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Selling Intelligent Design: If at First You Don’t Succeed...
April 4, 2008
Trust the intelligent design folks at the Discovery Institute and their ideological kin to keep looking for ways to get ID into the classroom.
I checked in at the institute’s Web site yesterday because earlier in the day I had interviewed Kenneth Miller about his powerfully argued new book, Only a Theory (Viking, June). A biolo-gist at Brown University, Miller is co-author of one of the bestselling high-school biology text-books in America and a leading proponent of evolution against intelligent design.
I’ve become fairly obsessed with the attack on evolution by ID adherents. I interviewed Miller’s main opponent, Michael Behe (Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution, both from Free Press), last year out of a genuine interest in knowing how the Lehigh University biochemist could espouse a view so reviled by the scientific community. (Behe is also, not coincidentally, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.)
Miller noted in our conversation that ID’ers have succeeded in appropriating the postmodernist notion that all knowledge is relative, which, I would add, gives their views an appearance being intellectually up-to-the-moment rather than retrograde. There is no absolute truth in science, they argue, only a cultural construct. This means that ID is as valid as evolutionary theory; in the words of Missouri state legislator Jane Cunningham, it’s just a matter of “differ-ent perspectives, competing ideas, and alternative claims of truth.”
Cunningham’s Missouri legislature, along with Louisiana’s, will be considering bills in favor of “academic freedom” and intellectual “diversity,” another politically correct word that the ID movement is adopting. A recent article on the Discovery Institute’s Web site reports on these bills.
Why do I find this issue so compelling? Maybe because when my Orthodox Jewish mother was a public school student in Chattanooga, Tenn. (not too long after the 1925 Scopes trial, also in Tennessee), the Lord’s Prayer was recited daily. I mentioned this a year or so ago over coffee to a writer (also Jewish), who also had vivid memories of reciting the Lord’s Prayer in his public school—not long ago in the South but in Connecticut in the 1950s.
What’s in my book bag today? For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb and the Murder that Shocked Chicago by Simon Baatz (Harper, Aug.). Anyone who has read Meyer Levin’s novel Compulsion (or seen the movie) will look forward to this new look at the 1924 case; surprisingly, according to Baatz, his is only the second nonfiction account and the first in over 30 years. (And, like the Scopes trial, it features Clarence Darrow for the defense.)
Posted by Sarah Gold on April 4, 2008 | Comments (2)
