The Intelligent Design Network (IDnet) is a nonprofit organization formed in Kansas to promote intelligent design. It is based in Shawnee Mission, Kansas. The Intelligent Design Network was founded by John Calvert, a corporate finance lawyer with a bachelor's degree in geology and nutritionist William S. Harris. Its self-described mission is "to promote evidence-based science education with regard to the origin of the universe and of life and its diversity" and "to enhance public awareness of the evidence of intelligent design and living systems."
In June 2000 it made a news release urging Kansas school boards "to reject National Science Standards proposed by Kansas Citizens for Science", complaining that they "would limit teaching to only 'natural explanations'", limiting tuition to only "one side of the controversy" (see Teach the Controversy) and ignoring "he evidence supporting design". In a letter sent the same day to all Kansas school districts, Calvert hinted at legal consequences for failing to admit intelligent design into curricula. In July 2000, two weeks before the Kansas State Board of Education Republican primaries, IDNet held a symposium featuring a number of Center for Science and Culture fellows and affiliates.
Famous quotes containing the words intelligent, design and/or network:
“Once we begin to appreciate that the apparent destructiveness of the toddler in taking apart a flower or knocking down sand castles is in fact a constructive effort to understand unity, we are able to revise our view of the situation, moving from reprimand and prohibition to the intelligent channeling of his efforts and the fostering of discovery.”
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)
“With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)