New York Times

The Washington Post has a story related to the showing of the film “The Privileged Planet” June 23 at the National Museum of Natural History. It will be interesting to see how the story is covered given the hysterical tone in evidence on certain ultra-Darwinian blogs in recent days. Once invitations got out and the New York Times ran a story over Memorial Day weekend (with its unfortunately misleading headline tying the film to the evolution debate, which is not its subject), the Museum apparently was flooded with calls and emails from angry Darwinists demanding that the event be cancelled. None of these would-be film-burners has seen the film, or read the book, of course.

RELATED DOCUMENTS:
PDF of recommended invitations provided by SI to DI
PDF of invitation sent out by DI
PDF of e-mail from SI saying The Privileged Planet had been reviewed and approved
PDF of letter received from Smithsonian by Dsicovery June 1

The Museum did not buckle, but it surely bent.

The event has not been cancelled. However a “Director’s Message” referencing supposed “consultation with the Secretary” (!) was circulated on the web Wednesday, and it purported to come from the Museum Director, Cristian Samper. The trouble is, Lucy Dorrick (director of development and special events) of the Smithsonian, who called us back when we telephoned Director Samper, knew nothing about it and seemed surprised to hear our report of it. She asked in turn if we had received a different, shorter message from her, on the museum’s behalf. We had not. She obligingly sent a copy to us and we sent her a copy of the questionable “Director’s Message.”

Addressed to Mark Ryland, Vice President of Discovery Institute and director of the institute’s Washington, DC office, the letter sent today to Discovery says,

Rob Crowther blogged earlier about the New York Times article on the upcoming screening of “Privileged Planet” at the Smithsonian. The Times article is pretty fair and balanced, but it starts off with a big blooper in the headline and first sentence: Smithsonian to Screen a Movie That Makes a Case Against Evolution Fossils at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History have been used to prove the theory of evolution. Next month the museum will play host to a film intended to undercut evolution. In fact, Privileged Planet is not about biological evolution. It makes the case for intelligent design in the universe based on astronomy and cosmology. It doesn’t deal at all with the Darwinian account of Read More ›

Biologist and Icons of Evolution author Jonathan Wells takes The New York Times and physicist Lawrence Krauss to task here and here for persistent misreporting of the science curricula battles in the state of Kansas.