DI Responds to Cobb County Ruling

The Discovery Institute has responded to the Cobb County ruling with their usual empty rhetoric.

"A final ruling in this case will be at least as important, if not more important, than the Dover school district case last year," added Luskin, a co-author of "Traipsing Into Evolution Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision". "Eventually it's likely that a decision will be handed down from this federal appellate court governing legal decisions in multiple states, whereas the Kitzmiller decision was from a trial court with no legal force outside of the parties in that local case."

That is pure wishful thinking. Regardless of what level the case stops at, there is no way the Cobb County case can be as important as the Dover case simply because the issue is so much narrower. The ruling will say nothing at all about the validity of ID, whether it's a scientific theory or not, or whether one can teach it in schools. It will be a very narrow decision on very narrow grounds, regardless of which way it goes. Frankly, I'm just not too fired up over this case no matter which way it goes because it isn't gonna change much of anything.

Discovery Institute believes that school districts should have the right to require science teachers to inform students about both scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolution. The Institute does not favor the mandatory inclusion of alternative scientific theories, such as intelligent design, and also does not favor the use of disclaimers, but instead recommends that school districts require teaching critical analysis of evolution.

Ah yes, their standard nonsensical answer - we don't want ID taught, we just want the "strengths and weaknesses" or the "arguments for and against" taught. But as I've said a hundred times, this is a shell game. ID, at this point, is nothing but arguments against evolution. There is not a single positive argument for ID, every single ID argument relies upon the failure of evolution as an explanation. So this statement is a reverse tautology - "we don't want ID taught, we just want ID taught". The only thing that changes is the label on the bottle.

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More important than Dover? Wishful thinking indeed, and I'll bet that if the decision does not go the way the DI wants it to go, we will read that it wasn't so important after all.

Discovery Institute believes that school districts should have the right to require science teachers to inform students about both scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolution.

Hmm, that would first require teaching students enough about the theory of evolution for them to understand the weaknesses. (As opposed to DI's misconceptions. You could teach those too I suppose, but some of them require a bit of background to understand just where DI & co. go off the rails.) But it's not impossible. I volunteer at a club to help students with their homework, and the section on Mendelian genetics included a bit on the weaknesses of that model. And there was one student who casually commented that Darwin got the nature of variation a bit wrong. I don't think that was on the curriculum.
Anywho, all this is neither here nor there: the DI is once again doublespeaking and no doubt by "critical analysis" they mean "he said, she said" crap.

By Andrew Wade (not verified) on 27 May 2006 #permalink