mouth of Eugenie Scott at the NCSE, whom he quotes in his article. What Slevin neglects to report is Discovery Institute’s response to Scott’s assertion. When Slevin asked me about this, I pointed out that the religious right has been around for a long time, so that really doesn’t explain why scientific criticisms of evolution finally seem to be gaining traction. What is different from the past is that today there are growing numbers of scientists at American academic institutions who are challenging evolution for scientific reasons. As I explained in more detail in my previous blog:

The Associated Press (AP) in Kansas must have hired the National Center for Science Education to edit news reports on that state’s evolution controversy. Why else would the Kansas AP continue to pass off the following biased and inaccurate definition of intelligent design theory as an impartial description of the differences between design and Darwinian evolution:

Evolution says species change in response to environmental and genetic factors over the course of many generations. Intelligent design, a form of creationism, holds there’s evidence of an intelligent design behind the origin of the universe, the formation of the Earth and biological change.

There are at least two things egregiously wrong with the above paragraph. First and foremost, intelligent design is NOT “a form of creationism.” While some Darwinists certainly try to categorize design theory in this way, intelligent design proponents vigrously disagree. (For some of the reasons why, read my article here.) By presenting the Darwinists’ biased assertion about ID being a form of creationism as a fact (and ignoring what the proponents of design say about their own theory!), the Kansas AP has left the realm of impartial reporting and entered spin zone of the NCSE.

The Washington Post today published on their front page the latest in a series of drive-by reportings on intelligent design. Not surprisingly the reporter, Peter Slevin, sees this more as a political issue than a scientific issue. He’s much more concerned with how religious zealots may try to use ID theory in the political realm than whether or not peppered moths really rest on trees. Are Heaeckel’s embryo drawings less fake because the Post wants to make this a political issue? They’re missing the point, which is a scientific one.

I tried to get Slevin to focus more on the science than the politics, but he was determined to do a political piece. So he decided to come to Seattle and I encouraged him to interview both John West (see West’s blog about the interview here), our main policy person, and Steve Meyer as the director of the CSC and one of the main scientists involved in design theory. Slevin spent a day in Seattle and interviewed each of them at length. I sat in on the interviews and took notes myself, as well as helped to clarify certain issues when they came up.

The upshot is that John West spent nearly two hours with Slevin talking about the policy and politics of ID, and Steve Meyer spent equal time with Slevin and focused almost solely on what the case for ID is and how it is not an argument from ignorance as the Washington Post, and others, has persisted in defining it.

What does Slevin do? He does not quote John West at all. He does quote Steve Meyer — but he strings together different thoughts on different issues from different points in the conversation and presents them as if they are one single quote:

Science journalist Denyse O’Leary in an e-mail to me summed up today’s Washington Post story this way.