Intelligent Design A Debate Evolves
This article, published by The Seattle Times, quotes Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Stephen Meyer.
Three years ago, the Ohio Board of Education invited a small but influential Seattle think tank to debate the way evolution is taught in Ohio schools.
It was an opportunity for the Discovery Institute to promote its notion of intelligent design, the controversial idea that parts of life are so complex, they must have been designed by some intelligent agent.
Instead, leaders of the institute’s Center for Science and Culture decided on what they consider a compromise. Forget intelligent design, they argued, with its theological implications. Just require teachers to discuss evidence that refutes Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, as well as what supports it.
They called it “teach the controversy,” and that’s become the institute’s rallying cry as a leader in the latest efforts to raise doubts about Darwin in school. Evolution controversies are brewing in eight school districts, half a dozen state legislatures, and three state boards of education, including the one in Kansas, which wrestled with the issue in 1999 as well.
“Why fight when you can have a fun discussion?” asks Stephen Meyer, the center’s director. The teach-the-controversy approach, he says, avoids “unnecessary constitutional fights” over the separation of church and state, yet also avoids teaching Darwin’s theories as dogma.
But what the center calls a compromise, most scientists call a creationist agenda that’s couched in the language of science.
There is no significant controversy to teach, they say.
“You’re lying to students if you tell them that scientists are debating whether evolution took place,” said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit group that defends teaching of evolution in school.
The Discovery Institute, she said, is leading a public-relations campaign, not a scientific endeavor.
The Discovery Institute is one of the leading organizations working nationally to change how evolution is taught. It works as an adviser, resource and sometimes a critic with those who have similar views.
“There are a hundred ways to get this wrong,” says Meyer. “And only a few to get them right.”
Read More ›Stephen Meyer Responds to Michael Shermer’s Falsehoods in the Los Angeles Times
In an op-ed in the March 29 Los Angeles Times Michael Shermer claims that after a recent debate with him at Westminster College I admitted that “suboptimal designs and deadly disease are not examples of an unintelligent or malevolent designer, but instead were caused by “the Fall” in the “Garden of Eden.” Michael Shermer is misrepresenting my position and putting Read More ›
Is Intelligent Causation Perfectly Natural?
Senior Fellow William Dembski Receives Trotter Prize
This article, published by Texas A&M University, is about an award received by Discovery Institute’s William Dembski:
Read More ›As recipients of Texas A&M’s 2005 Trotter Prize, Dr. William Dembski, an associate research professor in the conceptual foundations of science at Baylor University, and Dr. Stuart Kauffman, director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, will address the origin of life in a public lecture Monday (April 4) at 7 p.m. in Rudder Theatre. The presentation, which is free and open to the public, will be followed by a reception in the Rudder Exhibit Hall.
Murderous Science
From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, by Richard Weikart (Palgrave Macmillan, 324 pp., $59.95) It is an open question whether civilization will survive Darwinism, whose inspiration for Nazism, militarism, racism, wars of extermination, eugenics, abortion, and euthanasia is amply documented in Richard Weikart’s excellent new book. In precise and careful detail Weikart narrates an indispensable Read More ›
Curiosity Won’t Kill Science Classes
Original Article Volume 19 | Issue 6 | 6 | Mar. 28, 2005 Editorial | I’m concerned about the state of science teaching. Over the past few months, three quite separate accounts have made me nervous. The first was an opinion published last month in The Harvard Crimson, the university daily, in which student Irene Y. Sun detailed her wretched Read More ›
Objectivity Lost in Debate Over Faith, Evolution
This article, published by The Columbia Daily Tribune, mentions Discovery Institute Center for Science & Culture Senior Fellow Richard Sternberg and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Stephen Meyer:
Read More ›Science should be open-minded, objective and free of bias. Yet the career of Richard Sternberg, a prominent scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, is in jeopardy. This is because he, as editor of the scientific journal “Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington,” published an article on “intelligent design” by Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute. Intelligent design theorizes that the universe and living things are best explained as having an intelligent cause.
Habitable Zones in the Universe
This article is forthcoming in Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres. It is available in the meantime on astro-ph at:http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0503298
