Category: Culture
Will Tomorrow’s Academic Freedom Story in The New York Times Accurately Reflect Discovery’s Science Education Policy on Teaching Evolution?
UPDATE: A sentence in the original post has been corrected to read: I stopped her right there and explained that we do not favor mandating the teaching of intelligent design — as is so often misreported — but rather that we think when evolution is taught teachers should present both the evidence the supports Darwinian evolution as well as some of the evidence that challenges it. http://www.academicfreedompetition.comTomorrow The New York Times will publish an article about academic freedom bills being considered in a few states. We’ve obviously had some involvement: in 2008 we created the Academic Freedom Petition, which has sample language that legislators could adapt for use in their own states. That led to a very good piece of Read More ›
Testing Common Descent via the Continuity Between Biogeography and Evolution
Last fall I spoke at a symposium on intelligent design (ID) and the law at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, Minnesota. My forthcoming paper from that conference, “The Constitutionality and Pedagogical Benefits of Teaching Evolution Scientifically,” deals with many issues, one of which is a rebuttal to dumbed down versions of evolution that some evolution-lobbyists wish to teach students. The primary force in the evolution lobby is the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). In its response to the chapter on biogeography in the supplementary textbook Explore Evolution: The Arguments For and Against Neo-Darwinism (“EE”), the NCSE asserts that EE “mangles the tiny fraction of biogeography covered.” The reality, however, is that the NCSE drastically Read More ›
Fodor on Darwinism: “One sees, even without God, how this Darwinian story could turn out to be radically wrong.”
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini aren’t making many friends among evolutionists with their new book What Darwin Got Wrong. Salon magazine published an interview with Fodor today in which he has some interesting things to say about the attacks he’s received online, about whether he is providing aid and succor to the ID community, and what he thinks is wrong with modern evolutionary theory. As you explain in the book, one of the problems with Darwinism is that Darwin is inventing explanations for something that happened long ago, over a long period of time. Isn’t that similar to creationism? Creationism isn’t the only doctrine that’s heavily into post-hoc explanation. Darwinism is too. If a creature develops the capacity to spin Read More ›
“Free Thinkers” at the University of Arkansas Don’t Think You Should Be Free to Form Your Own Opinion on Evolution
Last Thursday night I spoke at the University of Arkansas for an Academic Freedom Day Event. The crowd was civil with a good mix of both ID-friendly folks and ID-skeptics. The Q & A was generally harmless but the most amusing question of all came from a very nice gentleman with a local “Free Thinkers” group who asked me a ‘how dare you’ type question, arguing that because the “consensus” or “thousands” of scientists oppose ID, so should I. Here’s a little snippet of what I said in reply: “ID is a minority scientific view. But you owe it to yourself to examine the issue for yourself and come up with your own viewpoint. And if the consensus is right, Read More ›
How to Completely Misunderstand Intelligent Design: A Response to Stephen Barr
Intelligent design (ID) has attracted its fair share of critics. If it’s not the fulminations of New Atheists, it’s extremely uncharitable readings from some Catholic intellectuals who think they smell mechanism or interventionism. While the criticisms vary, they tend to have one thing in common: they’re based, not on actual ID arguments, but on stereotypes and misunderstandings of those arguments. It’s hard to find ID critics who actually describe an ID argument correctly before proceeding to refute it. Catholic physicist Stephen Barr is a constitutionally uncharitable critic of ID. It’s not clear that he has even read the books that he criticizes. But he criticizes them nonetheless. In a February 9 diatribe in First Things, he makes several complaints. For Read More ›