Science and Culture Today | Page 1471 | Discovering Design in Nature

Darwinian biologist Ken Miller ventures into the field of constitutional law and flops. In an op-ed in the Boston Globe, Miller mangles a key finding of the judge in the Cobb County case. According to Miller: The judge simply read the sticker and saw that it served no scientific or educational purpose. Once that was clear, he looked to the reasons for slapping it in the textbooks of thousands of students, and here the record was equally clear. The sticker was inserted to advance a particular set of religious beliefs… While the ACLU claimed that the Cobb County school board adopted its textbook sticker in order to advance religion, the judge rejected that claim. Instead, the judge found that the Read More ›

Albuquerque Tribune columnist Jeffry Gardner is not amused by PBS affiliate KNME’s decision to cancel the intelligent design documentary “Unlocking the Mystery of Life.” His title is the first clue: “The BS in PBS”: We’re shelling out more than $300 million annually in state and federal tax dollars for shows like “Charlie Rose” (name the last conservative you’ve seen yucking it up with Chuck), “Frontline,” “American Experience” and “Nova” – all agenda-less programs, I’m sure. I think that’s why the blatant religious discrimination KNME proudly practices is all the more galling. We’re a nation rooted in religious freedom. Tolerance in the public forum is required. The entire piece is here.

Anti-intelligent design gurus Barbara Forrest and Glenn Branch have fired a shot across the bow to those in academia who have given intellectual assent to intelligent design theory (ID). The message: don’t count on academic freedom to protect you. Beyond Barbara and Branch’s hackneyed diatribe against ID as a conspiracy theory — like something out of an X-Files caper — the authors call upon others in academia to try to undermine the careers of academics that have pursued research in ID.

Their article reads like an anti-ID hit list, with the authors taking great care to drop the names of many ID proponents between propagandistic, red herring bits involving the author’s slanted discussions of the apparent religious motives of certain ID thinkers. The empirical scientific arguments of ID proponents are conveniently ignored.

The recent Dover design/intelligent design federal court case (aka Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District) just got a little bit more interesting, with the Rutherford Institute filing a motion to intervene on behalf of several parents. If successful, the parents will be made a third party to the ACLU’s lawsuit.

The parents hope to vindicate the rights of students to be able to learn about scientific information concerning the scientific controversy surrounding neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, defending the marketplace of ideas from the ACLU’s efforts to suppress all scientific information that call neo-Darwinian theory into question.

Quoting U.S. Supreme Court precedents, Rutherford’s motion makes an important point:

The Constitution protects not just the right to express information and ideas but also the right to receive information and ideas.

Quite so. Our Constitution does not sanction a regime of state-sponsored censorship. Nor does it condone, for that matter, ACLU-driven, state-approved censorhip.

In their press release, Rutherford’s President, John Whitehead goes on to state:

CSC Senior Fellow Jonathan Wells had a letter published in yesterday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Wells responds in brief detail to earlier letters asserting that there is no scientific evidence against Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The York Daily Record is reporting on the first ever reading of a statement about intelligent design to Dover School District ninth graders in biology classes. The story raises the issue of whether or not students are even learning about intelligent design theory, and seems to conclude that they are not.

According to YDR the statement read to students says i part:

“Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s views. The school leaves the discussion of the origins of life to individual students and their families.”

One has to wonder why the ACLU and others are so upset that someone read a statement saying that there are other viewpoints. Intelligent design is never explained or even defined in the statement. So, then one has to wonder why the school board is so insistent that this statement be read, and then that the issue be ignored for the next 19 days of instruction on Darwinian evolution.

YDR reports:

We’re starting to see occasional occurrences of coherent defenses of design theory popping up on editorial pages of all sorts of newspapers. For instance, Bruce Mclarty has an op-ed piece in The Daily Citizen (Arkansas) that nicely explains the differences between intelligent design and creationism, and correctly points out that creationism is a subset of intelligent design, not the other way around. “While all creationists would believe in intelligent design, the opposite is not true. One could adhere to the idea that nature reflects an intelligent designer without believing in the Bible, the God of the Bible, or the Genesis account of creation.” Mclarty also notes that: “When something appears to defy purely naturalistic explanation, it is attributed to being Read More ›

Expect to see California resident Larry Caldwell’s lawsuit against the Roseville Joint Union High School District to be misreported on a regular basis. Already Sacramento Bee reporter Laurel Rosen mistakenly asserted that Caldwell’s case is anti-evolution. Now, Kimberly Horg of the The Press-Tribune takes it one step further. “The suit was set into motion because, according to Caldwell, his constitutional rights to free speech, equal protection and religious freedom were violated in his efforts to remove the teaching of evolution in the district.” As Cooper pointed out yesterday this is exactly the opposite of what Caldwell has been trying to do. He has never tried to “remove the teaching of evolution.”

The lawsuit filed by attorney and parent Larry Caldwell against the Roseville Joint Union High School District for violation of his civil rights has been making waves in the media.

World Net Daily and The Sacramento Bee have stories discussing Caldwell’s suit and the inequities he was subjected to by the District over the course of a whole year.

In the interests of accuracy, note that Sacramento Bee‘s Laurel Rosen reports inaccurately when she (mistakenly) asserts that Caldwell tried to introduce “anti-evolution material” in the District. “Anti-evolution” entails the removal of chemical and biological evolutionary theories from curriculum, but what Caldwell sought to do was precisely the opposite: teach students even more about existing scientific theories by requiring them to learn the scientific weaknesses of such theories as well as their scientific strengths. (Caldwell’s proposal did not even call for the teaching of the scientific theory of intelligent design.)

Caldwell’s 96-page complaint to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California (available here) tells of the long train of abuses that Caldwell was subjected to by the District because it disagreed with Caldwell’s position that students should be able to learn about the scientific controversies surrounding biological and chemical evolutionary theories. Caldwell’s complaint leaves the District with a lot of explaining to do — particularly its pattern of ignoring its own procedures or making up new ones and applying them only to Caldwell.

For eight long months the Board sought to prevent Caldwell from exercising his rights as a citizen and parent to put his policy proposal on the Board’s agenda. Caldwell’s
“Quality Science Education” simply states:

The York Daily Record on Sunday published a brief opinion piece from a York resident challenging the paper’s definition of intelligent design. What is intelligent design? Are our kids being taught to think? Do schools want to give a good education? The York Daily Record definition says, “ID holds that all living organisms are so complex that they must have been created by an unspecified divine being.” The YDR is not alone in using this description which is actually how critics of design define the theory. Hopefully the YDR will begin using a more accurate description, or at least attribute this one to critics rather than leaving it as if it were the proper, working definition. Once more, with feeling: Read More ›