Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns
Summary
The Discovery Institute has conducted a series of related public relations campaigns which seek to promote intelligent design while attempting to discredit evolutionary biology, which the Institute terms "Darwinism". The Discovery Institute promotes the pseudoscientific intelligent design movement and is represented by Creative Response Concepts, a public relations firm.
Prominent Institute campaigns have been to 'Teach the Controversy' and to allow 'Critical Analysis of Evolution'. Other campaigns have claimed that intelligent design advocates (most notably Richard Sternberg) have been discriminated against, and thus that Academic Freedom bills are needed to protect academics' and teachers' ability to criticise evolution, and that the development of evolutionary theory was historically linked to ideologies such as Nazism and eugenics, claims based on misrepresentation which have been ridiculed by topic experts. These three claims are all publicized in the pro-ID movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed; the Anti-Defamation League said the film's attempt to blame science for the Nazi Holocaust was outrageous. Other campaigns have included petitions, most notably A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism.
The theory of evolution is accepted by overwhelming scientific consensus. Intelligent design has been rejected, both by the vast majority of scientists and by court findings, such as Kitzmiller v. Dover, as being a religious view and not science.
Wedge strategy
The overarching goal of the Institute in conducting the intelligent design campaigns is religious; to replace science with "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." To accomplish this the Institute has conducted a number of public relations campaigns. The governing strategy of these various campaigns is called the Wedge strategy and was first made public when the Institute's "Wedge Document" was leaked on the World Wide Web in 1999.
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.