THC Science

Teach the Controversy is a slogan the Discovery Institute and intelligent design proponents uses to promote intelligent design^[1]^[2] and advance an education policy for US public schools which introduces creationist explanations for the origin of life to public-school science curricula. Teach the Controversy proponents portray evolution as a "theory in crisis" with scientists criticizing evolution. Opponents reply that the "controversy" is a matter of religion and politics, not science.

Intelligent design "holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not a natural process such as natural selection."^[3] Both the intelligent design movement (IDM) and the Teach the Controversy campaign are largely directed and funded by the Discovery Institute, a conservative Christian think tank^[4] based in Seattle, Washington, USA.

The consensus of the scientific community is that there is no controversy^[5]; the theory of evolution is accepted by the overwhelming majority of biologists and by the scientific community in general. Such controversies as do exist concern the details of the mechanisms of evolution, not the validity of the over-arching theory of evolution, which is one of the best supported theories in all of science.^[6]

A United States federal court recently ruled that a public school district requirement for science classes to teach that intelligent design is an alternative to evolution was a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), United States District Judge John E. Jones III also ruled that "ID’s backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the IDM is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID."^[7]

Origin of phrase

The term "teach the controversy" originated with Gerald Graff, a professor of English and education at the University of Illinois in Chicago^[8], as an admonition to teach that established knowledge is not simply given as a settled matter, but that it is created in a crucible of debate and controversy. To the chagrin of Graff, who describes himself as a liberal secularist,^[9] the idea was later appropriated by Phillip E. Johnson, Discovery Institute program advisor and father of the ID movement. Discussing the 1999-2000 Kansas State Board of Education controversy over the teaching of intelligent design in public school classrooms, Johnson wrote "What educators in Kansas and elsewhere should be doing is to "teach the controversy." In his book Johnson proposed casting the conflicting points of view and agendas as a scholarly controversy. Johnson's usage differs somewhat from Graff's original concept. Graff advocated that a comprehensive understanding of what are considered to be "established" concepts must include teaching the debates and conflicts by which they were established, while Johnson uses the concept to cast doubt upon the very concept of established knowledge.

The phrase was picked up by other Discovery Institute affiliates Stephen C. Meyer, David K. DeWolf, and Mark E. DeForrest in their 1999 article, Teaching the Controversy:Darwinism, Design and the Public School Science Curriculum published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics. The Foundation for Thought and Ethics also publishes the pro-intelligent design biology textbook Of Pandas and People, commonly suggested as an alternative to mainstream science and biology textbooks by Teach the Controversy proponents.

Strategy

The Discovery Institute or constituent groups acting on its behalf lobby state and local boards of education and local, state and federal policymakers directly to enact policies and laws and propose classroom curricula that feature ID prominently.

The Discovery Institute's Teach the Controversy campaign's strategy has been centered around attempts at the local and state level to undermine or remove altogether evolutionary theory from the public school science classroom by portraying it as "controversial" and "in crisis"; to having the federal government mandate the teaching of intelligent design; to 'stacking' municipal, county and state school boards with ID proponents. The Discovery Institute has played a significant role in many of these cases, providing a range of support from material assistance to federal, state and regional elected representatives in the drafting of bills to supporting and advising individual parents confronting their school boards. Their goal is to move from standards battles to curriculum writing and textbook adoption while undermining the central positions of evolution in biology and methodological naturalism in science. The Discovery Institute is the primary organizer and promoter of the Teach the Controversy campaign, though it recently remains behind the scenes and orchestrates, underwrites and otherwise supports local campaigns, ID groups, and proponents to act on its behalf in lobbying state and local politicians and schoolboards. This strategy is consistent with the Discovery Institute's Wedge strategy, where the Teach the Controversy campaign plays a significant role.

The Institute and its supporters claim to advocate presenting evidence both for and against evolution and encouraging students to evaluate the arguments. The overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is that there is no controversy, evolution is one of the best supported theories in all of science, and the Discovery Institute itself has cynically manufactured the alleged "controversy" to further its political and social agenda.

According to published reports, the nonprofit Discovery Institute spends more than $1 million a year for research, polls, lobbying and media pieces that support intelligent design and their Teach the Controversy campaign.^[10]

Political action

The Discovery Institute aggressively promotes its Teach the Controversy campaign and intelligent design to the public, education officials and public policymakers. Its efforts are largely aimed at conservative Christian policymakers, where it is cast as a counterbalance to the liberal influences of "atheistic scientists" and "Dogmatic Darwinists." As a measure of their success in this effort, on 1 August 2005, during a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, President Bush said that he believes schools should discuss intelligent design alongside evolution when teaching students about the origin of life. Bush, a conservative Christian, declined to go into detail on his personal views of the origin of life, but advocated the Teach the Controversy approach - "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought... you're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." Christian conservatives, a substantial part of Bush's voting base, have been central in promoting the Teach the Controversy campaign.

In 2001 the Discovery Institute drafted and lobbied for the Santorum Amendment to the No Child Left Behind education act. The amendment encouraged the "teach the controversy" approach to evolution education. The amendment was passed by the U.S. Senate, but was left out of the final version of the Act, and remains only in highly modified form in the conference report, where it does not carry the weight of law. The conference report language is commonly touted by the Discovery Institute as model language for bills and curricula. The Discovery Institute lobbies states, counties, and municipalities, and offers them legal analysis and Institute-developed curricula and text books which they tout as meeting constitutional criteria established by the courts in previous creationism/evolution First Amendment cases.

The Discovery Institute employs a number of specific political strategies and tactics in their furtherance of their goals. These range from attempts at the state level to undermine or remove altogether the presence of evolutionary theory from the public school classroom, to having the federal government mandate the teaching of intelligent design, to 'stacking' municipal, county and state school boards with ID proponents. The Discovery Institute has been a significant player in many of these cases, providing a range of support from material assistance to federal, state and regional elected representatives in the drafting of bills to supporting and advising individual parents confronting their school boards.

In some state battles, the ties of Teach the Controversy and intelligent design proponents to the Discovery Institute's political and social and its strategy and the Institute's role in the debate have been made public resulting in their efforts being temporarily thwarted. The Discovery Institute takes the sophisticated view that all publicity is good and that no defeat is real. The Institute has shown a willingness to back off, even to not advocate for the inclusion of ID, to ensure that all science teachers are required to portray evolution as a "theory in crisis." The Institute's strategy is to move, relentlessly, from standards battles, to curriculum writing, to textbook adoption, and back again doing whatever it takes to undermine the central position of evolution in biology. Critics of this strategy and the movement contend that the intelligent design controversy diverts much time, effort and tax money away from the actual education of children.

Some of the political battles which have involved the Discovery Institute include:

2000 Congressional briefing In 2000, the leading ID proponents operating through the Discovery Institute held a congressional briefing in Washington, D.C., to promote ID to lawmakers. Sen. Rick Santorum was and continues to be one of ID's most vocal supporters. One result of this briefing was that Sen. Santorum inserted pro-ID language into the No Child Left Behind bill calling for students to be taught why evolution "generates so much continuing controversy," an assertion heavily promoted by the Discovery Institute.
2001 Santorum Amendment As a result of the 2000 Congressional briefing, the Discovery Institute played a central role in the drafting and inclusion of pro-ID language known as the Santorum Amendment in the Conference Report of the federal No Child Left Behind education act. Though the amendment lacks the weight of law, its inclusion in the conference report is constantly cited by the Discovery Institute and other ID supporters as providing federal sanction for intelligent design.
2002 Ohio Board of Education The Discovery Institute proposed a model lesson plan that featured intelligent design prominently in its curricula. It was adopted in part in October 2002, with the Board's advising that the science standards do "not mandate the teaching or testing of intelligent design." Still, this has been touted by the Discovery Institute as a significant victory.
2004 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District Eleven parents of students in the school district in Dover, Pennsylvania, near Harrisburg, sued the Dover Area School District over a statement that the school board required to be read aloud in ninth-grade science classes when evolution was taught endorsing intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. The plaintiffs successfully argued that intelligent design is a form of creationism, and that the school board policy thus violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In December, 2005 United States federal court judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design is not science and is essentially religious in nature.

Origin of the campaign

Intelligent design movement

The Intelligent Design movement began in the early 1990s and is an organized campaign promoting a religious agenda calling for broad social, academic and political changes centering around intelligent design in the public sphere, primarily in the United States. The overall goal of the movement is "to defeat materialism" and the "materialist world view" as represented by evolution, and replace it with "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." The movement's hub is the Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture (CSC). The CSC counts the leading ID advocates and authors among its fellows or officers, including the movement's founder Phillip E. Johnson, Michael Behe, William A. Dembski, Stephen C. Meyer and Jonathan Wells.

The movement consists primarily of a public relations campaign meant to sway the opinion of the public and that of the popular media, and an aggressive lobbying campaign directed at policymakers and the educational community which seeks to undermine public support for teaching evolution while cultivating support for what the movement terms "intelligent design theory." Its near-term goal is greatly undermining or eliminating altogether the teaching of evolution in public school science, and with the long-term goal of to "renew" American culture by shaping public policy to reflect conservative Christian values. Intelligent design is central and necessary for this agenda as described by the Discovery Institute: "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

The ID movement grew out of a creationist tradition which argues against evolutionary theory from a religious (usually Evangelical Christian and Fundamentalist Christian) standpoint and the 1987 US Supreme Court decision Edwards v. Aguillard prohibiting the teaching of creationism in public school science classrooms. Although ID advocates often claim that they are only arguing for the existence of a "designer," who may or may not be God, all the leading advocates do believe that the designer is God, and frequently accompany their allegedly scientific arguments with discussion of religious issues, especially when addressing religious audiences. In front of other audiences, they downplay the religious aspects of their agenda.

The Wedge strategy

The Wedge strategy is a political and social action plan authored by the Discovery Institute. Informally known as the "Wedge Document," it was a fund raising tool used by the Discovery Institute to raise money for its subsidiary charged with promoting its science and education agenda, the Center for Science and Culture, at the time called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC). As stated in the Wedge Document [4], the strategy is designed to defeat "Darwinism" and to promote an idea of science "consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." The ultimate goal of the Wedge strategy is to "renew" American culture by shaping public policy to reflect conservative Christian values.

The strategy outlines a public relations campaign, of which teaching the controversy is part, meant to sway the opinion of the public, popular media, charitable funding agencies, and the scientific community in order that they should effect an "overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies". Wedge advocates have stated they hope to reinstate a "broadly theistic understanding of nature" to replace materialism. Phillip Johnson, the architect of the strategy, invokes the metaphor of a wood-splitting wedge to illustrate his goal of splitting apart the concepts of science and naturalism. A fundamental part of the Wedge strategy is the rejection of naturalism as unnecessary to science. Though the alternative to naturalism is supernaturalism, ID proponents avoid this word when speaking to mainstream audiences, substituting euphemisms like "non-natural" or skirting the issue altogether. Critics of the campaign characterize this as a semantic subterfuge made in the hope that it will enable ID proponents to skirt the First Amendment prohibition against promoting religion in public schools.

According to critics of the intelligent design movement, the Wedge document, more than any other Discovery Institute project, betrays the Institute's and intelligent design's political rather than scientific purpose.

Criticisms

"Teach the Controversy"

The theory of evolution is accepted by the vast majority of biologists and by the scientific community in general (in such overwhelming numbers that some claim the theory of evolution to be a scientific consensus). Over 70 scientific societies, institutions and other professional groups representing tens of thousands individual scientists have issued policy statements supporting evolution education and opposing intelligent design. Such controversies as do exist concern the details of the mechanisms of evolution, not the validity of the over-arching theory of evolution. In the absence of an actual professional controversy between groups of experts on evolution, critics say intelligent design proponents have merely renamed the conflict that already existed between biologists and creationists, and that the controversy to which intelligent design proponents refer is political in nature and thus, by definition, outside of the realm of science and scientific educational curricula. Critics contend that intelligent design proponents ignore this point by continuing to make the claim of a "scientific controversy."

For example the National Association of Biology Teachers in a statement endorsing evolution as noncontroversial quoted Theodosius Dobzhansky "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." and went on to state that the quote "accurately reflects the central, unifying role of evolution in biology. The theory of evolution provides a framework that explains both the history of life and the ongoing adaptation of organisms to environmental challenges and changes." They emphasized that "Scientists have firmly established evolution as an important natural process" and that "The selection of topics covered in a biology curriculum should accurately reflect the principles of biological science. Teaching biology in an effective and scientifically honest manner requires that evolution be taught in a standards-based instructional framework with effective classroom discussions and laboratory experiences."^[11].

Prominent evolutionary biologists such as Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne have proposed various 'controversies' that are worth teaching, instead of intelligent design [5]. Dawkins compares teaching intelligent design in schools to teaching flat earthism: perfectly fine in a history class but not in science. "If you give the idea that there are two schools of thought within science, one that says the earth is round and one that says the earth is flat, you are misleading children."[6]

Tufts philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, describes how they generate a sense of controversy: "The proponents of intelligent design use an ingenious ploy that works something like this: First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a 'controversy' to teach." [7] Such a controversy is then self-fulfilling and self-sustaining, though completely without any legitimate basis in the academic world.

Critics of the Teach the Controversy movement and strategy can also be found outside of the scientific community. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State described the approach of the movement's proponents as "a disarming subterfuge designed to undermine solid evidence that all living things share a common ancestry."

"The movement is a veneer over a certain theological message. Every one of these groups is now actively engaged in trying to undercut sound science education by criticizing evolution," said Lynn. "It is all based on their religious ideology. Even the people who don't specifically mention religion are hard-pressed with a straight face to say who the intelligent designer is if it's not God." [8]

The Discovery Institute

According to critics of the Discovery Institute's efforts through the Teach the Controversy campaign and the intelligent design movement, the Wedge strategy betrays the Institute's political rather than scientific and educational purpose. The Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture (CSC) has an overarching conservative Christian social and political agenda that seeks to redefine both law and science and how they are conducted, with the stated goal of a religious "renewal" of American culture.

Critics also allege that the Discovery Institute has a long-standing record of misrepresenting research, law and its own policy and agenda and that of others:

In announcing the Teach the Controversy strategy in 2002, the Discovery Institute’s Stephen C. Meyer [9] presented an annotated bibliography of 44 peer-reviewed scientific articles that were said to raise significant challenges to key tenets of what was referred to as "Darwinian evolution" [10]. In response to this claim the National Center for Science Education, an organization that works in collaboration with National Academy of Sciences, the National Association of Biology Teachers, and the National Science Teachers Association that support the teaching of evolution in public schools [11], contacted the authors of the papers listed and twenty-six scientists, representing thirty-four of the papers, responded. None of the authors considered that their research provided evidence against evolution [12].

The Discovery Institute, following the policies outlined by Phillip E. Johnson, obfuscates its agenda. Opposed to the public statements to the contrary made by the Discovery Institute, Johnson has admitted that the goal of intelligent design movement is to cast creationism as a scientific concept:

"Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools."[13]
"This isn't really, and never has been a debate about science. It's about religion and philosophy."[14]
"If we understand our own times, we will know that we should affirm the reality of God by challenging the domination of materialism and naturalism in the world of the mind. With the assistance of many friends I have developed a strategy for doing this....We call our strategy the "wedge."^[12]
"The objective (of the Wedge strategy) is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God. From there people are introduced to 'the truth' of the Bible and then 'the question of sin' and finally 'introduced to Jesus.'"^[13]
"So the question is: "How to win?" That’s when I began to develop what you now see full-fledged in the "wedge" strategy: "Stick with the most important thing" —the mechanism and the building up of information. Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate because you do not want to raise the so-called Bible-science dichotomy. Phrase the argument in such a way that you can get it heard in the secular academy and in a way that tends to unify the religious dissenters. That means concentrating on, "Do you need a Creator to do the creating, or can nature do it on its own?" and refusing to get sidetracked onto other issues, which people are always trying to do."^[14]

Instead of producing original scientific data to support ID’s claims, the Discovery Institute has promoted ID politically to the public, education officials and public policymakers through its Teach the Controversy campaign.

Johnson's statements validate the criticisms leveled by those who allege that the Discovery Institute and its allied organizations are merely stripping the obvious religious content from their anti-evolution assertions as a means of avoiding the legal restriction on establishment. They argue that ID is simply an attempt to put a patina of secularity on top of what is a fundamentally religious belief and agenda.

Given the history of the Discovery Institute as an organization committed to opposing any scientific theory inconsistent with "the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God", [15] many scientists regard the movement purely as a ploy to insert creationism into the science curriculum rather than as a serious attempt to discuss scientific evidence. In the words of Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Education:

" 'Teach the controversy' is a deliberately ambiguous phrase. It means 'pretend to students that scientists are arguing over whether evolution took place.' This is not happening. I mean you go to the scientific journals, you go to universities... and you ask the professors, is there an argument going on about whether living things had common ancestors? They'll look at you blankly. This is not a controversy." [16]

Though Teach the Controversy proponents cite the current public policy statements of the Discovery Institute as belying the criticisms that their strategy is a creationist ploy and decry critics as biased in failing to recognize that the intelligent design movement's Teach the Controversy strategy as really just a question of science with no religion involved, is itself belied by Discovery Institute's former published policy statements,^[15] its "Wedge Document", and statements made to its constituency by its leadership, and in particular Phillip E. Johnson.

Writes Johnson in the foreward to Creation, Evolution, & Modern Science (2000) "The Intelligent Design movement starts with the recognition that "In the beginning was the Word," and "In the beginning God created." Establishing that point isn't enough, but it is absolutely essential to the rest of the gospel message." Johnson admits that intelligent design arguments are carefully formulated in secular terms and intentionally avoid positing the identity of the designer and that cultivating ambiguity by employing secular language in arguments which are carefully crafted to avoid overtones of theistic creationism is a necessary first step for ultimately reintroducing the Christian concept of God as the designer. "...The first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion. ...This is not to say that the biblical issues are unimportant; the point is rather that the time to address them will be after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact." [17] This bolsters the claims of those critics who cite Johnson's admission that the ultimate goal of the campaign is getting "the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools."[18]

Amidst this political and religious controversy the clear, categorical and oft-repeated advice of established national and international scientific organizations remains that there is no scientific controversy over teaching evolution in public schools.

External links

Con

Intelligent Design and that Vast Right-wing Conspiracy
What's wrong with 'teaching the controversy'?
The Wedge Strategy Three Years Later
The Discovery Institute
Critiques of Anti-Evolutionist Phillip Johnson's Views
Resolution disparaging ID and ID politics, by the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
National Center for Science Education resources on ID
- "Intelligent Design" Not Accepted by Most Scientists
Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences by the Steering Committee on Science and Creationism, National Academy of Sciences, addressing the issue of intelligent design in the guise of creationism.
The "Intelligent Design" of a Monkey Trial: A Case of Hidden Agendas by Bob Weitzel. At the axisoflogic.com website.
Teach the controversy (Creationism through the back door) Stephen C. Meyer and John Angus Campbell. originally published at the baltimoresun.com 11 March 2005
Should We “Teach the Controversy”? Jason Rosenhouse csicop.org (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal)
State Your Case Chris Mooney. csicop.org (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) 25 October 2004
Evolution Controversy in Our Schools A letter sent to Academy members by President of the National Academy of Sciences, Bruce Alberts 4 March 2005.
The Newest Evolution of Creationism, Intelligent design is about politics and religion, not science. Barbara Forrest. Natural History magazine, April, 2002, page 80
Analysis of the Discovery Institute's Bibliography of Supplementary Resources for Ohio Science Education NCSE staff, National Center for Science Education website
Should Creationism Be Taught in the Public Schools? (PDF) Robert T. Pennock. March 2002

Neutral

David Morris, Alternet, 23 May 2005, "Having Fun With Intelligent Design"
Peter Slevin, Washington Post, March 14, 2005, "Battle on Teaching Evolution Sharpens"
Evan Ratliff, Wired, October 2004, "The Crusade Against Evolution"
- Discovery Institute, October 13, 2004, "Wired magazine reporter criticized for agenda driven reporting - critique of Wired article and list of alleged misrepresentations
Gregg Easterbrook, Wired, December 2002, "The New Convergence"
Faith and Reason an overview of the Fall 1998 television documentary presented by PBS dealing with religion and science.

Pro

No Need to Fear Teaching the Controversy, from the Discovery Institute
Reprint of Washington Post OpEd piece approving of teaching the controversy
The "Wedge Document": "So What?" (An explanation by the Discovery Institute)
The "Wedge" Archives at the Access Research Network website.

Audio and video

Reference notes

^ "ID's home base is the Center for Science and Culture at Seattle's conservative Discovery Institute. Meyer directs the center; former Reagan adviser Bruce Chapman heads the larger institute, with input from the Christian supply-sider and former American Spectator owner George Gilder (also a Discovery senior fellow). From this perch, the ID crowd has pushed a "teach the controversy" approach to evolution that closely inﬂuenced the Ohio State Board of Education's recently proposed science standards, which would require students to learn how scientists "continue to investigate and critically analyze" aspects of Darwin's theory." Chris Mooney. The American Prospect. December 2, 2002 Survival of the Slickest: How anti-evolutionists are mutating their message
^ Teaching Intelligent Design: What Happened When? by William A. Dembski"The clarion call of the intelligent design movement is to "teach the controversy." There is a very real controversy centering on how properly to account for biological complexity (cf. the ongoing events in Kansas), and it is a scientific controversy."
^ Discovery Institute, Center for Science and Culture. Questions about Intelligent Design: What is the theory of intelligent design? "The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. "Questions About Intelligent Design
^ Patricia O’Connell Killen, a religion professor at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma whose work centers around the regional religious identity of the Pacific Northwest, recently wrote that "religiously inspired think tanks such as the conservative evangelical Discovery Institute" are part of the "religious landscape" of that area. [1]
^ Turn out the lights, the "Teach the controversy" party’s over
^ National Academy of Sciences, 1999 Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences, Second Edition
^ Ruling, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, page 89
^ "To Debate or Not to Debate Intelligent Design?" by Gerald Graff, Inside Higher Ed, September 28, 2005.
^ To Debate or Not to Debate Intelligent Design? By Gerald Graff, Inside Higher Ed, September 28, 2005.
^ Battle on Teaching Evolution Sharpens By Peter Slevin Washington Post, March 14, 2005
^ National Association of Biology Teachers. Statement on Teaching Evolution 2004. [2]
^ Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. Phillip E. Johnson. 1997. pp. 91-92
^ Phillip E. Johnson. Quoted in Church and State Magazine, April 1999
^ Phillip E. Johnson. Touchstone Magazine interview, June 2002 [3]
^ What is The Center for the Renewal of Science & Culture All About?
The Mission of The Center for Renewal of Science & Culture

[1] "ID's home base is the Center for Science and Culture at Seattle's conservative Discovery Institute. Meyer directs the center; former Reagan adviser Bruce Chapman heads the larger institute, with input from the Christian supply-sider and former American Spectator owner George Gilder (also a Discovery senior fellow). From this perch, the ID crowd has pushed a "teach the controversy" approach to evolution that closely inﬂuenced the Ohio State Board of Education's recently proposed science standards, which would require students to learn how scientists "continue to investigate and critically analyze" aspects of Darwin's theory." Chris Mooney. The American Prospect. December 2, 2002 Survival of the Slickest: How anti-evolutionists are mutating their message

[2] Teaching Intelligent Design: What Happened When? by William A. Dembski"The clarion call of the intelligent design movement is to "teach the controversy." There is a very real controversy centering on how properly to account for biological complexity (cf. the ongoing events in Kansas), and it is a scientific controversy."

[3] Discovery Institute, Center for Science and Culture. Questions about Intelligent Design: What is the theory of intelligent design? "The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. "Questions About Intelligent Design

[4] Patricia O’Connell Killen, a religion professor at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma whose work centers around the regional religious identity of the Pacific Northwest, recently wrote that "religiously inspired think tanks such as the conservative evangelical Discovery Institute" are part of the "religious landscape" of that area. [1]

[5] Turn out the lights, the "Teach the controversy" party’s over

[6] National Academy of Sciences, 1999 Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences, Second Edition

[7] Ruling, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, page 89

[8] "To Debate or Not to Debate Intelligent Design?" by Gerald Graff, Inside Higher Ed, September 28, 2005.

[9] To Debate or Not to Debate Intelligent Design? By Gerald Graff, Inside Higher Ed, September 28, 2005.

[10] Battle on Teaching Evolution Sharpens By Peter Slevin Washington Post, March 14, 2005

[11] National Association of Biology Teachers. Statement on Teaching Evolution 2004. [2]

[12] Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. Phillip E. Johnson. 1997. pp. 91-92

[13] Phillip E. Johnson. Quoted in Church and State Magazine, April 1999

[14] Phillip E. Johnson. Touchstone Magazine interview, June 2002 [3]

[15] What is The Center for the Renewal of Science & Culture All About?
The Mission of The Center for Renewal of Science & Culture

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 ==Criticisms==
 ==="Teach the Controversy"===
-The theory of evolution is accepted by the vast majority of biologists and by the [[scientific community]] in general (in such overwhelming numbers that some claim the theory of evolution to be a scientific [[consensus]]). Over 70 scientific societies, institutions and other professional groups representing tens of thousands individual scientists have issued policy statements supporting evolution education and opposing intelligent design. Such controversies as do exist concern the details of the mechanisms of evolution, not the validity of the over-arching theory of evolution.
+The theory of evolution is accepted by the vast majority of biologists and by the [[scientific community]] in general (in such overwhelming numbers that some claim the theory of evolution to be a scientific [[consensus]]). Over 70 scientific societies, institutions and other professional groups representing tens of thousands individual scientists have issued policy statements supporting evolution education and opposing intelligent design. Such controversies as do exist concern the details of the mechanisms of evolution, not the validity of the over-arching theory of evolution. In the absence of an actual professional controversy between groups of experts on evolution, critics say intelligent design proponents have merely renamed the conflict that already existed between biologists and creationists, and that the controversy to which intelligent design proponents refer is political in nature and thus, by definition, outside of the realm of science and scientific educational curricula. Critics contend that intelligent design proponents ignore this point by continuing to make the claim of a "scientific controversy."
 For example the National Association of Biology Teachers in a statement endorsing evolution as noncontroversial quoted [[Theodosius Dobzhansky]] "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." and went on to state that the quote "accurately reflects the central, unifying role of evolution in biology. The theory of evolution provides a framework that explains both the history of life and the ongoing adaptation of organisms to environmental challenges and changes." They emphasized that "Scientists have firmly established evolution as an important natural process" and that "The selection of topics covered in a biology curriculum should accurately reflect the principles of biological science.  Teaching biology in an effective and scientifically honest manner requires that evolution be taught in a standards-based instructional framework with effective classroom discussions and laboratory experiences."<ref>National Association of Biology Teachers. Statement on Teaching Evolution 2004. [http://www.nabt.org/sub/position_statements/evolution.asp]</ref>.