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CNN Reporter Ed Lavendera, who two years ago fabricated part of his story about the Texas textbook battle, has now been sent to Kansas to report on the controversy there. Not surprisingly, Ed gets the basic facts about Kansas wrong as well. He even recycles an old clip from his previous story while creating impression that it came from Kansas!
Read More ›Nightline ran a story on intellingent design last night, and if the inane preview article is any indication, the segment was the sort of lopsided hatchet-job one used to expect from the folks at “60 Minutes”—but not nearly as intelligent. Nightline’s main point appears to be that there really isn’t any scientific controversy over Darwinism and intelligent design. How do they know this? They checked with several Darwinists, who told them so! That’s right.
According to Nightline, because Darwinists happen to believe there is no scientific controversy over evolution, there really must be no controversy.
Hmm. Nightline could apply this logic to a lot of other issues besides intelligent design:
Read More ›Yesterday “Hardball with Chris Matthews” featured a short debate between Discovery president Bruce Chapman and NCSE director Eugenie Scott about intelligent design and whether it should be required instruction in science classes.
More interesting than that question though was the debates diversion into the issue of whether or not intelligent design is religion — it’s not — and if it inherently invokes “God.”
Read More ›Science standards that allow for scientific challenges to Darwinism to be discussed in the classroom moved forward in Kansas today according to AP reports.
Read More ›It fascinates me that people often assume that if you are an advocate of intelligent design — or even if you merely question Darwinism — you must be a religious zealot of one stripe or another.
Read More ›UPDATED, 10:48am, 8.10: Gilder vs. Dawkins is no contest. Literally. Dawkins chickened out and refused to debate, instead preferring to go it alone. So, each of them appeared separately on the program which is now available at “On Point’s” website. Today NPR’s “On Point” will feature Discovery senior fellow George Gilder debating Darwin defender Richard Dawkins. The program airs on WBUR live from 10-11am, and on NPR stations across the country at different times today and throughout the week.
CSC associate director John West has a nice op-ed in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
In “Intelligent design is sorely misunderstood” West makes the point that the ID scientific research program is sometimes highjacked by people who have little or no understanding of what the theory is about.
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Intelligent Design (ID) has made it to the cover of Time magazine this week, and I’m delighted to say that the cover story is for the most part respecftul and fair. It’s certainly a far-cry from Time’s inaccurate and conspiracy-mongering tirade a few months ago. The cover story even gives a mostly correct definition of ID (adapted from the definition on Discovery Institute’s website). Time says that intelligent design is “the proposition that some aspects of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause or agent, as opposed to natural selection.” A number of ID scientists were interviewed for the article, and Time assigned at least a dozen reporters to work on the story.
Still, there are some misleading or erroneous statements in the Time story that ought to be corrected. Here are three of the most important:
Read More ›It’s been interesting to watch this past week as media pundits have weighed-in on the debate over intelligent design in the wake of President Bush’s pro-ID comments. Most of the pundits denouncing intelligent design have simply demonstrated how little they actually know about ID and what it proposes. A good example is Jonathan Alter’s snooty anti-ID column in this week’s Newsweek. Alter says a lot of ignorant and inaccurate things, but I will focus on just one:
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Following up on President Bush’s remarks about teaching evolution earlier this week, The Lehrer Newshour tackled the subject of intelligent design this evening with a debate between CSC Fellow biochemist Dr. Michael Behe, and Case Western physicist Dr. Lawrence Krauss. The clear advantage of the Newshour over most news programs is that it can devote the time necessary to truly discuss an issue in-depth. This segment showed that it helps to have enough time to really get anywhere with the debate over evolution beyond the six second soundbites normally allowed. I think that Jeffrey Brown did a good job of moderating the discussion. Really the Newshour’s only mistake came early on when Brown reported that: This summer, the Kansas State Read More ›