Creationism lives on in US public schools

5 years ago this week was the start of the Dover trial (Kizmiller v. Dover) and to remember it New Scientist published an article on creationism still existing in U.S. public schools.

Chemistry teacher Robert Eschbach, who was also a plaintiff, says the trial has made teachers less afraid to step on people's toes when it comes to evolution. It "forced me to be a better educator", he says. "I went back and read more of the history around Darwin and how he came to his conclusions."

None of this means that the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based think tank that promotes intelligent design, has been idle. The institute helped the conservative Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), headed by Christian minister Gene Mills, to pass a state education act in 2008 that allows local boards to teach intelligent design alongside evolution under the guise of "academic freedom".

Philosopher Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University, another key witness for the Dover plaintiffs in 2005, testified against the Louisiana education act. "Louisiana is the only state to pass a state education bill based on the Discovery Institute's template," she says. Similar measures considered in 10 other states were all defeated

I think the article has too broad a focus and needed to pick either talking about the Dover trial itself or about the current brand of creationism taking place in the U.S. right now and why it gets so much support. I have covered the controversy in Livingston Parish in a couple of earlier posts but I feel the Dover trial forced a major change in the way that creationists operate and in fact has made it more difficult for them to try to force their religion into science class.

Looking at ID by religious studies professor

How do you tell that I think something is a hot button issue? Three posts on it in less than a week. The issue is the Discovery Institute's event at SMU last week. When we last left the issue a group of professors had written a letter to the SMU school paper. This morning another article was published in the same paper, this one by the chair of the Department of Religious Studies a Dr. Mark A. Chancey. Dr. Chancey does not say what one might expect from a professor of religious studies he says that evolution is a scientific theory and ID is at its heart a religious theory.

Intelligent Design (ID) has not gained much traction in the scientific community. It originated within certain religious circles and has credibility only within those same circles-mostly theologically conservative Christian groups that find aspects of evolutionary theory threatening.

This is true ID is a religious idea a court case can attest to this fact, see Kitzmiller v. Dover. Dr. Chancey then brings up something that I really thought was important and did not know prior to this, and it helps explain why there was so much backlash against the DI at SMU.

Why the sensitivity over IDers' appearance at SMU? Here, historical context is important.

Unfortunately, the Discovery Institute has a track record of using SMU's prestige and academic reputation to bolster its own claims to legitimacy. Consider this quote from Phillip E. Johnson, a chief ID architect: "The movement we now call the Wedge made its public debut at a conference of scientists and philosophers held at Southern Methodist University in March 1992."

Johnson goes on to characterize that conference as "a respectable academic gathering." This language implies that SMU sponsored an academic conference in which ID proponents participated as full-fledged scholars. In fact, the 1992 event, too, was sponsored not by any academic unit of the university but by a campus ministry-a detail conspicuously absent from Johnson's description.

He goes on to describe the "Wedge Document", another interesting read if you haven't seen it. Read the rest of the article and learn but also learn why there should be a separation between science and religion.

When will they learn?

A few days ago I talked about the Discovery Institute event that was held at SMU earlier this week. Well this post came out on Friday over at Religion Dispatches and it is worth another quick read. The author sums of ID pretty well here:

As Discovery Institute fellow Jonathan Wells said about the event in a news release, “The evidence is clear: Darwin was wrong about the origin of new species, organs and body plans. We are ready to show the next generation of young scientists just how wrong Darwin was.”

Of course, one of Discovery Institute’s featured tactics is to pretend that Darwin’s theory exists in a vacuum and that the scientific world has learned nothing in the past 150 years to advance knowledge of evolution and how it works. Destroy Darwin, destroy evolution.

But in order to make that argument, they must conveniently discount, ignore or just lie about the vast amount of information made since then in the fields of genetics, molecular biology and evolutionary development. Perhaps to bring him up to speed a bit on the past century and a half, I’d like to make a helpful suggestion to Wells. He should read Sean Carroll’s wonderful book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful (Norton, 2005) for an understanding of how the evolution of genetic switches led to the formation of complex body forms in all their infinite and amazing variations.

OK sorry for all of the posts just sharing links I swear eventually I will write a longer post.

Intelligent Design at SMU

Last Thursday night the Discovery Institute (DI) and their "research" wing known as the Biologic Institute sponsored an event entitled "4 Nails in Darwin's Coffin" on the campus of Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas. The DI are obviously the main proponents of Intelligent Design (ID). Knowing people who had attended SMU I knew that there would be a fair sized group of people who don't think the same things as DI. It turns out I was right, yesterday the school paper, the Daily Campus, published an article signed by several of the faculty of SMU saying that what DI said was not what the science said. The article included a link to a page that, while still a work in progress, shows all of the errors in the ID idea. This webpage also links to a webpage that shows how SMU truly feels about Darwin's theory of evolution.

It also turns out that the event was recorded, I will embed the first video here but will include links to the others below, it looks like it was a long event.



Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Thank you C0nc0rdance for putting all of these videos up