intelligent design

Harrisburg, PA — The plaintiffs in the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial are arguing that intelligent design sprang up in the wake of the 1987 Supreme Court decision against creation science, and the National Center for Science Education’s Nick Matzke is repeating the talking point to reporters: “Intelligent design is just a new label for creationism,” Mr. Matzke noted. “It is just the latest legal strategy for creationism. It evolved in 1987 right after the Supreme Court ruled against creationism and said that that was unconstitutional.” The assertion is demonstrably false. The idea of intelligent design reaches back to Socrates and Plato, and the term “intelligent design” as an alternative to blind evolution was used as early as 1897. More recently, Read More ›

CSC senior fellow Jonathan Witt will be dispatched to Pennsylvania to cover the Dover intelligent design trial that starts on Monday in federal court in Harrisburg. He will attend the opening three days of the trial, but will continue to post reports throughout the trial until its conclusion, sometime in October.

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:

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.

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.

The Washington Post printed Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman’s short op-ed in today’s “Free For All” section of the Post.