History
Brandon's original goal was to get 400 petition signatures in four hours. However, Brandon found he was 75 signatures short after four hours, and so he decided to extend his collection period to four days. The emails became more frequent, and at one point, petition responses were arriving every 3.5 seconds. However, the 325 signatures collected in the first four hours can be compared to the Discovery Institute's gathering of 400 signatures of self-identified scientists, most in irrelevant fields, in four years. In the week after the close of the four day period, another several thousand signatures arrived, but were not included in the official tally.
One signatory, Dr. Steve Brill of Rutgers University, stated, "To be called a scientific theory, Intelligent Design must be at the very least, disprovable. Since there is no way for Intelligent Design to be disproved, it fails the simplest test of scientific theory."
In a press release on October 20, 2005 announcing the results of the "Four Day Petition", Brandon drew attention to the remarks of Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Michael Behe's faculty colleagues in the biological sciences at Lehigh University. Twenty of Behe's peers remarked collectively that
"As Michael J. Behe's faculty colleagues... we lend our voices to the chorus of nearly all scientists who conclude that 'Intelligent Design' is not a scientific theory, but rather a loosely veiled attempt to explain natural phenomena by invoking the concept of a supernatural entity. Intelligent Design is not a scientific alternative to Darwinian evolution and has no place in the biology classroom."
Another signatory, biologist Mark Siddall of the American Museum of Natural History stated, "This is not a fight about what the nature of science is. Scientists have already determined that. It's a fight about what our daughters and sons will be taught is the nature of science." Siddall, added, "R. Joe's efforts elicited an overwhelming response from the scientific community—one that cut across lines of faith as deeply as it did across fields of scientific study." Siddall also assisted Brandon in checking that the IP addresses of the respondents corresponded to the institutions they claimed to be affiliated with.
Brandon's original plan was to compile the signatures that he obtained and pass them on to Judge John E. Jones III who was handling the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case, as well as announce the results in a press release. The petition was not completed sufficiently early to submit it as part of an amicus curae brief for the Dover case. However, if the case was to go to the US Supreme Court, the petition could have been submitted as an amicus brief at that time.
R. Joe Brandon emphasized that this "Four Day Petition" did not mean that scientific issues are settled by majority vote. What Brandon maintains is that this is an indication of the level of scientific consensus that accepts evolution as a viable established scientific theory that has passed a large number of hurdles and is supported by an immense amount of evidence.
Read more about this topic: A Scientific Support For Darwinism
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