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

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 ›

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: