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In Educating the Media about Intelligent Design, It’s Good to Be Able to Report Progress

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Last week I wrote a “Letter to a Young Darwin Activist’s Parents,” meant partly in jest and partly in earnest. I pointed out the persistent untruths circulated by a writer for Slate, Zack Kopplin, who identifies intelligent design with creationism and claims over and over again that teaching “creationism” is what academic freedom laws like the Louisiana Science Education Act are intended to protect.

The part that was in jest was the notion that college student Zack would dutifully print out my post and take it home to be signed by Mom and Dad, who would then have a conversation with him about what he is doing with his education and his career. The part that was in earnest was everything else.

Darwinists, who specialize in vicious ad hominem attacks, can’t abide even a joke about one of their own. They responded to me with a volley of outraged, insulting, or obscene tweets and emails. And that’s fine — it goes with the territory. But I’m not the only observer to note that when it comes to the evolution controversy, Slate runs some truly lousy science “reporting.”

Alex Berezow at Real Clear Science is no ID advocate, but he agrees with me on this (“Slate’s Science Page Has Gone Crazy“):

Slate has given a platform for Zack Kopplin, a science activist, to attack the Republican governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal. While I agree with Mr. Kopplin’s latest piece that Louisiana ought not promote Intelligent Design (ID) in biology classrooms, his purposeful conflation of creationism and ID is clich�d and tiresome. ID is not creationism. Many people who consider themselves ID advocates accept evolution, often to a fairly large extent. Though Christian biologists (like me) prefer the concept known as theistic evolution and take issue with ID on scientific and theological grounds, it is patently unfair to call ID “creationism.” Referring to it as such betrays either dishonesty or ignorance of ID’s actual claims.

Berezow takes issue with another Slate writer, astronomer Phil Plait, for similar reasons:

When he so chooses, [Plait] can be an excellent science communicator. Too often, however, he chooses to be a shrill partisan who is more interested in promoting the Democratic Party than thoughtful science policy analysis. In between posting selfies (Hi Phil! Hi Neil!), he provides readers with one-sided rants about how stupid he thinks Republicans are. That is such a common theme for Dr. Plait that he recently managed to post three such screeds in merely five days.

In his third piece, Dr. Plait absurdly implies that Louisiana students are too uneducated to apply to universities because of the state’s Republican policies on the teaching of evolution and Intelligent Design.

In short, compared to the standard of “intellectually honest” science journalism, Slate falls grossly short:

In its current form, Slate‘s science page appears more interested in scoring cheap clicks by feeding red meat to a left-wing audience.

There’s more to Mr. Berezow’s analysis, and I encourage you to read the rest. I should add, though, that he too seems uninformed about the provisions of the Louisiana law, LSEA.

The law does not protect teaching creationism, but neither does it “promote Intelligent Design (ID) in biology classrooms.” If you read the text, you see that the legislation allows teachers to supplement their standard curriculum with material to sharpen students’

critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.

While the law explicitly excludes promoting any “religious doctrine” (e.g., creationism), it says nothing about teaching much less about “promoting” a scientific alternative to Darwinian evolution, like intelligent design.

What exactly does the law intend to protect? What does it envision? Well, in addition to the standard science curriculum on evolution, a teacher could show students the documentary Icons of Evolution, perhaps adding to that the Icons of Evolution Study Guide. More ambitiously, the instructor could draw on the textbook Explore Evolution: The Arguments For and Against Neo-Darwinism.

None of this material is about intelligent design. Can I be clearer than that? Discovery Institute opposes introducing ID in public schools, and LSEA neither says nor implies anything about ID.

That having been said, thanks to Alex Berezow for confirming much that should be obvious but, to folks at Slate, strangely is not. Just when you’re ready to despair, along comes a guy with a measure of integrity.

Image: � Chad McDermott / Dollar Photo Club.

David Klinghoffer

Senior Fellow and Editor, Evolution News
David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and the editor of Evolution News & Science Today, the daily voice of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, reporting on intelligent design, evolution, and the intersection of science and culture. Klinghoffer is also the author of six books, a former senior editor and literary editor at National Review magazine, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Seattle Times, Commentary, and other publications. Born in Santa Monica, California, he graduated from Brown University in 1987 with an A.B. magna cum laude in comparative literature and religious studies. David lives near Seattle, Washington, with his wife and children.

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