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But Isn't It Creationism? The beginnings of 'intelligent design' and Of Pandas and People in the midst of the Arkansas and Louisiana litigation.
... The shocked reactions from all corners of the fundamentalist and evangelical community indicated widespread naiveté about the quality of creationists' scientific and legal arguments. An example is the May 1982 cover story of Moody Monthly, the magazine of the venerable conservative evangelical Moody Bible Institute (founded 1886), which declared that Arkansas was "[w]here creationism lost its shirt" (Mawyer 1982); other examples are reviewed in Matzke (2009). ...
... The Third Creationist Movement: "Intelligent Design" (1989)(1990)(1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005) It has been shown in detail elsewhere (e.g., Matzke 2009;Scott and Matzke 2007) that "intelligent design" is a direct descendant of the watered-down-for-courts "creation science" that Bird was defending in the Edwards case. In short, ID's early "designers" were a cooperating group of young-earth and old-earth creationists who were attempting to come up with a textbook that would provide students with the sanitized form of creation science that they hoped would be legal in public schools if equal-time laws were ruled constitutional. ...
... In short, ID's early "designers" were a cooperating group of young-earth and old-earth creationists who were attempting to come up with a textbook that would provide students with the sanitized form of creation science that they hoped would be legal in public schools if equal-time laws were ruled constitutional. All of the main players in the writing and production of this textbook were also closely involved in defending the Arkansas and/or Louisiana bills (or at least had been prepared as expert witnesses in the event that the Louisiana case went to trial), or had been explicit defenders of either creation science or "equal time" approaches (Matzke 2009). The textbook they were working on went through many drafts and titles from 1983-1989, and evolved throughout that time period. ...
Every discipline has its hazards, and for evolution scientists and educators, a major hazard consists of encounters with creationists,
their rhetoric, and their attempts to insert antievolutionism into public education. Preparation for this hazard should be
a standard part of the background of professional evolutionists. One important piece of this preparation involves understanding
the historical origins of creationism within the wider history of western Christianity, especially evangelical Protestantism
and its development in the United States. Here, I place the standard histories of “creation science” by Numbers and Larson
(covering primarily the early 1900s to the 1980s) into this larger context (going back to the evangelical split over slavery
before the Civil War and during), and then show how the “intelligent design” movement (from the 1980s until the present) fits
squarely within the long history of primarily evangelical, biblicist opposition to evolution. The major creationist movements
and slogans are identified and also placed into this historical picture. In summary, while creationism has evolved diverse
labels and strategies for legal and rhetorical purposes, its fundamental essence remains unchanged. That essence is advocacy
of miraculous divine intervention, i.e., special creation, in the history of life, and the claim that science must acknowledge
special creation or dire consequences for society will follow.
KeywordsCreationism-Intelligent design-Evangelicalism-Fundamentalism-Evolution education
... O combate ao evolucionismo nos Estados Unidos data do começo do século xx e passou por três fases principais, as duas primeiras julgadas inconstitucionais pelos tribunais norte-americanos (Matzke, 2015). A primeira buscava, simplesmente, banir seu ensino em todos os níveis. ...
... Note-se que a denominação "design inteligente" foi adotada após uma decisão da Suprema Corte dos Estados Unidos contra o ensino obrigatório do criacionismo, o caso Edwards v. Aguillard, de 1987. No fundo, como reconheceu a justiça americana, estamos diante das mesmas ideias sob nova denominação (Matzke, 2009). ...
This article gathers the phenomena of creationism, historical revisionism, fake news and local law under the name of “perversion” and examines two of them in detail to demonstrate the relevance of the classification. Next, the article argues that such phenomena are the result of the action of autarchic normative orders, whose purpose is to establish hierarchical and irrational forms of life.
... Instead, they focused more narrowly on perceived flaws in the science of evolution, arguing that natural selection could not account for certain complex features of organisms. Knowledgeable critics noted, correctly, that their arguments comprised only a new gloss on discredited creationist claims and that their religious motivations were readily visible just below the surface (Forrest and Gross 2004;Matzke 2009). ...
The argument that the second law of thermodynamics contradicts the theory of evolution has recently been revived by anti-evolutionists. In its basic form, the argument asserts that whereas evolution implies that there has been an increase in biological complexity over time, the second law, a fundamental principle of physics, shows this to be impossible. Scientists have responded primarily by noting that the second law does not rule out increases in complexity in open systems, and since the Earth receives energy from the Sun, it is an open system. This reply is correct as far as it goes, and it adequately rebuts the most crude versions of the second law argument. However, it is insufficient against more sophisticated versions, and it leaves many relevant aspects of thermodynamics unexplained. We shall consider the history of the argument, explain the nuances various anti-evolution writers have brought to it, and offer thorough explanations for why the argument is fallacious. We shall emphasize in particular that the second law is best viewed as a mathematical statement. Since anti-evolutionists never make use of the mathematical structure of thermodynamics, invocations of the second law never contribute anything substantive to their discourse.
... Moran's discussion of the history of intelligent design starts with the publication of Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial (1991); while Johnson was instrumental in publicizing intelligent design, in fact, as the Kitzmiller trial revealed, intelligent design was under way even while the Edwards decision was announced. The prehistory of intelligent design remains largely uninvestigated, although Moran would have benefited from consulting a paper by Nick Matzke (2009), whom he interviewed for chapter 5. ...
Jeffrey P. Moran’s American Genesis examines the Scopes trial in particular and the antievolution movement in general through the prisms of gender, region, and race. The diversification, of both ideology and strategy, of antievolutionism and the current impact of antievolutionism on scientists in academia are also discussed. Overall, despite a few problems, American Genesis deserves a place on anyone’s list of the top 10 books on the Scopes trial and the antievolution impulse in America.
... It is impossible to summarize the extensive literature on the creationist movement here (46,52,66,67,73,75,108,113,114,128,138). Perhaps the most important point to appreciate is that, despite a prevalent stereotype, creationism-the rejection of a scientific explanation of the history of life in favor of a supernatural account-is highly diverse. ...
Creationism continues to present a challenge to the teaching of evolution in the United States. With attempts to ban evolution education and to "balance" the teaching of evolution with creationism unavailing, creationists are increasingly favoring the approach of misrepresenting evolution as scientifically controversial. To understand the ongoing challenges facing evolution education in the United States, it is necessary to appreciate creationist actions at the different levels of educational governance--state legislatures, state boards of education, local boards of education, and finally the individual classroom--that serve as the battlegrounds for the evolution education wars. Scientists are in a unique position to defend the teaching of evolution, both by resisting creationist incursions as they occur and by helping to improve the teaching of evolution at both the precollege and college levels.
In American Creationism, Creation Science, and Intelligent Design in the Evangelical Market , Benjamin Huskinson presents a close examination of the two main American sociopolitical movements launched in opposition to evolution during the second half of the twentieth century: creation science and intelligent design. Despite a failure of a central argument and a handful of errors, the book is a welcome and valuable interrogation of the stereotypes of American creationism.
In the previous chapter, the different variants of creationism were presented as concepts or, more specifically, as both different and partly overlapping systems of interpreting the world that also contain a specific perspective of the opposing interpretation system of secular science and, in particular, evolutionary theory. Sociologically, these ideas become relevant (and apprehensible) only when they are expressed via social action (Weber 1978:3–62). It is, therefore, necessary to ask how the social representation of creationism is structured. Who are the creationists, how do they organize themselves, how do they try to make their views public and defend themselves against criticism?
The intelligent design (ID) creationist movement is now a quarter of a century old. ID proponents at the Discovery Institute, headquartered in Seattle, WA, USA, insist that ID is not creationism. However, it is the direct descendant of the creation science movement that began in the 1960s and continued until the definitive ruling against creationism by the US Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard
1987, which struck down laws that required balancing the teaching of evolution with creationism in public schools. Already anticipating in the early 1980s that Arkansas and Louisiana “balanced treatment” laws would be declared unconstitutional, a group of creationists led by Charles Thaxton began laying the groundwork for what is now the ID movement. After Edwards, Thaxton and his associates promoted ID aggressively until it, too, was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District 2005. Subsequently, in 2008, the Discovery Institute began its multistate promotion of model “academic freedom” legislation that bears striking parallels to the 1980s balanced treatment laws. Because of Kitzmiller, ID proponents have written their model legislation in code language in an effort to avoid another court challenge. Yet despite attempting to evade the legal constraints imposed by Edwards, they are merely recycling earlier creationist tactics that date back to the late 1970s and early 1980s. The tactics that ID creationists now use—promoting legislation, publishing “educational” materials, establishing a “research” institute, and sanitizing their terminology—are the recycled tactics of their creation science predecessors.
I present a structural empirical model of collective household labour supply that includes the non-participation decision. I specify a simultaneous model for hours, participation and wages of husband and wife. I discuss the problems of identification and statistical coherency that arise in the application of the collective household labour supply model. The model includes random effects and it is estimated using a panel data set of Dutch couples. The estimates allow me to check the underlying regularity conditions on individual preferences and to obtain estimates of the sharing rule that governs the division of household income between husband and wife. Copyright © The Author(s). Journal compilation © Royal Economic Society 2009.
ID ('intelligent design') is not science, but a form of creationism; both are very different from the simple theological proposition that a divine Creator is responsible for the natural patterns and processes of the Universe. Its current version maintains that a 'Designer' must intervene miraculously to accomplish certain natural scientific events. The verdict in the 2005 case Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover School District, et al. (in Harrisburg, PA, U.S.A.) was a landmark of American jurisprudence that prohibited the teaching of ID as science, identified it as religiously based, and forbade long-refuted 'criticisms of evolution' from introduction into public school classes. Much of the science of the trial was based on biochemistry; biochemists and other scientists have several important opportunities to improve scientific literacy and science education in American public schools ('state schools') by working with teachers, curriculum developers and textbook writers.
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