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

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.

The Kansas Board of Education is thinking about implementing science curricula that would teach the controversy over neo-Darwinism. The ultra-Darwinists insist that there is no scientific controversy, that opponents of Darwin’s theory of common descent by natural selection are Christian fundamentalists conspiring to establish a global theocracy. Piercing this smokescreen of ad hominem rhetoric comes the wry voice of Jewish agnostic David Berlinski. In today’s Wichita Eagle he writes: The suggestion that Darwin’s theory of evolution is like theories in the serious sciences — quantum electrodynamics, say — is grotesque. Quantum electrodynamics is accurate to 13 unyielding decimal places. Darwin’s theory makes no tight quantitative predictions at all. Perhaps Berlinski, a philospher and mathematician with a Ph.D. from Princeton, is Read More ›

An AFP news agency article about the growing controversy between Darwinism and intelligent design was almost balanced. Darwinist Barbara Forrest was allowed to peddle her conspiracy theory, the gist of which is that many scholars exploring the scientific evidence for intelligent design are theists! And they want to renew our culture!

Then design theorists like biologists Michael Behe and Jonathan Wells were allowed to briefly explain the scientific evidence for intelligent design. So far so good.

But then, near the end, so close to the finish line, the article stumbles badly:

Amid growing animosity, both sides agree that proving intelligent design in traditional scientific terms is next to impossible.

“Can science show you whether God exists? No,” said Dr Wells.

“It is difficult to reconcile science with Christian philosophical questions,” said Vittorio Maestro of Natural History magazine.

This is extraordinarily misleading. The central tenet of design theory is that design is scientifically detectable in nature. By studying a bacterial flagellum we can see that the bacterial flagellum was designed but not who designed it. This latter point is what the design theorist means when he says science cannot tell us “whether God exists.”

Perhaps the reporter simply misunderstood this point. But if so, why was the news agency clear-headed enough to produce the following portion halfway through the article?

The Cobb Co. textbook disclaimer has finally been cleverly parodied by Steve Mirsky in the latest issue of Scientific American. And not a moment too soon. Let’s see, the first disclaimer sticker case was a decade or more ago in Louisiana. The Cobb Co. case originated just after the turn of the millennia, and it was over three years ago that the school district authorized the use of the disclaimers. About time someone at long last humorlessly skewered it. Never mind that in December 2004, The New York Times op-ed page published a chart by Colin Purrington, The Descent of Dissent that poked fun at disclaimer stickers and criticized anyone at all critical of evolution. Purrington of course had been Read More ›

Casey Luskin from the IDEA Center sent the following report on a recent news story that aired on San Diego’s Fox affiliate. Amazingly, the station devoted over four minutes — an eternity in TV news time — to looking at what ID is. An MPEG of the story is available for download from the IDEA Center at www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1298. (newly updated link)

In response to Michael Behe’s case for intelligent design in a recent edition of The New York Times, two letters to the paper’s editor charged design theory with being untestable. Design theory has failed to produce “statements that are susceptible to testing,” wrote Karen Rosenberg. Similarly, Donald Terndrup asserted , “Design will be a real science” when and only when “we have testable answers for these questions.”

But as philosopher of science Stephen Meyer has explained, the methodology used for intelligent design is strikingly similar to that used by Darwinists to argue for common descent. An argument against intelligent design “that appears frequently both in conversation and in print finds expression as follows: ‘Miracles are unscientific because they can not be studied empirically. Design invokes miraculous events; therefore design is unscientific. Moreover, since miraculous events can’t be studied empirically, they can’t be tested. Since scientific theories must be testable, design is, again, not scientific.’

Meyer continues: