an article on the creationist's plea "teach the controversy"

From: Steve Gabosch (
Date: Sun Oct 10 2004 - 04:02:46 PDT

Here is a long but informative article. The new plea by creationists is
"teach the controversy."
- Steve

In the beginning there was Darwin. And then there was intelligent
America's classrooms.

from the on-line Wired Magazine

The Crusade Against Evolution
By Evan Ratliff

an antievolution theory known as intelligent design should be allowed
into the classroom.

Species, 75 years after John Scopes taught natural selection to a
ruled against a Louisiana law mandating equal time for creationism,
the question of how to teach the theory of evolution was being
biologist Ken Miller from Brown University and physicist Lawrence
Krauss from Case Western Reserve University two hours north in
representatives from the Discovery Institute in Seattle, the main
sponsor and promoter of intelligent design: Stephen Meyer, a
professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University's School of Ministry and
director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture,
Icons of Evolution, a 2000 book castigating textbook treatments of
evolution. Krauss and Miller methodically presented their case
time to subject them to it."

Meyer and Wells took the typical intelligent design line: Biological
life contains elements so complex - the mammalian blood-clotting
mechanism, the bacterial flagellum - that they cannot be explained by
intelligent designer. Creationists call that creator God, but
proponents of intelligent design studiously avoid the G-word - and
language of science to argue that Darwinian evolution is crumbling.

played right into the ID strategy - create the impression that this
very complicated issue could be seen from two entirely rational yet
audience. "When two groups of experts disagree about a controversial
subject that intersects with the public-school science curriculum,
the students should be permitted to learn about both perspectives. We
call this the 'teach the controversy' approach."

leading battleground. Several months after the debate, the Ohio
school board voted to change state science standards, mandating that
biology teachers "critically analyze" evolutionary theory. This fall,
some cases, that means introducing the basic tenets of intelligent
shows that our Darwinist colleagues have a real problem now."

a mathematician - have been thoroughly dismissed on the grounds that
Darwin's theories can account for complexity, that ID relies on
misunderstandings of evolution and flimsy probability calculations,
and that it proposes no testable explanations.

As the Ohio debate revealed, however, the Discovery Institute doesn't
need the favor of the scientific establishment to prevail in the
in biology curricula and textbook controversies around the country.
The institute and its supporters have taken the "teach the
controversy" message to Alabama, Arizona, Minnesota, Missouri,
Montana, New Mexico, and Texas.

The ID movement's rhetorical strategy - better to appear scientific
than holy - has turned the evolution debate upside down. ID
proponents quote Darwin, cite the Scopes monkey trial, talk of
"scientific objectivity," then in the same breath declare that
extraterrestrials might have designed life on Earth. It may seem
counterintuitive, but the strategy is meticulously premeditated, and
to a 10th-grade biology class near you.

British philosopher William Paley in 1802. In Natural Theology, the
Anglican archdeacon suggested that the complexity of biological
structures defied any explanation but a designer: God. Paley imagined
appears to have been purposely assembled and wouldn't function
concluded, applied to biological structures like the vertebrate eye.
Its complexity implied design.

Fifty years later, Darwin directly answered Paley's "argument to
years of evolutionary science after him - seemed to knock Paley into
the dustbin of history.

In the American public arena, Paley's design argument has long been
supplanted by biblical creationism. In the 1970s and 1980s, that
movement recast the Bible version in the language of scientific
inquiry - as "creation science" - and won legislative victories
Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's law. Because creation science
secular purpose" and violated the First Amendment clause prohibiting

reconstituted his ideas in an area beyond Darwin's ken: molecular
biology. In his 1996 book Darwin's Black Box, Lehigh University
biochemist Michael Behe contended that natural selection can't
explain the "irreducible complexity" of molecular mechanisms like the
bacterial flagellum, because its integrated parts offer no selective
William Dembski, a philosopher and mathematician at Baylor
University, proposed that any biological system exhibiting
chance or natural law. The only remaining option is an intelligent

The scientific rationale behind intelligent design was being
developed just as antievolution sentiment seemed to be bubbling up.
In 1991, UC Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson published Darwin
On Trial, an influential antievolution book that dispensed with
biblical creation accounts while uniting antievolutionists under a
single, secular-sounding banner: intelligent design. In subsequent
books, Johnson presents not just antievolution arguments but a
broader opposition to the "philosophy of scientific materialism" -
the assumption (known to scientists as "methodological materialism")
that all events have material, rather than supernatural,
used to "split the trunk," eventually overturning scientific
materialism itself.

That's where Discovery comes in. The institute was founded as a
conservative think tank in 1990 by longtime friends and former
Harvard roommates Bruce Chapman - director of the census bureau
during the Reagan administration - and technofuturist author George
Gilder. "The institute is futurist and rebellious, and it's
Discovery added ID to its list of contrarian causes, which included
everything from transportation to bioethics. Chapman hired Meyer, who
institute signed Johnson - whom Chapman calls "the real godfather of
the intelligent design movement" - as an adviser and adopted the

fundraising document leaked on the Web in 1999 - is the scientific
confrontation with the advocates of material science" and "possible
legal assistance in response to integration of design theory into
public school science curricula."

Step one has made almost no headway with evolutionists - the
design is the hook."

a voice. The universities and the scientific world do not recognize
a heretical scientific idea, ID's supporters see themselves as
public's eyes."

The buzz phrase most often heard in the institute's offices is
and posit alternative theories."

not been able to convince even a tiny amount of the scientific
marketplace of ideas."

And yet, the Discovery Institute's appeals to academic freedom create
in, they risk reinforcing the perception of a battle between equal

Taped to the wall of Eugenie Scott's windowless office at the
National Center for Science Education on the outskirts of Oakland,
places where the teaching of evolution is under attack, from
which defends evolution in teaching controversies around the country,
enormously effective compared to the more traditional creationists,

Intelligent design doesn't really explain anything. It says that

The movement's first test of Johnson's strategies began in 1999, when
the Kansas Board of Education voted to remove evolution from the
state's science standards. The decision, backed by traditional
creationists, touched off a fiery debate, and the board eventually
reversed itself after several antievolution members lost reelection
initiative. A Kansas group called IDNet nearly pushed through its own
textbook in a local school district.

Two years later, the Discovery Institute earned its first major
political victory when US senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania)
inserted language written by Johnson into the federal No Child Left
Behind Act. The clause, eventually cut from the bill and placed in a
nonbinding report, called for school curricula to "help students
understand the full range of scientific views" on topics "that may
generate controversy (such as biological evolution)."

As the institute was demonstrating its Beltway clout, a pro-ID group
called Science Excellence for All Ohioans fueled a brewing local
controversy. SEAO - consisting of a few part-time activists, a Web
site, and a mailing list - began agitating to have ID inserted into
Ohio's 10th-grade-biology standards. In the process, they attracted
the attention of a few receptive school board members.

When the board proposed the two-on-two debate and invited Discovery,
Meyer and company jumped at the opportunity. Meyer, whom Gilder calls
the institute's resident "polymath," came armed with the Santorum
amendment, which he read aloud for the school board. He was bringing
a message from Washington: Teach the controversy. "We framed the
issue quite differently than our supporters," says Meyer. The
approach put pro-ID Ohioans on firmer rhetorical ground: Evolution
should of course be taught, but "objectively." Hearing Meyer's
suggestion, says Doug Rudy, a software engineer and SEAO's director,
"we all sat back and said, Yeah, that's the way to go."

Back in Seattle, around the corner from the Discovery Institute,
Meyer offers some peer-reviewed evidence that there truly is a
controversy that must be taught. "The Darwinists are bluffing," he
says over a plate of oysters at a downtown seafood restaurant. "They
have the science of the steam engine era, and it's not keeping up
with the biology of the information age."

Meyer hands me a recent issue of Microbiology and Molecular Biology
Reviews with an article by Carl Woese, an eminent microbiologist at
reductionist biology - the tendency to look at systems as merely the
biology. Meyer says the conclusion of Woese's argument is that the
Darwinian emperor has no clothes.

It's a page out of the antievolution playbook: using evolutionary
biology's own literature against it, selectively quoting from the
likes of Stephen Jay Gould to illustrate natural selection's
downfalls. The institute marshals journal articles discussing
evolution to provide policymakers with evidence of the raging
controversy surrounding the issue.

"To say that my criticism of Darwinists says that evolutionists have
no clothes," Woese says, "is like saying that Einstein is criticizing
Newton, therefore Newtonian physics is wrong." Debates about
evolution's mechanisms, he continues, don't amount to challenges to
the theory. And intelligent design "is not science. It makes no
predictions and doesn't offer any explanation whatsoever, except for
'God did it.'"

Of course Meyer happily acknowledges that Woese is an ardent
evolutionist. The institute doesn't need to impress Woese or his
peers; it can simply co-opt the vocabulary of science - "academic
freedom," "scientific objectivity," "teach the controversy" - and
contradictory scientific views. By appealing to a sense of fairness,
that's been long suppressed."

answer is probably somewhere between the two."

An exasperated Krauss claims that a truly representative debate would
have had 10,000 pro-evolution scientists against two Discovery
opinions that the Holocaust never happened, but we don't teach that
in history."

Eventually, the Ohio board approved a standard mandating that
students learn to "describe how scientists continue to investigate
and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory." Proclaiming
victory, Johnson barnstormed Ohio churches soon after notifying
congregations of a new, ID-friendly standard. In response, anxious
board members added a clause stating that the standard "does not
mandate the teaching or testing of intelligent design." Both sides
claimed victory. A press release from IDNet trumpeted the mere
inclusion of the phrase intelligent design, saying that "the
implication of the statement is that the 'teaching or testing of
intelligent design' is permitted." Some pro-evolution scientists,
meanwhile, say there's nothing wrong with teaching students how to
scrutinize theory. "I don't have a problem with that," says Patricia
Princehouse, a professor at Case Western Reserve and an outspoken
opponent of ID. "Critical analysis is exactly what scientists do."

The good feelings didn't last long. Early this year, a
board-appointed committee unveiled sample lessons that laid out the
kind of evolution questions students should debate. The models
appeared to lift their examples from Wells' book Icons of Evolution.
"When I first saw it, I was speechless," says Princehouse.

With a PhD in molecular and cell biology from UC Berkeley, Wells has
the kind of cred that intelligent design proponents love to cite.
But, as ID opponents enjoy pointing out, he's also a follower of Sun
Myung Moon and once declared that Moon's prayers "convinced me that I
should devote my life to destroying Darwinism." Icons attempts to
discredit commonly used examples of evolution, like Darwin's finches
and peppered moths. Writing in Nature, evolutionary biologist Jerry
Coyne called Icons stealth creationism that "strives to debunk
Darwinism using the familiar rhetoric of biblical creationists,
including scientific quotations out of context, incomplete summaries
of research, and muddled arguments."

After months of uproar, the most obvious Icons-inspired lessons were
removed. But scientists remain furious. "The ones they left in are
still arguments for special creation - but you'd have to know the
literature to understand what they are saying. They've used so much
technical jargon that anybody who doesn't know a whole lot of
evolutionary biology looks at it and says 'It sounds scientific to
me, what's the matter with it?'" says Princehouse. "As a friend of
mine said, it takes a half a second for a baby to throw up all over
your sweater. It takes hours to get it clean."

As Ohio teachers prepare their lessons for the coming year, the
question must be asked: Why the fuss over an optional lesson plan or
two? After all, both sides agree that the new biology standards - in
which 10 evolution lessons replace standards that failed to mention
evolution at all - are a vast improvement. The answer: In an era when
the government is pouring billions into biology, and when stem cells
and genetically modified food are front-page news, spending even a
small part of the curriculum on bogus criticisms of evolution is
arguably more detrimental now than any time in history. Ironically,
says Ohio State University biology professor Steve Rissing, the
education debate coincides with Ohio's efforts to lure biotech
companies. "How can we do that when our high school biology is
failing us?" he says. "Our cornfields are gleaming with GMO corn.
There's a fundamental disconnect there."

Intelligent design advocates say that teaching students to
"critically analyze" evolution will help give them the skills to "see
both sides" of all scientific issues. And if the Discovery Institute
philosophy of modern science itself - which they blame for everything
from divorce to abortion to the insanity defense. "Our culture has
been deeply influenced by materialist thought," says Meyer. "We think
overturn it."

It's mid-July, and the Ohio school board is about to hold its final
meeting before classes start this year. There's nothing about
intelligent design on the agenda. The debate was settled months ago.
And yet, Princehouse, Rissing, and two other scientists rise to speak
during the "non-agenda" public testimony portion.

One by one, the scientists recite their litany of objections: The
model lesson plan is still based on concepts from ID literature; the
ACLU is considering to sue to stop it; the National Academy of
Sciences opposes it as unscientific. "This is my last time," says
Rissing, "as someone who has studied science and the process of
evolution for 25 years, to say I perceive that my children and I are
suffering injuries based on a flawed lesson plan that this board has

During a heated question-and-answer session, one board member accuses
the scientists of posturing for me, the only reporter in the
audience. Michael Cochran challenges the scientists to cite any
testimony that the board hadn't already heard "ad infinitum." Another
she says. "Ultimately, the question of what students should learn "is

decades - centuries - of scientific scrutiny end up in classrooms,
and those that don't are discarded. The intelligent design movement
is using scientific rhetoric to bypass scientific scrutiny. And when
science education is decided by charm and stage presence, the
Discovery Institute wins.

