Discovery Institute Responses to PBS/NOVA’s “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” Movie

As their birthday gift to Charles Darwin, yesterday many PBS stations apparently re-aired the “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” movie that they first released in November, 2007. The “documentary” purports to re-tell the story of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, but it portrays an extremely inaccurate, biased, and one-sided view of the case. In this regard, below are some links to responses to the “Judgment Day” that Discovery Institute produced when it first came out in 2007: 

Darwin’s Failed Predictions, Slide 14: “What would Darwin do?” (from JudgingPBS.com)

[Editor’s Note: This is slide 14 in a series of 14 slides available at JudgingPBS.com, a new website featuring “Darwin’s Failed Predictions,” a response to PBS-NOVA’s online materials for their “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” documentary.] PBS presents a thoroughly pro-Darwin only account of the debate over evolution. In fact, there are many reasons why we should teach the controversy over Darwinian evolution: (1) Congress supports such a policy:“The Conferees recognize that a quality science education should prepare students to distinguish the data and testable theories of science from religious or philosophical claims that are made in the name of science. Where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to Read More ›

Darwin’s Failed Predictions, Slide 13: “The abrupt appearance of biological forms” (from JudgingPBS.com)

[Editor’s Note: This is slide 13 in a series of 14 slides available at JudgingPBS.com, a new website featuring “Darwin’s Failed Predictions,” a response to PBS-NOVA’s online materials for their “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” documentary.] PBS has a slide stating that evolutionary paleontologists “continue to unearth key fossils that bridge those gaps Darwin bemoaned.” But evolutionary paleontologist David Raup wrote in 1979 that “we are now about 120 years after Darwin, and knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded … ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time.”1 PBS asserts that fossils discovered in the “past half century” have “filled in” gaps to explain the Cambrian explosion in evolutionary Read More ›

Darwin’s Failed Predictions, Slide 12: “The origin of life remains a mystery” (from JudgingPBS.com)

[Editor’s Note: This is slide 12 in a series of 14 slides available at JudgingPBS.com, a new website featuring “Darwin’s Failed Predictions,” a response to PBS-NOVA’s online materials for their “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” documentary.] If, as Slide 11 suggests, human origins are a mystery to Darwinian scientists, the chemical origin of life presents a far greater challenge. As Gregg Easterbrook recently wrote in Wired Magazine, “What creates life out of the inanimate compounds that make up living things? No one knows. How were the first organisms assembled? Nature hasn’t given us the slightest hint. If anything, the mystery has deepened over time.”1 Origin of life theorists have struggled simply to account for the origin of pre-biological organic Read More ›

Darwin’s Failed Predictions, Slide 11: “Human evolution remains a mystery” (from JudgingPBS.com) (Updated)

[Editor’s Note: This is slide 11 in a series of 14 slides available at JudgingPBS.com, a new website featuring “Darwin’s Failed Predictions,” a response to PBS-NOVA’s online materials for their “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” documentary.] In 1980, the famed late evolutionary paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted that, “[m]ost hominid fossils, even though they serve as a basis for endless speculation and elaborate storytelling, are fragments of jaws and scraps of skulls.”1 PBS confidently asserts that our species, Homo sapiens, evolved from ape-like species, but the fossil record tells a different story. The fossil record contains two basic types of hominids: those that can be classified as ape-like and those that can be classified as modern human-like. But there Read More ›