No Need to Fear Teaching the Controversy

In today’s Washington Post: Who’s Afraid of Intelligent Design?”

SEATTLE, Wash. – The Discovery Institute is featured in a commentary on the op-ed page in today’s Washington Post about the controversy over the teaching of evolution. The commentary, written by Post education reporter Jay Matthews, argues in favor of teaching the controversy over evolution in public schools and goes even further than Discovery in suggesting that it would also be a good idea to include intelligent design theory in biology classes.

Discovery supports teaching that controversy in the classroom: teach Darwin’s theory of evolution, and, teach the many scientific critiques of evolution as well.

“Our approach has always been to focus on teaching students more about evolution, including a candid assessment of the theory’s unresolved difficulties,” says attorney Seth Cooper, Program Officer, Public Policy & Legal Affairs for Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture. “Students should learn the scientific evidence for evolution, but they should also learn about some of the scientific criticisms about major parts of the theory being raised by mainstream scientists.”

Discovery’s Center for Science & Culture advocates the scientific theory of Intelligent Design (ID), which holds that certain features of the universe and living systems – such as the miniature machines, complex circuits and digital information found in cells, and the digital code found in DNA – are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection acting on random. Discovery does not advocate the teaching of ID theory in schools, but supports teaching the scientific challenges to Darwinian evolution.

Matthews notes in his op-ed piece today that Discovery Institute Fellow John Angus Campbell, a professor at the University of Memphis, has been trying to coax more of his colleagues to allow their students consider critics of Darwin.

“If you don’t see the risks, if you don’t see the gaps, you don’t see the genius of Darwin,” says Campbell.