The Biggest SCAM in Science (and there have been some doozies)
How the ACLU Silenced the Evolution Debates. With Darwin on the Ropes, the Refs Suspended the Fight
How the ACLU Silenced the Evolution Debates. With Darwin on the Ropes, the Refs Suspended the Fight
December 20 represents the twentieth anniversary of one of the darker days in the history of science. This is the day on which the ACLU convinced a federal judge in Pennsylvania that some “science” is sacrosanct and beyond criticism. Going forward, debate on the most fundamental of all issues was essentially verboten.
Specifically, Judge John Jones ruled that “intelligent design” is a form of “creationism,” and that the Dover school board policy violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution. At the nub of judge’s ruling was this: “ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation.” Permitting “supernatural causation,” oh my!
In the way of background, the theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not by a purposeless, undirected process as Charles Darwin proposed in his 1871 opus The Descent of Man. Darwinism was the nineteenth century equivalent of climate change. All the best people felt obliged to believe. If the evidence did not hold up, there were always ways to tinker around the edges and “hide the decline.”
The emergence of Intelligent Design as a movement can be traced to the publication of Darwin on Trial in 1991 by distinguished Berkeley law professor Philip Johnson. By 2004, when the ACLU brought suit in…