Teach the Controversy

The "teach the controversy" campaign of the Discovery Institute seeks to promote the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design (a variant of traditional creationism) as part of its attempts to discredit the teaching of evolution in United States public high school science courses. Scientific organizations (including the American Association for the Advancement of Science) point out that the institute claims that there is a scientific controversy where in fact none exists. The Discovery Institute is a conservative Christian think tank based in Seattle, Washington. The overall goals of the movement are "to defeat scientific materialism" and "to replace [it] with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God". It claims that fairness requires educating students with a "critical analysis of evolution" in which "the full range of scientific views", evolution's "unresolved issues", and the "scientific weaknesses of evolutionary theory" are presented and evaluated and in which intelligent design concepts such as irreducible complexity are presented. The scientific community and science education organizations have replied that there is no scientific controversy regarding the validity of the theory of evolution and that the controversy exists solely in religion and politics. A federal court has agreed with evaluation of the majority of scientific organizations (including the American Association for the Advancement of Science) that the institute has manufactured the controversy they want to have taught by promoting the false perception that evolution is "a theory in crisis" by falsely claiming the theory is the subject of wide controversy and debate within the scientific community. In fact, intelligent design has been rejected by essentially all of the members of the scientific community, including the numerical estimate of 99.9 percent of scientists. In December 2005, a federal judge ruled that intelligent design is not science and "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents".

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Intelligent design movement

The intelligent design movement is a neo-creationist religious campaign for broad social, academic and political change to promote and support the pseudoscientific idea of intelligent design (ID), which asserts that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." Its chief activities are a campaign to promote public awareness of this concept, the lobbying of policymakers to include its teaching in high school science classes, and legal action, either to defend such teaching or to remove barriers otherwise preventing it.

Wedge strategy

The Wedge Strategy is a creationist political and social action plan authored by the Discovery Institute, the hub of the pseudoscientific intelligent design movement. The strategy was put forth in a Discovery Institute manifesto known as the Wedge Document. Its goal is to change American culture by shaping public policy to reflect politically conservative fundamentalist evangelical Protestant values. The wedge metaphor is attributed to Phillip E. Johnson and depicts a metal wedge splitting a log.

Eugenie Scott

Eugenie Carol Scott (born October 24, 1945) is an American physical anthropologist, a former university professor and educator who has been active in opposing the teaching of young Earth creationism and intelligent design in schools. She coined the term "Gish gallop" to describe a fallacious rhetorical technique which consists in overwhelming an interlocutor with as many individually weak arguments as possible, in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument.

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Explores Earth's origin theories, from religious myths to scientific inquiries, highlighting key historical figures and the clash between religious beliefs and scientific discoveries.

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Explores sociotechnical controversies in research work, emphasizing the blurred boundaries of expertise and the intertwined nature of facts and values.