No, not the sitcom. A couple hours ago I was flipping channels and I see my friend Nick Matzke on the screen. Nick works for the National Center for Science Education and is a contributor to the Panda's Thumb. I had the good fortune to meet him a couple years ago at a conference at Berkeley (and the misfortune of trying to shove three of us into the front of his tiny pickup for a ride back to the hotel after eating an enormous dinner). He was on Fox News being interviewed by Tony Snow, along with Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute. I only caught the last minute of it, but enough to see Nick hold up a copy of Of Pandas and People, the ID textbook that was approved as a supplemental text in Dover, now the subject of a Federal lawsuit, and was being used as well in the Gull Lake situation here in Michigan. As Nick pointed out, this textbook actually serves as powerful evidence for the argument that Intelligent Design is just creationism in a new package because, in the initial drafts of the book they actually used the terms "creationism" and "creation science"; those terms were simply replaced in numerous places with "intelligent design". Given that the Supreme Court has already ruled creationism out of public schools, this is an important argument in the Dover lawsuit.
- Log in to post comments