Scientific Community
The consensus of the scientific community is that Critical Analysis of Evolution is unsound teaching based on the Discovery Institute's flawed anti-evolution creationist premise, and scientists have overwhelmingly rejected the institute's proposals.
Early drafts of the Critical Analysis of Evolution lesson plan referred to the lesson as the "great evolution debate"; one of the early drafts of the lesson plan had one section titled "Conducting the Macroevolution Debate". In a subsequent draft, it was changed to "Conducting the Critical Analysis Activity". The wording for the two sections was almost identical, with just "debate" changed to "critical analysis activity" wherever it appeared, in the manner in which intelligent design proponents simply replaced "creation" with "intelligent design" in Of Pandas and People to repackage a creation science textbook into an intelligent design textbook. In light of this, Professor Patricia Princehouse has said that "critical analysis is intelligent design relabeled, just as intelligent design was creationism relabeled." Nick Matzke has written what he believes shows that Critical Analysis of Evolution is a means of teaching all the intelligent design arguments without using the intelligent design label.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general scientific society, comprising 262 affiliated societies and academies of science and some 10 million individuals, has consistently opposed the teaching of intelligent design, with or without language that calls into question the validity of evolution, saying in a policy statement that "the lack of scientific warrant for so-called 'intelligent design theory' makes it improper to include as a part of science education." In its 2006 "Statement on the Teaching of Evolution" it called out the Critical Analysis of Evolution argument specifically saying:
Some bills seek to discredit evolution by emphasizing so-called 'flaws' in the theory of evolution or 'disagreements' within the scientific community. Others insist that teachers have absolute freedom within their classrooms and cannot be disciplined for teaching non-scientific 'alternatives' to evolution. A number of bills require that students be taught to 'critically analyze' evolution or to understand 'the controversy.' But there is no significant controversy within the scientific community about the validity of the theory of evolution. The current controversy surrounding the teaching of evolution is not a scientific one.
Read more about this topic: Critical Analysis Of Evolution, Reception of The Campaign
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