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".