Science and Culture Today | Page 1470 | Discovering Design in Nature

Time magazine demonstrates yet again why fewer and fewer people are turning to the old-guard media for their news. In its Jan. 31 issue, the once venerable news organ is running a hackneyed article on intelligent design as a secret conspiracy (yawn!). Bearing the hysterical title “Stealth Attack on Evolution,” the piece comes with an even more fevered subtitle: “Who is behind the movement to give equal time to Darwin’s critics, and what do they really want?!!!! ” Okay, I added the emphasis and exclamation points. But the title deserves it. It reads like something you’d see in a supermarket tabloid. Time lists three authors for the story: Michael Lemonick, Noah Isakson, and Jeffrey Ressner. But in the interest of full disclosure, the magazine should have listed a fourth: Eugenie Scott, head of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) and Darwin spin-doctor extraordinaire. Scott is quoted in the article, but she should have been credited as one of the writers, for Time’s reporters simply recycled her spin in their own words. The writers’ effort to attack ID as a sinister secret plot to foist religion on unsuspecting students comes straight out of the NCSE’s playbook.

In a future post, I will catalog some of the more egregious errors and omissions of the Time piece. Here I’d simply like to tell about my encounter with Time reporter Jeffrey Ressner, with whom I had a lengthy phone conversation. After talking with dozens of reporters on the science education issue, I have become rather skeptical of most reporters’ ability to report fairly about the evolution controversy. Usually they have visions of “Inherit the Wind” dancing around in their heads, and they simply recycle stereotypes from the Scopes trial, regardless of the actual facts. Even reporters from places like The Washington Post produce shoddy and inaccurate stories on the subject (see here and here for examples). Because of the pervasively poor reporting of the old-guard media on this issue, I now begin many interviews by listing for reporters some of the most egregious inaccuracies and stereotypes in recent news reports. Usually when I do this, reporters respond that they just want to present the story accurately and fairly. They assure me that they don’t have any preconceived agenda. I’ve learned to be more than a little skeptical of such protestations; indeed, in my experience, reporters who protest too loudly about their fairness sometimes turn out to be the most biased.

In a blog post entitled “Public Education and Evolution,” David Limbaugh brings attention to the lawsuit that was recently filed by parent and attorney Larry Caldwell against the Roseville Joint Union High School District in California for the violation of his civil rights. Caldwell had sought to improve and enhance his school districts presentation of neo-Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theories by having students learn a little bit about some of the scientific criticisms of those respective theories, but he was subjected to bullying tactics from those who preferred to censor such information. Discussing Caldwell’s case, Limbaugh makes a great point about the ones who were really avoiding THE EVIDENCE in that case. Be sure to check it out. (See previous Read More ›

The release of Hugh Hewitt’s new book, Blog, could not be better timed, as it coincides with the launch of this very blog, which pays particularly close attention to Legacy Media error-prone portrayals of the scientific controversies surrounding neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory and its debate with intelligent design theory.

The emergence of the blogosphere is now challenging the monopoly on the dissemination of information that has long been held by Legacy Media, aka Old Media, aka MSM. Hewitt points out the significance of blogs in empowering the people themselves as popular journalists, distributing and receiving unfiltered news at a faster rate than has ever been seen before. His book describes the who, the what, and the why of blogs. It also provides an engaging and pithy account of blogosphere history and some of the major episodes of that young history, including Trent Lott’s birthday remarks, the New York Times meltdown in the wake of Jayson Blair, the Swift Boat Vets and the Christmas in Cambodia story, as well as Rathergate and the fake memo saga.

The Washington Post published a lead editorial yesterday that seems to steal a page right out of The New York Times playbook (Darwinian end-run around scientific evidence, on three!). The Post’s first paragraph is shockingly similar to the Times’ opening from just the day before: “With their slick web sites, pseudo-academic conferences and savvy public relations, the proponents of “intelligent design” — a “theory” that challenges the validity of Darwinian evolution — are far more sophisticated than the creationists of yore. Rather than attempt to prove that the world was created in six days, they operate simply by casting doubt on evolution, largely using the time-honored argument that intelligent life could not have come about by a random natural process Read More ›

Instapundit is featuring a joke equating the Cobb County evolution sticker with belief in a flat earth.

Glenn Reynolds doesn’t fit neatly into the Republican or Democrat camp. For that reason I’m optimistic he will soon move past the simplistic binary opposition of idiot-Darwinism-doubters-who-only-grudgingly-concede-the-earth-is-round vs. enlightened-secularists-who-understand-that-Darwinism-is-a-given-and-doesn’t-threaten-religion.

Earlier this month, the PBS show Uncommon Knowledge taped a discussion about the controversy over the teaching of evolution and intelligent design. The guests were Darwinists Dr. Massimo Pigliucci of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and CSC Fellow Dr. Jonathan Wells. Uncommon Knowledge host Peter Robinson moderated the discussion.

The 30-minute show will be aired by PBS sometime in the next few months, but in the meantime Dr. Pigliucci has posted his version of what happened on a skeptics’ web site.

We recommend that anyone interested in this controversy watch the actual show when it airs. Since Dr. Pigliucci has chosen to publicize his own version of the discussion beforehand, however, we have asked Dr. Wells to write down his own recollection of it. Here is Dr. Wells’s account.

The New York Times lead editorial Sunday, Jan 23, avoided addressing in any detail the scientific issues in the national debate over how to teach evolution and instead tried to equate the scientific theory of intelligent design with creationism, and proclaimed all critics of Darwinian evolution are Biblical creationists. It reads like a briefing paper from the ACLU, and probably was inspired by one.

Critics of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution become more wily with each passing year. Creationists who believe that God made the world and everything in it pretty much as described in the Bible were frustrated when their efforts to ban the teaching of evolution in the public schools or inject the teaching of creationism were judged unconstitutional by the courts. But over the past decade or more a new generation of critics has emerged with a softer, more roundabout approach that they hope can pass constitutional muster.

It is often mistakenly asserted that design theory is merely a recasting of creation science that came about because creationism was tossed out of schools in the late eighties. Actually, the theory of intelligent design finds it starting points well before the famous 1987 supreme court case that banned creation science from public schools. For example, biologist Michael Denton published his famous book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis in 1986, and even before that Walter Bradley and others had published works challenging Darwinian evolution and presenting the foundations of intelligent design theory in the early eighties. And, then there is the case of Dean Kenyon, professor emeritus of biology at San Francisco state who in the sixties was one of the world’s leading chemical evolutionists. By the late seventies he was disavowing his own previous evolution textbooks and discussing intelligent design theories in his university courses.

Continuing its dogmatic toeing of the Darwinian line the Times says this about the textbook disclaimer sticker recently struck down in Cobb Co., Georgia:

The tasteless, over-the-top effort by some Darwinists (especially those at the ACLU) to castigate anyone who disagrees with them on evolution as Nazis or Holocaust deniers continues unabated. In a recent article in the Cleveland Jewish News, Jeffrey Selman, whom the ACLU represented in the Cobb County case, implies that if we allow students to hear about scientific criticisms of evolutionary theory we are one step away from putting Jews in the ovens:

When a federal judge in Georgia ruled last week that a local school board’s decision to put a small sticker on its science textbooks labeling evolution “a theory, not a fact” was unconstitutional, Jeffrey Selman said it was primarily an American issue.

Still, he said, he could not help but view it through the lens of his Jewishness.

“Look what happened in Germany,” said Selman…”The German Jews said, ‘We’re Germans. We’ll be fine.’ The next thing you know, they were opening the oven doors for us.”

The Berkshire Eagle newspaper in Massachusetts is running an absurd editorial with the histrionic title, “Ayatollahs in the classroom”. To get the full effect, you might want to turn on a CD of some suitably melodramatic music from a horror film before you start reading: A movement to drag the teaching of science in the United States back into the Dark Ages continues to gain momentum. So far, it’s a handful of judges — “activist judges” in the view of their critics — who are preventing the spread of Saudi-style religious dogma into more and more of America’s public-school classrooms. According to this Berkshire editorialist, discussing scientific criticisms of modern evolutionary theory in the classroom is tantamount to turning America Read More ›

Constitutional attorney Brian Fahling has a sensible discussion of the Cobb County decision in the Union-Leader, here. Especially pertinent is his paragraph responding to the charge that it was illegitimate for the school district to single out evolution in its disclaimer. Fahling hits the proverbial nail on the head when he says: I suspect that evolution was singled out because it is the only scientific theory whose adherents are utterly intolerant of criticism, and it is the only scientific theory taught in public schools as the gospel truth that no reasonable person could question. This is not only troubling for parents whose religion rejects the theory, but it is equally troubling from an academic, scientific, and intellectual perspective for obvious Read More ›