Phillip Johnson's weekly update, from
http://www.arn.org/docs/pjweekly/pj_weekly_010507.htm
Icons of Evolution exposed on CNN
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The big news this week was the CNN telecast overnight on May 3, on their CNN
Newsroom Series show that is used in many public and private school
classrooms.
The 7-minute segment (see transcript) featured the exposure of the peppered
moth story and the faked Haeckel embryo drawings by Jonathan Wells, in his
book Icons of Evolution. The segment began with an interview with Joe Baker,
a high school senior who has become skeptical of evolution and wants his
school board to put labels in the textbooks warning students about the
errors. According to Baker, "This isn't about typos. These are the main
icons which are used to teach evolutionary theory. Many of them are fraud."
As usual, the school district has refused to do anything to correct the
fraud. Leading Darwinian authorities also don't seem to care whether the
examples in the textbooks are accurate or not. Jerry Coyne of the University
of Chicago told CNN that evolutionary biologists are the ones who discovered
the frauds and errors in the first place, so there was no need for outside
critics like Wells to make a public issue of the subject. This fails to
explain why those leading biologists kept the embarrassing facts confined
within professional circles, and why the textbooks still feature the Haeckel
drawings and the peppered moth story, presenting them and other dubious
icons as absolutely reliable evidence for Darwinism. My own experience in
conversations with Darwinists is that most of them simply shrug off textbook
errors, however gross. What does it matter, since the theory has to be true
on philosophical grounds alone, regardless of the evidence? The purpose of
the textbooks is not to inform, much less to encourage critical thinking
about evidence, but to induce the students to believe the philosophy.
The CNN transcript also features a brief interview with Michael Behe
explaining irreducible complexity, and a rebuttal by Eugenie Scott. Scott
takes her usual line that intelligent design is "religious" and not
"scientific," which means in effect that Darwinism (or some alternative
naturalistic explanation) is true by definition, regardless of the evidence.
As a letter from a biologist published in Nature in 1999 summarized this
position, "Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an
hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic." Who
wants truth, if you can have that kind of "science" instead?
The best thing about the CNN program was that it exemplified the approach
for teaching evolution that we in the Intelligent Design movement support.
The public schools should "teach the controversy." Students need to learn
what the mainstream scientists believe about evolution, and why they believe
it. Students also need to learn why there are so many critics, and why the
critics are growing in number and influence.
If the science educators continue to pretend that there is no controversy to
teach, perhaps the television networks and the newspapers will take over the
responsibility of informing the public. This week there was a favorable
story about Intelligent Design and the Discovery Institute in yet another
major newspaper, Canada's National Post.
While the science textbook writers are still trying to bamboozle students
with the Haeckel embryos, the reporters are at last getting a clear glimpse
of the truth.
Keith B. Miller
Department of Geology
Kansas State University
Manhattan, KS 66506
kbmill@ksu.edu
http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~kbmill/
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