Discovery Institute Campaigns - Campaign To "teach The Controversy"

Campaign To "teach The Controversy"

See also: Teach the Controversy, Kansas evolution hearings, Critical Analysis of Evolution, and Explore Evolution: The Arguments For and Against Neo-Darwinism

Previously, attempts to introduce creationism into public high school science curricula had been derailed when this was found to have violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. In an attempt to avoid repeating this violation, the Institute today avoids directly advocating for intelligent design in high school curricula. Instead, it advocates teaching methods that introduce intelligent design ideas (and textbooks) indirectly through a campaign to "Teach the Controversy" by portraying evolution as "a theory in crisis" and "presenting all the evidence, both for and against, evolution" and teaching "Critical Analysis of Evolution" (the name of the Institute's model lesson plans on the subject). The Discovery Institute describes their approach as:

As a general approach, Discovery Institute favors teaching students more about evolution, not less. We think students deserve to know not only about the strengths of modern evolutionary theory, but also about some of the theory's weaknesses and unresolved issues. In other words, students should be taught that evolutionary theory, like any scientific theory, continues to be open to analysis and critical scrutiny. According to opinion polls, this approach is favored by the overwhelming majority of the American public, and it has also been endorsed by the U.S. Congress in report language attached to the No Child Left Behind Act Conference Report.

Gordy Slack of Salon interpreted this tactic as follows:

"We want to teach more about evolution," says Discovery Institute's Casey Luskin, "not less." The "more" they want to teach, of course, is what they see as evolution's shortcomings, leaving an ecological niche that will then be filled by intelligent design.

In 2001 Robert T. Pennock wrote that intelligent design proponents are "manufacturing dissent" in order to explain the absence of scientific debate of their claims:

The "scientific" claims of such neo-creationists as Johnson, Denton, and Behe rely, in part, on the notion that these issues are the subject of suppressed debate among biologists. ... according to neo-creationists, the apparent absence of this discussion and the nearly universal rejection of neo-creationist claims must be due to the conspiracy among professional biologists instead of a lack of scientific merit.

These teaching methods were promoted by the Institute at the Kansas evolution hearings in 2005, but were the subject of judicial criticism later in that year in the decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District:

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.

Since this censure, the slogan "teach the controversy" has been increasingly superseded by the more oblique "Critical Analysis of Evolution".

In 2007, three Discovery Institute members, Stephen C. Meyer, Scott Minnich and Paul A. Nelson, co-authored Explore Evolution: The Arguments For and Against Neo-Darwinism, a biology textbook embodying their 'teach the controversy' philosophy, with illustrator and creationist author Jonathan Moneymaker and Kansas evolution hearings participant Ralph Seelke. The book was published by Hill House Publishers Pty. Ltd. (London and Melbourne), headed by creationist and butterfly photographer Bernard d'Abrera.