Chronology of "Academic Freedom" Bills

Date of Introduction	State	Bill Number	Current Status
February 12, 2004	Alabama	HB391	Dead
February 17, 2004	Alabama	SB336	Dead
February 8, 2005	Alabama	HB352	Dead
February 8, 2005	Alabama	SB240	Dead
April 5, 2005	Alabama	HB716	Dead
January 9, 2006	Oklahoma	HB 2107	Dead
January 10, 2006	Alabama	HB106	Dead
January 10, 2006	Alabama	SB45	Dead
January 24, 2006	Oklahoma	SB 1959	Dead
February 16, 2006	Maryland	HB 1531	Dead
January 21, 2007	New Mexico	SB 371	Dead
January 24, 2007	New Mexico	HB 506	Dead
March 13, 2007	Missouri	HB 469	Dead
February 7, 2008	Discovery Institute offers model language for academic freedom bills
February 29, 2008	Florida	SB 2692	Dead
March 4, 2008	Florida	HB 1483	Dead
March 31, 2008	Louisiana	SB 561/733	Passed
April 1, 2008	Missouri	HB 2554	Dead
April 21, 2008	Louisiana	HB1168	Dead
April 24, 2008	Alabama	HB923	Dead
April 30, 2008	Michigan	HB 6027	Dead
May 15, 2008	South Carolina	SB 1386	Dead
June 3, 2008	Michigan	SB 1361	Dead
February 2, 2009	Oklahoma	SB 320	Dead
February 3, 2009	Alabama	HB300	Dead
February 3, 2009	Iowa	HF 183	Dead
February 3, 2009	New Mexico	SB 433	Dead
February 10, 2009	Missouri	HB 656	Dead
March 13, 2009	Texas	HB 4224	Dead
May 21, 2009	South Carolina	S 875	In Committee
January 13, 2010	Missouri	HB 1651	Second Reading
February 8, 2010	Kentucky	HB 397	In Committee

Discovery Institute's “Model Academic Freedom Statute on Evolution"

On February 7, 2008, the Discovery Institute launched academicfreedompetition.com in cooperation with Motive Marketing, one of the companies in charge of promoting Expelled. Among other things, this site contains the following model "academic freedom" bill:

---

MODEL ACADEMIC FREEDOM STATUTE ON EVOLUTION
[version: 9/7/2007]

SYNOPSIS: Existing law does not expressly provide a right nor does it expressly protect tenure and employment for a public school teacher or teacher at an institution of higher education for presenting scientific information pertaining to the full range of scientific views regarding biological and chemical evolution. In addition, students are not expressly provided a right to positions on views regarding biological and chemical evolution.

This bill would expressly provide rights and protection for teachers concerning scientific presentations on views regarding biological and chemical evolution and students concerning their positions on views regarding biological and chemical evolution.

A BILL
TO BE ENTITLED
AN ACT

Providing teacher rights and protection for a public school teacher or a teacher at an institution of higher education to present scientific information pertaining to the full range of scientific views regarding biological and chemical evolution in applicable curricula or in a course of learning; providing employment and tenure protection and protection against discrimination for any public school teacher or teacher at a public institution of higher education related to the presentation of such information; and providing student protection for subscribing to a particular position on views regarding biological or chemical evolution.

BE IT ENACTED BY ____________:

Section 1. This law shall be known as the "Academic Freedom Act."

Section 2. The Legislature finds that existing law does not expressly protect the right of teachers identified by the United States Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard to present scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories. The Legislature further finds that existing law does not expressly protect the right of students to hold a position on views regarding biological or chemical evolution. The Legislature further finds that the topic of evolution has generated intense controversy, lawsuits and threats of lawsuits, where some lower courts such as Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School Board, have created confusion about the rights of teachers and students to hold differing views about scientific controversies and express those views without fear of adverse employment or academic consequences. Finally, the Legislature finds that school districts and school administrators should not bear the primary burden of defending the academic freedom of teachers and students to discuss the topics of biological or chemical evolution. It is the intent of the Legislature that this act expressly protects those rights.

Section 3. Every K-12 public school teacher or teacher or instructor in any two-year or four-year public institution of higher education, or in any graduate or adult program thereof, in the State of ______________, shall have the affirmative right and freedom to present scientific information pertaining to the full range of scientific views regarding biological and chemical evolution.

Section 4. No K-12 public school teacher or teacher or instructor in any two-year or four-year public institution of higher education, or in any graduate or adult program thereof, in the State of ___________, shall be terminated, disciplined, denied tenure, or otherwise discriminated against for presenting scientific information pertaining to the full range of scientific views regarding biological or chemical evolution in any curricula or course of learning, provided, with respect to K-12 teachers, the [insert official title of state’s science standards] has been taught as appropriate to the grade and subject assignment.

Section 5. Students may be evaluated based upon their understanding of course materials, but no student in any public school or institution of higher education shall be penalized in any way because he or she may subscribe to a particular position on any views regarding biological or chemical evolution.

Section 6. The rights and privileges contained in this act apply when the subject of biological or chemical origins is part of the curriculum. Nothing in this act shall be construed as requiring or encouraging any change in the state curriculum standards in K-12 public schools, nor shall any provision of this act be construed as prescribing the curricular content of any course in any two-year or four-year public institution of higher education in the state.

Section 7. Nothing in this act shall be construed as promoting any religious doctrine, promoting discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promoting discrimination for or against religion or non-religion.

Section 8. This act shall become effective on the first day of the third month following its passage and approval by the Governor, or its otherwise becoming law.

"Academic Freedom" Bills by State & Year

The Evolutionary Wars in Ohio

by Trisha Gura

Reprinted from the HHMI Bulletin, September 2002, pages 24-27. ©2002 Howard Hughes Medical Institute

For a PDF version, click here.

The Ohio Board of Education had a big problem. Two years ago, a Fordham Foundation study had slapped the state with an "F" for the way it taught evolution in the classroom. In fact, state standards lacked any mention of evolution in the science lessons for Ohio students, kindergarten through high school. Embarrassed, the state legislature mandated that the board revise the standards by the end of 2002.

In the course of adopting new standards, however, the board ran smack into the latest anti-evolution concept: intelligent design. The philosophy purports that life is too complex to have evolved by chance and therefore must have been the product of a divine (in the supernatural sense—perhaps a biblical God or an extraterrestrial force) designer.

In a push that sparked a fierce row between parents, teachers, legislators and board members, proponents of intelligent design were trying to insert the idea into the Ohio science standards as an "alternative to evolution." Advocates of intelligent design, led by the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank and activist organization in Seattle, insist that their concept is a valid scientific theory and that it deserves a place in the K-12 curricula alongside evolution.

At Cloverleaf Middle School, a public school in Westfield Center, Ohio, Kira Nance and her classmates have not been taught about evolution. The 14-year-old recalls her 8th-grade science teacher talking last fall about adding discussions of evolution to the curriculum. "Nobody really cared," says Nance. "Only a few students had an opinion, and they didn't voice it clearly." She says she believes in God and doesn't believe in evolution, but she wouldn't mind learning about it. She'd like to hear about intelligent design as well. "Hearing both sides would be a good thing."

Adults in Ohio appear to agree. According to a public poll commissioned by The Cleveland Plain Dealer and published in June, 59 percent of respondents favored including both evolution and intelligent design in the state's academic standards for science; only 8 percent thought science curricula should be limited to evolution alone.

"What's at stake," says Kenneth R. Miller, professor of biology at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, "is that a major, highly industrialized U.S. state is on the verge of writing intelligent design into its school curriculum, with the complete absence of any scientific support."

Ohio's education standards are expected to be finalized by December. According to Board of Education member Marlene Jennings, "some sort of compromise" is expected, but details are unclear.

Sound familiar? It should. The Kansas Board of Education went through a similar battle four years ago when evolution faced off against creation science, which focuses on biblical origins of the universe and looks for "evidence" against evolution. In August 1999, the board voted to drop evolution entirely from its newly revised standards. Amid the public outcry, one year later, voters ousted the two anti-evolutionist board members; a third member resigned. The new board reinserted evolution into the state science standards.

In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, scientists have been enraged over reports that Emmanuel College in Gateshead—a prestigious Christian-run college near Newcastle upon Tyne that has been praised by Prime Minister Tony Blair—is teaching creationist ideas as science. At the same time, Japanese education officials are cutting evolution from the middle school curriculum and making it optional for high school students. The move is meant to ease pressure on the country's children, according to a report in the April 25, 2002, Nature, but scientists are concerned about the impact on students' understanding of biology.

PLANTING THE SEED

The hullabaloo about intelligent design, says evolutionary biologist David R. Lindberg, director of the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, "is all really a smokescreen to get back to basic 'creation science'."

This self-styled science sprung from creationism, which became a legal reality when John T. Scopes was convicted by the state of Tennessee in 1925 of the crime of teaching evolution. It wasn't until 1957 that evolution made a classroom comeback, spurred in large part by Sputnik, which generated a competitive zest in Americans to be scientifically literate. Law solidified the turnaround in 1968 when, in Epperson v. Arkansas, the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot ban the teaching of evolution on religious grounds.

In response, creationists reframed their doctrine as creation science. During the 1970s, 22 states proposed that creation science and evolution be given equal time in classrooms, and two states—Arkansas and Louisiana—adopted the idea. Then in 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court struck anti-evolutionists down again, reaffirming a federal district court decision that creation science was, in fact, religion and therefore couldn't be taught in schools.

While the decision appeared to be a victory for science, Justice Antonin Scalia left a loophole. Teachers could still teach "evidence against evolution," he wrote. That tiny phrase, part of a larger opinion, became a seed that anti-evolutionists readily planted. They scoured the scientific literature and attended scientific meetings, with the purpose of finding and pointing out evolutionary "controversy," as if the practice of science proceeds any other way.

Scientists do of course disagree on some of the specifics of evolution. For example, they argue about the exact positions that whales and hippos occupy on the tree of life and about the exact sequence of genetic changes that cause tumor cells to develop resistance to chemotherapy. Darwin's theory hasn't explained all these details—at least not yet, say scientists. But the devil is in the details.

Meanwhile, anti-evolutionists claim that these disagreements cast doubt on whether evolution ever happened at all—"a completely willful misinterpretation of the level of disagreement between scientists," says Jack W. Szostak, HHMI investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who studies the principles of Darwinian evolution on populations of DNA molecules in the laboratory.

In some communities, these "misinterpretations" have had an impact. In 1996, biology textbooks in Alabama began carrying evolution disclaimers. The practice still continues today. That same year, Governor Fob James used state discretionary funds to send every high school teacher in Alabama a copy of the anti-evolutionary book Darwin on Trial, by Phillip E. Johnson, a now-retired criminal-law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The author invokes the legal argument of "reasonable doubt": Because you can't prove that evolution created human beings, he maintains, you must allow for alternatives to it.

"Evolution is not ad hoc theorizing," counters molecular biologist Sean B. Carroll. "Evolution is a large body of scientific fact that is supported by a large body of theory," says the HHMI investigator at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Medical experience with antibiotic resistance, fossil evidence and comparative studies with animals all bolster the case for evolution.

THE EVOLUTION OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN

The intelligent-design concept stems from the work of English theologian William Paley, who in 1802 developed the idea in his book Natural Theology. He compared particular biological structures, such as the eye, to a watch. Just as this timepiece does not self-assemble, Paley wrote, the intricate designs of living things implicitly argue for the hand of a "watchmaker."

In 1989, Percival Davis at the Hillsborough Community College in Tampa and Dean Kenyon at San Francisco State University resurrected the 200-year-old watchmaker argument. In their book Of Pandas and People, they maintain that classic Darwinism—which states that organisms evolve over long periods of time as a result of random change and mutation—cannot explain the structural complexity of life. Therefore, they conclude, life had to be created by an intelligent designer.

By the mid-1990s, the "scientific" component of intelligent design began to form. In 1996, for example, Michael J. Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, laid out his theory of "irreducible complexity." In his book Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Behe argues that systems like the bacterial flagellum—a whip-like appendage that propels the creature through biological fluids—has several parts that are necessary for its function. In the absence of any of those parts, the flagellum doesn't work. If evolution moves stepwise from first conception to today's version, intermediate forms should be able to function. Because they don't, Behe argues, the fully made structure must be designed.

Not surprisingly, the intelligent-design concept has met with criticisms—the main one being, according to molecular geneticist Bruce T. Lahn, that "there is no evidence for it." Lahn, an HHMI investigator at The University of Chicago, says that intelligent design, by scientific definition, cannot be a theory because it cannot be tested, only believed. What's more, he notes, no account of intelligent design or its conceptual siblings has ever appeared in any peer-reviewed scientific journal.

The Discovery Institute's Stephen C. Meyer says that intelligent design proponents haven't published articles in peer-reviewed journals because the scientific community is "biased" against intelligent design and therefore won't accept it. "They are excluding publication of a viable hypothesis," Meyer asserts.

Amid the debates, intelligent-design proponents are making their mark, as evidenced by that Cleveland Plain Dealer poll. With its convoluted arguments and lack of evidence, how is intelligent design gaining such support?

"We're dealing with emotional issues," says board member Joseph D. Roman, who cochairs the subcommittee that will decide the issue in Ohio. There may be other factors as well, including the way intelligent design is being presented. One argument states that evolution is just a theory, intelligent design is also a theory; therefore, the two deserve the same time in classrooms. They "are exploiting Americans' sense of fairness," says Wisconsin's Carroll.

The anti-evolution approach is being considered on the local level simply because that is where many educational decisions are made in this country, notes Lindberg. Board members are accountable to state legislators as well as to the community members who elect them. This produces incredible disparities between science curricula district-by-district and even school-by-school.

If intelligent design or some other "alternative" to evolution makes it into the state curriculum standards, it will likely dictate the content of textbooks, statewide proficiency exams and teacher certification. "Teachers are very much aware that they have to teach to tests," says molecular biologist Joan L. Slonczewski at Kenyon College in Ohio, who runs an HHMI-funded outreach program for science teachers. They must also satisfy parents. If parents object to the teaching of evolution, for example, and teachers refuse to comply, their jobs are on the line, says Slonczewski. To skirt the problem, many teachers avoid evolution altogether—or wait until the last week of school, when no one has time to voice an objection.

This flight (as opposed to fight) approach is having an effect. Slonczewski and Carroll, both of whom teach biology, say that some students are arriving at college knowing little or nothing about evolution.

TREADING LIGHTLY

Teachers aren't the only ones grappling with wide-ranging views about evolution. Similar disparity is playing out in zoos, museums and community programs, partly as a result of teacher actions (or inactions).

"I have been here for over eight years and I have not had one teacher ask us to cover evolution," says Brad Batdorf, curator of education at the Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita, Kansas. On the other hand, he reports, some teachers, parents and other visitors have asked not to be taught anything about evolution.

That puts Batdorf in a quandary. The zoo is receiving an HHMI grant to develop activities that boost scientific literacy. At the same time, community groups also provide funding to the zoo. His strategy is to tread lightly around the issue. Descriptive signs at the zoo often have subtle references to evolution, but Batdorf says he stresses respect for the creatures and their ecological relationships, rather than how they came to be.

Slonczewski is also trying to be sensitive. She is structuring her outreach to include evolution not as a separate lecture for teachers but intricately woven into all of biology as an explanation for change—in everything from viral mutation to wing development in fruit flies to immunity in human beings.

Lindberg at the Museum of Paleontology, who last July received a grant from HHMI to develop an interactive Web site on evolution (see sidebar), is promoting evolution with no apologies. "K-12 science classes should reflect what scientists call science," he explains.

Carroll agrees: "Love your religion, but don't try to wrap it up and tell me it's science. For the United States to remain a technological leader, we have to understand what science is—and teach it."

Ohio Scientists' Intelligent Design Poll

A poll of scientists' opinions on "intelligent design", commissioned by the University of Cincinnati and Case Western Reserve University, was presented in October, 2002. Here are the results:

Internet Public Opinion Laboratory
Department of Political Science University of Cincinnati

By: George Bishop, PhD Professor of Political Science Director Internet Public Opinion Laboratory Department of Political Science University of Cincinnati (513) 556-5078

Majority of Ohio Science Professors and Public Agree: “Intelligent Design” Mostly about Religion

“Intelligent Design”: Is it science or religion? The idea that an intelligent designer or a supernatural force created the universe and guided the development of human life has become the center of a heated controversy among Ohio educators. As the State Board of Education in Ohio wrestles with the policy issue of whether to teach “intelligent design” in public school science classes the latest statewide surveys of Ohio citizens and science professors in Ohio indicate that the concept of “intelligent design” is viewed by the vast majority of scientists and a clear majority of the public as basically a religious explanation of human origins.

These findings are based on: (1) an Internet survey of 460 science professors teaching at both public and private four-year colleges and universities in Ohio, sponsored by the Biology Department at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and conducted by the Internet Public Opinion Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati between September 26 and October 9, 2002; and (2) an Ohio Poll of 900 adults conducted by the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Cincinnati between September 4 and September 15, 2002.

Public Ignorance and Public Opinion

Despite significant coverage and editorials on the ID issue in Ohio’s news media in recent months, most Ohioans still know little or nothing about “intelligent design”. In the most recent Ohio Poll, conducted between September 4 and September 15, 2002, respondents were first asked: “ Do you happen to know anything about the concept of ‘intelligent design’?” The vast majority (84%) said “no”; 14% said “yes”; and the rest (2%) were “not sure”. Not surprisingly, college graduates were significantly more likely to say they knew something about it (28% of them) than were high school graduates (7%) or those with less than a high school education (6%).

Whether they knew anything about it or not, respondents were then given a brief description of the concept of intelligent design identical to the one used in a statewide Cleveland Plain Dealer Poll conducted this past spring:

“The concept of ‘intelligent design’ is that life is too complex to have developed by chance and that a purposeful being or force is guiding the development of life.”

“What is your opinion—do you think the concept of ‘intelligent design’ is a valid scientific account of how human life developed, or is it basically a religious explanation of the development of human life?”

Given this description, the majority of Ohioans (54%) viewed it as basically a religious explanation of human origins; less than 1 out of 4 (23%) thought it was a valid scientific account; 7% believed it was a mix of religious and scientific accounts; and 17% said they were “not sure.”

Views of Ohio Science Professors

Not unexpectedly, those who have the academic training and expertise (PhDs) to teach the basic natural and physical sciences in Ohio’s public and private universities regarded the concept of “intelligent design” as an unscientific notion. More than 9 out of 10 (91%) thought it was primarily a religious view. The vast majority (93%) of science professors said they were not aware of “any scientifically valid evidence or an alternate scientific theory that challenges the fundamental principles of the theory of evolution.” Only a tiny percentage of them (7%) thought that “intelligent design” was either “strongly” or “partly” supported by scientific evidence. Most (90%) believed there was no scientific evidence at all for the idea of “intelligent design”. And 3% were “not sure”. Furthermore, when asked if they ever used the ID concept in their research, virtually all of them (97%) said “no.”

Ohio’s science professors felt just as strongly about what should or should not be taught about the controversy in Ohio schools. Most all of them (92%) thought “ Ohio high school students should be tested on their understanding of the basic principles of the theory of evolution in order to graduate.” When asked, however, if such students should also be tested on their knowledge of the concept of “Intelligent Design” in order to graduate, most of them (90%) said “no.”

Perhaps the most surprising finding in the survey is that the great majority of Ohio science professors (84%) thought that accepting the theory of evolution was “consistent with believing in God.” Only 9% thought it was not; and the rest (7%) just weren’t sure. Most critics of teaching evolution in Ohio’s schools commonly assume it’s basically inconsistent with believing in God. Evidently, most of Ohio’s science professors—those who understand the theory of evolution best—do not share that widespread view.

Further statistical analysis of the data from the survey of Ohio science professors showed only minor differences in responses across scientific fields such as astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and other natural sciences.

Survey Methodology

Ohio Poll

The sampling error for the Ohio Poll of 900 adults is +/-3.3%. A description of the methodology for the Ohio Poll conducted from September 4 through 15 can be found at the following website:
IPR

Internet Public Opinion Laboratory (IPOL): Methodology

An e-mail invitation to participate in this web-based survey was sent to all professors (approximately 1500) currently on the faculty in four-year, public and private colleges and universities in Ohio for the following fields: Astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and other natural sciences. Their e-mail addresses were identified through a combination of listings on the various college and departmental websites, supplemented by further examination of other university information sources. Four hundred and sixty (460) professors responded to the e-mail invitation, a response rate of 31%.

The sampling error for a sample size of 460 cases is approximately plus or minus 4.5%. As in any other survey, in addition to sampling error, other sources of error such as non-response and the wording and context of the questions asked can affect the results and conclusions of the study.

The results reported here for the Internet survey of Ohio science professors were based on the following questions (Note: Percentages Rounded)

1. Are you aware of any scientifically valid evidence or an alternate scientific theory that challenges the fundamental principles of the theory of evolution?

1. Yes	-- 4%
2. No	-- 93
3. Not Sure	-- 2

2. The concept of “Intelligent Design” is that life and the universe are too complex to have developed without the intervention of a purposeful being or force to guide the development of life. Which of the following do you think best describes “Intelligent Design”?

1. It is strongly supported by scientific evidence	-- 2%
2. It is partly supported by scientific evidence	-- 5
3. It is not supported at all by scientific evidence
-- 90
4. Not Sure	-- 3

3. Do you think the concept of “Intelligent Design” is primarily a religious view?”

1. Yes	-- 91%
2. No	-- 5
3. Not Sure	-- 4

4. Do you think Ohio high school students should be tested on their understanding of the basic principles of the theory of evolution in order to graduate?

1. Yes	-- 92%
2. No	-- 4
3. Not Sure	-- 3

5. Do you think Ohio high school students should be tested on their knowledge of the concept of “Intelligent Design” in order to graduate?

1. Yes	-- 6%
2. No	-- 90
3. Not Sure	-- 4

6. Do you use the concept of Intelligent Design in your research?

1. Yes	-- 2%
2. No	-- 97
Not Sure	-- 1

7. Do you think accepting the theory of evolution is consistent with believing in God?

a. Yes	-- 84%
b. No	-- 9
c. Not Sure	-- 7

Analysis of the Discovery Institute's Bibliography

2002 Ohio Board of Education Science Standards

by NCSE Staff

Executive Summary

On March 11, 2002, the Discovery Institute — a Seattle, Washington, organization that seeks to promote "intelligent design" — submitted its "Bibliography of Supplementary Resources for Ohio Science Education" to the Ohio Board of Education. Although the publications listed in the Bibliography are valuable contributions to the scientific literature, the Bibliography itself is misleading. The staff of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) analyzed the Bibliography with the assistance of many of the authors of the publications listed in it, finding (1) that the Discovery Institute misrepresents the significance of the publications in the Bibliography, (2) that the Discovery Institute's descriptions of the publications in the Bibliography are frequently inaccurate and tendentious, and (3) that the Discovery Institute fails to present any principled basis for the selection of the publications or any pedagogical rationale for their use in the classroom. NCSE concludes that the only purpose of the Discovery Institute's Bibliography is to mislead members of the Board and of the public about the status of evolution.

1. Background

The Discovery Institute seeks to promote "intelligent design," defined on one of its web sites as follows:

"Intelligent design" refers to a scientific research program as well as a community of scientists, philosophers and other scholars who seek evidence of design in nature. Through the study and analysis of a system's components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof. … In nature, design theorists cite information[-]rich systems like the genetic code, irreducibly complex systems like the bacterial flagellum, and the fine-tuning of the laws of physics as evidence of intelligent design.[1]

And it is "intelligent design" that creationist organizations such as Science Excellence for All Ohioans (SEAO) are lobbying the Board to add to the proposed state science standards, over the protests of the 45-member writing committee.[2]

As Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University reported at the March 11 panel discussion in Columbus, there is no published work in the peer-reviewed scientific literature supporting intelligent design.[3] For a scientific publication to be peer-reviewed is for it to be assessed for its scientific merit by experts having knowledge of the research area equal to that of the author. Peer review is essentially a form of quality control in the modern scientific world. The fact that there is no published work supporting intelligent design in the peer-reviewed scientific literature strongly suggests that the Discovery Institute's claim that "intelligent design" is a scientific theory is false.

But what of the "Bibliography of Supplementary Resources for Ohio Science Education" provided by Jonathan Wells and Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute to the Ohio Board of Education?[4] The 44 publications listed in the Bibliography are indeed legitimate and valuable contributions to the scientific literature. But what is the point of the Bibliography itself?

As it was originally furnished to the Board, the Bibliography was prefaced with the following explanation:

The publications represent dissenting viewpoints that challenge one or another aspect of neo-Darwinism (the prevailing theory of evolution taught in biology textbooks), discuss problems that evolutionary theory faces, or suggest important new lines of evidence that biology must consider when explaining origins.

Because the representatives of the Discovery Institute who appeared at the March 11 meeting — Jonathan Wells and Stephen C. Meyer — were widely touted as promoters of "intelligent design," it would have been reasonable for the Board to assume that among the "dissenting viewpoints" included in the Bibliography was "intelligent design." But it isn't.

NCSE sent a questionnaire to the authors of every publication listed in the Bibliography, asking them whether they considered their work to provide scientific evidence for "intelligent design."[5] None of the 26 respondents (representing 34 of the 44 publications in the Bibliography) did; many were indignant at the suggestion. For example, Douglas H. Erwin (author of [8]), answered, "Of course not — [intelligent design] is a non sequitur, nothing but a fundamentally flawed attempt to promote creationism under a different guise. Nothing in this paper or any of my other work provides the slightest scintilla of support for 'intelligent design'. To argue that it does requires a deliberate and pernicious misreading of the papers."[6]Several respondents even went so far as to say that their work constituted scientific evidence against "intelligent design."

Similarly, on the basis of the explanation prefaced to the Bibliography, it would have been reasonable for the Board to assume that the publications included in the Bibliography challenged evolution. But they don't. None of the respondents to NCSE's questionnaire considered their work to provide scientific evidence against evolution. David M. Williams (coauthor of [18]), for example, simply remarked, "No, certainly not. How could it possibly?" Almost all of the respondents emphasized that their work provided scientific evidence for evolution. Kenneth Weiss (author of [21]), for example, remarked, "I state clearly that evolution is beyond dispute based on all the evidence I am aware of."

Perhaps in reaction to NCSE's questionnaire, the Discovery Institute added a disclaimer to its Bibliography when it posted it on its web site:

The publications are not presented either as support for the theory of intelligent design, or as indicating that the authors cited doubt evolution. Discovery Institute has made every effort to ensure that the annotated summaries accurately reflect the central arguments of the publications.[7]

Shouldn't the Discovery Institute have issued such a disclaimer in the first place?

Moreover, in light of Stephen C. Meyer's declaration that the Bibliography contains publications "that raise significant challenges to key tenets of Darwinian evolution" — a declaration that significantly postdates the disclaimer — the sincerity of the disclaimer may be doubted.[8]

2. What is the real significance of the publications in the Bibliography?

Within the Bibliography, the publications are divided into three categories: Questions of Pattern, Questions of Process, and Questions about the Central Issue: the Origin and Nature of Biological Complexity. In each of these categories, there are two issues to address: what the significance of the publications really is, and what the Discovery Institute would have people believe it is. The two are rarely the same.

a. Questions of Pattern

Phylogenetics is the field of biology that attempts to determine the genealogical relationships among organisms (phylogenies). Molecular phylogenetics is based on data from genes and other macromolecules (taken from mitochondria, ribosomes, or nuclear DNA). When molecular phylogenetics was first introduced, it was widely believed to be more reliable than morphological phylogenetics, which is based on body characteristics, but more recent research suggests that molecular phylogenetics is subject to difficulties of its own. What the publications cited in the Bibliography reflect is the current lively controversy in the scientific community about phylogenetic methodology and how to reconcile conflicts when the results of different methods disagree.

The Discovery Institute's selection of publications in the Questions of Pattern section is idiosyncratic. Over 1600 papers on molecular phylogeny have been published in the last ten years; why did the Discovery Institute select these particular 22? There is no unifying subject of the publications: they deal variously with mammals, insects, bacteria, and metazoans in general. And several of the publications are out of date; for example, Douglas H. Erwin (author of [8]) remarks, "Citing a paper from 1994 [i.e., [8]] is decidedly poor scholarship, however, given how fast this field has moved. The rapid advances in comparative developmental biology have rendered much of this pretty outdated. We now have a very well substantiated metazoan phylogeny, at least in general outline, allowing some of the tests suggested at the end of the cited passage. Moreover, comparative developmental studies have only served to emphasize the fundamental unity of bilaterian animals." There are also papers from 1993 and 1991, which are practically ancient by the standards of the fast-moving field of molecular phylogeny.

The only point of similarity of the publications in the Questions of Pattern section appears to be that there are passages in them that, if taken out of context or otherwise misrepresented, seem to express doubt about phylogeny in general. But for the Discovery Institute to insinuate that scientific debates about how to determine which organisms are related to which are debates about whether organisms are related is misleading. As Peter J. Lockhart (coauthor of [13]) carefully explains, in responding to the Discovery Institute's summary of his work:

I don't think it is a good representation of our work — our work does not present 'a classic challenge to evolutionary analysis'. In our paper we point out that technically it is a hard problem to reconstruct the phylogeny of corbiculate bees regardless of whether you use morphological or molecular data (the reason for this concerns the pattern of radiation — four different lineages diverged in a short period of time a long time ago — given this pattern it is not surprising that different data types might suggest different phylogenies). In our article we do not say that interpretation of the molecular data is right and that interpretation of the morphological data is wrong (or vice versa). Instead we make some suggestions which we believe will help resolve why the different data types suggest different conclusions — we suggest that the bee morphologists relook at the interpretation of some of their data and we also encourage the molecular biologists to determine some additional data which would help test their hypotheses — we suggest that if these things are done then there should be a resolution to the controversy over which phylogeny is correct. We do not doubt that there is a phylogeny — in contrast, the statement by the Discovery Institute suggests that the bee controversy is evidence for absence of phylogeny. No scientist involved in the corbiculate bee debate has ever suggested this to my knowledge.

Kenneth Weiss's article "We hold these truths to be self-evident" [21] is the odd article out in the section on Questions of Pattern. Weiss was not discussing phylogeny; the Discovery Institute apparently included it just in order to quote him as saying, "It is healthy to be skeptical even of truths we hold to be self-evident, and to ask: suppose it isn't true — what would follow? Do we need a theory of evolutionary biology?" Weiss told NCSE that "This is misrepresenting the fuller context. For example, the last question that is quoted was followed by my asking what would be the minimal essential elements of such a theory that biologists would insist on." And although the Discovery Institute parenthetically added, "Please note that in his footnotes, Weiss is highly skeptical of creationism, and endorses what he calls 'the fact' of evolution," Weiss responded, "The Discovery Institute does not give an honest sense of the clarity that I put in that disclaimer: 'Given the spate of recent anti-evolutionary books, I feel compelled to make the statement here that nothing in this column in any way questions the fact of evolution, nor in any way supports creationist accounts (one cannot call them "explanations") for the diversity of life.'"

b. Questions of Process

The bulk of the publications in the Questions of Process section of the Bibliography belong to the newly emerging field of evolutionary developmental biology ("evo-devo"), which has provided one of the most powerful models for explaining evolutionary novelty. As Corey S. Goodman and Bridget C. Coughlin write,

Once seen as distinct, yet complementary[,] disciplines, developmental biology and evolutionary studies have recently merged into an exciting and fruitful relationship. The official union occurred in 1999 when evolutionary developmental biology, or "evo-devo," was granted its own division in the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB). It was natural for evolutionary biologists and developmental biologists to find common ground. Evolutionary biologists seek to understand how organisms evolve and change their shape and form. The roots of these changes are found in the developmental mechanisms that control body shape and form. Developmental biologists try to understand how alterations in gene expression and function lead to changes in body shape and pattern. So although SICB only recently validated evo-devo as an independent research area, evo-devo really started over a decade ago when biologists began using an individual organism's developmental gene expression patterns to explain how groups of organisms evolved.[9]

The emergence of evo-devo is anything but a challenge to evolution.

As with the publications in the Question of Pattern section, the publications in the Questions of Process section seem to have been selected only because they provide passages that, if taken out of context or otherwise misrepresented, seem to express doubt about the neo-Darwinian synthesis or macroevolution in general.[10] What must be understood is that although these debates about the details of evo-devo and the mechanisms of macroevolution are legitimate, they in no way affect the presentation of evolution at the high school level, which is simply not presented in enough detail for these highly technical debates to be relevant.

And as with the publications in the Questions of Pattern section, the authors themselves reject the Discovery Institute's misinterpretation of their work. Thus, for example, Günther P. Wagner (coauthor of [31] and author of [32]), wrote:

In no way does my work represent an attack on the theory of descent with modification, i.e. the plain fact of evolution, or even the fundamental insights of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. It is intended as an attempt to extend the explanatory reach of Darwinian evolutionary thinking by eliminating some technical limitations that result from the mathematical language currently used to model evolutionary processes. All that work agrees with and is based on the fact that evolution proceeds by the spontaneous generation of genetic variation and the fixation of these variations by selection and/or drift. The points of my papers are narrow technical ones and in no way weaken the fundamental insights of Darwinian evolutionary thinking. They do, however, challenge some of the more speculative extensions of this theory, like the idea that everything is possible with more or less equal probability. But this does not affect the fundamentals of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution.

Scott F. Gilbert (coauthor of [25] and [27]) wrote: "My research on turtles and my research into evolutionary developmental biology is fully within Darwinian parameters. My gripe has been that neo-Darwinism has supposed that population genetics was the only genetics needed to explain Darwinian evolution. I claim that developmental genetics is also needed. So my research has been to include developmental genetics into the Darwinian mix." And Douglas L. Erwin (author of [24]) told NCSE, "While the article considers the relationship between micro- and macro- evolution, the Discovery Institute is inaccurate in saying that I am challenging the standard view of evolution. The treatment of macroevolution in that paper is an extension, but by no means a challenge. Further, although more work may be needed to fully understand macroevolutionary events, there is no evidence that requires, or even suggests, a role for so-called 'intelligent design'."

Although Eörs Szathmáry's article ([44]) was not included in the section on Questions of Process, his comments are relevant here. Answering the Discovery Institute's claim that the publications in the Bibliography "represent dissenting viewpoints that challenge one or another aspect of neo-Darwinism (the prevailing theory of evolution taught in biology textbooks)," Szathmáry replied, "This depends very much on how you define neo-Darwinism. First, like science in general, it is developing. Second, there are cutting-edge and pedestrian conceptualizations of neo-Darwinism. My coauthor on two books, John Maynard Smith, would be regarded by many as an arch neo-Darwinist. Yet, for those, The Major Transitions in Evolution [by Maynard Smith and Szathmáry] came as a bit of a shock... But that's only because of an outdated idea of how a neo-Darwinist should approach evolution..."[11]

c. Questions about the Central Issue: the Origin and Nature of Biological Complexity

According to the Discovery Institute, the publications in the Questions about the Central Issue section "concerns the origin of what makes organisms distinctively what they are: the source of the specified complexity of biological information." It is wholly unclear what the Discovery Institute intends here; "specified complexity" and "biological information" are not terms with a definite meaning within the scientific community.[12] They are, however, prominent terms in the philosophical and theological writings of Discovery Institute Senior Fellow William A. Dembski, author of Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), which may explain their appearance here.

The publications are a hodgepodge of work from various disciplines (biomimetics, artificial life and artificial intelligence, the origin of life, investigations into the minimal genome) with little in common — except, of course, that they contain passages that, if taken out of context or otherwise misrepresented, seem to express doubt about evolution. Again, the authors themselves reject the Discovery Institute's misinterpretation of their work. Philip Ball told NCSE that his paper on biomimetics [33] is in fact evidence for "the effectiveness of evolution in fine-tuning the properties and features of natural systems." Rodney Brooks (author of [34]) complained that "they have selectively quoted just parts of what I wrote in order to distort completely what I said in the article." Leslie E. Orgel (author of [43]) wrote,

The paper is intended to support a conventional Darwinian form of evolution based on reproduction, selection, and mutation of polymeric molecules and to argue against a different form of evolution based on self-organizing cycles of chemical reaction. Supporters of both sides of the argument take evolution for granted, as do all competent biologists, but they disagree about important details. … it would be appropriate to point out that all scientists carrying out experimental work on the origins of life believe that one form or another of Darwinism can adequately explain the origin of life on the earth without any recourse to "intelligent design."

3. Is the Bibliography reliable?

As the preceding discussion indicates, the Discovery Institute's view of the significance of the publications in its Bibliography was uniformly rejected by the authors themselves. But was the Discovery Institute able to summarize the arguments of the publications in its Bibliography correctly? No. More than half of the respondents to NCSE's questionnaire considered the summaries in the Bibliography to be inaccurate and tendentious. Here is a sampling of their responses.

Eugene V. Koonin (coauthor of [12]): "…the conclusion that this is 'a hypothesis quite unexpected on neo-Darwinian (common ancestry) assumptions' is (i) not taken from our paper and (ii) not at all compatible with the data or ideas presented in the paper."

David P. Mindell (coauthor of [14]): "The words enclosed in quotation marks are accurate. However, the quotes are entirely misinterpreted and taken out of context. This is just as the scientific community, and at least some of the public, has come to expect from the Discovery Institute."

Paul Morris (coauthor of [15]): "The quotations are accurate; their assembly is a little misleading (the context of the first quote is a discussion of similar amino acids assembled by different synthesis pathways, where the evidence for homology lies in the synthesis pathways rather than in the amino acids, while the second quote is in the context of discussion of protein sequence similarity). The implications, particularly that molecular data are unable to reconstruct the history of life, are complete distortions of what we said."

David M. Williams (coauthor of [18]): "The short answer to your question, 'Do you consider this accurate?' is no."

Michael K. Richardson (coauthor of [19]): "Partly accurate and partly ambiguous. The creationists have taken a very complicated argument and extracted from it the bits and pieces that fit their world view. In particular, I have some problems with the following statement: 'There is no single stage of embryogenesis in vertebrates where all forms are similar.' In fact, there are strong resemblances between vertebrate embryos at various times in development, but it is not possible to ascribe them to a single stage."

Douglas L. Erwin (author of [24]): "While the article considers the relationship between micro- and macro- evolution, the statement above is inaccurate in saying that I am challenging the standard view of evolution. The treatment of macro-evolution in that paper is an extension, but by no means a challenge."

David W. Deamer (author of [35]): "No! The misleading (and loaded) words, of course, are 'greater realism.' Those were supplied gratis by the Discovery Institute folks. The correct words would be 'increased understanding'. The main cultural gap separating thoughtful scientists from creationists and intelligent design adherents is that the life blood of science is to ask questions about the world around us, while the creationists seek a feeling of certainty that they have all the answers. Those answers, of course, are encapsulated in an unquestioning belief in religious doctrine (the creationists) or that the universe must have a greater purpose of some sort (intelligent design). Therefore whenever a scientist writes about questions to which we don't yet have answers, the creationists pounce on this 'confession' as proof of weakness, implying that they have all the answers."

Again, more than half of the Discovery Institute's summaries were rejected as inaccurate and tendentious by the authors themselves. So if the Discovery Institute were being graded on its ability to summarize these publications, it would flunk. Should the state of Ohio be guided in the development of its science standards by people who are apparently incapable of reliably and objectively summarizing the scientific literature?

4. What is the pedagogical value of the Bibliography?

The preceding sections have already amply demonstrated that the Discovery Institute's interpretation of the publications in the Bibliography is tendentious and that its understanding of the publications is unreliable. But what about the pedagogical value of the Bibliography?

According to the Bibliography, "The publications represent dissenting viewpoints that challenge one or another aspect of neo-Darwinism (the prevailing theory of evolution taught in biology textbooks), discuss problems that evolutionary theory faces, or suggest important new lines of evidence that biology must consider when explaining origins." It also states, "These 44 scientific publications represent important lines of evidence and puzzles that any theory of evolution must confront, and that science teachers and students should be allowed to discuss when studying evolution."

But who is the Discovery Institute to make these judgments? Does the staff of the Discovery Institute, to which the authorship of the Bibliography is credited, include any important scientific contributors to the topics discussed? No — significantly, the Bibliography contains no publications by anyone associated with the Discovery Institute. Does the Bibliography cite the experience of any working K–12 science teachers? No. Does it rely on the research of any specialists in developing science curricula? No. Is any indication given in the Bibliography that the Discovery Institute has actually examined the instructional materials in use in Ohio and ascertained their deficiencies? No. Are there any concrete suggestions in it for science teachers how to incorporate these publications in their lessons? No. There is merely the blanket, anonymous, unsubstantiated claim that these publications "represent important lines of evidence and puzzles that any theory of evolution must confront, and that science teachers and students should be allowed to discuss when studying evolution." The Board of Education should not accept the claim uncritically.[13]

NCSE's questionnaire also asked whether the authors considered their work appropriate for use in high-school biology classes. Some of the respondents simply did not know; others said that it was. But several explained that their publications would be inappropriate for use in high-school biology classes, for a variety of reasons.

First, despite the Discovery Institute's boast that "Over half of the papers listed below were published within the past 2–3 years, with the remainder published throughout the 1990s," several respondents noted that their work was already outdated. For example, David M. Williams (coauthor of [18]) wrote, "our review was written nearly 10 years ago and things have moved on since then. Many of the possible solutions to data incongruence we suggested then have now been acted upon and molecules and morphology agree in many more cases. In fact, many more examples using molecules and morphology together highlight and clarify topics relating directly to many evolutionary issues."

Second, many respondents remarked that their publications were intended for a specialist audience; for example, Keith Stewart Thomson (author of [30]) replied, "No, it is totally inappropriate, as it can only be judged in terms of a knowledge of the particular detailed subject matter. It is part of a sophisticated professional discusssion within a part of the subject of evolution, not a general exposition for general readers," and Kenneth Weiss (author of [21]) explained, "I was writing for a professional audience; to point out issues in evolutionary biology to high-school students would require fuller explanations of the underlying knowledge one needs before getting to the types of issues I was writing about."

Third, several respondents explained that their work is as yet too speculative to be included in high-school biology classes. Leslie E. Orgel (author of [43]), for example, remarked, "Like most researchers, I work at the frontiers of present-day knowledge. The misinterpretation of my work routinely promulgated by crypto-creationists is certainly not suitable for inclusion in high-school textbooks. I doubt that the time is ripe for a detailed and correct interpretation of my work at the high-school level." And Günther P. Wagner (coauthor of [31] and author of [32]) explains, "It is not settled enough to be an established part of scientific teaching. This is cutting-edge research and we cannot yet know whether it will stand up under the scrutiny of our colleagues. There is too much work to be done to determine whether our ideas and results turn out to be correct and useful for further research." Orgel's and Wagner's attitude instructively contrasts with that of the promoters of "intelligent design," who wish for their views to be taught at the high-school level before they have been accepted by the scientific community.

NCSE also asked Brian J. Alters, an internationally recognized expert on science education who holds appointments at Harvard University and McGill University, where he is the Director of the Evolution Education Research Centre, to comment on the pedagogical value of the Bibliography. Alters responded,

When high school students read such relatively complex discussions written for scientists, they often believe that the authors are contending that evolution is a theory in crisis. But when such articles are read by those with the proper university training in science, those readers do not conclude that the authors are contending that evolution is a theory in crisis. This difference is very telling and probably explains why the Discovery Institute selected these particular papers. After all, the Institute gives no rationale for the selection. Of all the colleagues I know in North America, none of those university science educators with expertise in training high school teachers would have selected these papers for high school students. So again, why were these particular papers selected? Not only is this selection of papers inappropriate for the high school level, it will likely engender numerous misconceptions among high school students about the science of evolution — something no science teacher would want.

So not only has the Discovery Institute failed to provide any pedagogical rationale for its Bibliography, it is extremely difficult to see that there is any conceivable pedagogical value to it.

5. Working in the quote mine

The tactic of abusing the primary scientific literature for the purpose of misleading the general public is not new to the anti-evolutionist movement. Writing in 1981, John R. Cole explained:

Creationists have developed a skill unique to their trade: that of misquotation and quotation out of context from the works of leading evolutionists. This tactic not only frustrates scientists but it misleads school board members, legislators, and the public. Whether such actions by creationists of selectively seeking out quotations or references in order to prove a preconceived case are willful distortion or the product of wishful thinking is irrelevant. Such acts misuse science and scientists in bogus appeals to authority.[14]

The practice is so frequent among creationists (as well as other practitioners of pseudoscience) that it receives a name: quote-mining. There are even books devoted to nothing but quote-mining.[15]

The Discovery Institute is accumulating quite a record of quote-mining of its own. Jonathan Wells's Icons of Evolution (Washington DC: Regnery, 2000) is essentially a compendium of quote-mining intended to discredit evolution in general; the reviewers for Nature, Science, and The Quarterly Review of Biology were unanimous in finding nothing of scientific or pedagogical value in it.[16] The Discovery Institute's Getting the Facts Straight: A Viewer's Guide to PBS's Evolution (Seattle WA: Discovery Institute, 2001) is another exercise in quote-mining, intended to discredit the recent critically acclaimed PBS series on evolution in particular. Jerry Coyne, one of the scientists whose views were misrepresented by the Discovery Institute in Getting the Facts Straight, commented, "The Discovery Institute is up to its old tricks. Given the complete absence of evidence for their own theory of 'intelligent design' — a theory that has produced not a single scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal — they instead seek 'confirmation' of their views in controversies about evolutionary biology. Their strategy (transparent to all thinking people) is to sow doubt about the fact of evolution simply because scientists do not know every detail about how evolution occurred."[17]

In fact, the Discovery Institute's reputation for quote-mining is apparently spreading in the scientific community. In his response to NCSE's questionnaire, for example, David P. Mindell (coauthor of [14]), wrote, "I am appalled that the Discovery Institute would find anything in any of my work to support their unscientific views. I am of course familiar with them as a source of misinformation and misunderstanding about nature and propaganda for anti-science education legislation."

Because it cites 44 valuable, if abstruse, contributions to the scientific literature, the Bibliography may at first glance appear scientific itself. But make no mistake: quote-mining is neither scholarship nor research. It is propaganda. What John R. Cole wrote over twenty years ago is still true today: "Instead of searching for quotations, creationists should test their ideas against empirical evidence." Until the staff of the Discovery Institute follows his advice, the Board of Education should not take theirs.

Footnotes

1. From http://www.reviewevolution.com/whatIsIntelligentDesign.php, spotted March 28, 2002.

2. For SEAO's proposals, see http://www.seao.org, spotted March 28, 2002; for the writing committee's objections, see "Curriculum team backs evolution," Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 16, 2002.

3. See "State board studying theories on start of life," Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 12, 2002; see also George W. Gilchrist, "The elusive scientific basis of intelligent design theory," Reports of the National Center for Science Education May/June 1997, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 14-15.

4. The publications listed in the Bibliography - though not the Discovery Institute's summaries of them - are listed in Appendix A.

5. In the case of publications with multiple authors, NCSE sent a questionnaire to at least one of the authors.

6. Numbers in brackets refer to the numbered entries in the Discovery Institute's Bibliography. Quotations from the authors of the publications are reproduced, with permission, from their responses to NCSE's questionnaire. The questionnaire itself is reproduced in Appendix B. NCSE will send a complete compilation of responses to the questionnaire to state educational officials and members of the press upon request.

7. From http://www.discovery.org/viewDB/index.php3?command=view&id=1127&program=CRSC%20Responses, emphasis in original, spotted March 28, 2002.

8. Stephen C. Meyer, "Teach the controversy on origins," Cincinnati Enquirer, March 30, 2002.

9. Corey S. Goodman and Bridget C. Coughlin, "The evolution of evo-devo biology," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 2000, vol. 97, issue 9, pp. 4424-4425.

10. The paper of Michael Richardson et al. [19] should be here rather than in the Questions of Pattern section.

11. Szathmáry's name is consistently misspelled in the Bibliography as Szarthmáry.

12. This is not to deny that these terms occasionally appear in the biological literature. But they have no consistent, well-established, definite meaning there.

13. The Discovery Institute may wish to claim in response that its Senior Fellow Jonathan Wells's book Icons of Evolution (Washington DC: Regnery, 2000) constitutes a contribution to the literature on science education. But the reviews of Icons of Evolution in the scientific journals have been uniformly scathing. For example, Jerry A. Coyne's review in Nature - which, as the Bibliography proclaims, is "one of the top two science journals in the world" - concludes with the ironic comment that "Icons is exactly as even-handed and intellectually honest as one would expect from someone whose 'prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism'" (Nature 2001, vol. 410, pp. 745-746; the passage Coyne quotes is from Wells's essay "Darwinism: Why I went for a second Ph.D.", to be found on a Unification Church web site at http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/ Talks/Wells/DARWIN.htm, spotted March 28, 2002).

14. John R. Cole, "Misquoted scientists respond," Creation/Evolution 1981, vol. 6, pp. 34-44.

15. See, e.g., Henry M. Morris, That Their Words May Be Used Against Them (Green Forest AR: Master Books, 1998).

16. These reviews are Jerry Coyne, "Creationism by stealth," Nature 2001, vol. 410, pp. 745-746; Eugenie C. Scott, "Fatally flawed iconoclasm," Science 2001, vol. 292, pp. 2257-2258; Kevin Padian and Alan Gishlick, "The talented Mr. Wells," The Quarterly Review of Biology 2002; vol. 77.

17. For Coyne's remark, see "Misrepresented scientists speak out," Reports of the National Center for Science Education September-December 2001, vol. 21, nos. 5-6, pp. 14-16; see the same issue, pp. 5-21 passim, for evidence of the Discovery Institute's quote-mining and reactions by the scientists whose views were misrepresented.

Analysis of the Discovery Institute's Bibliography: Appendix

Appendix A

The publications listed in the Bibliography

Respondents to NCSE's questionnaire are in boldface.


1. Ying Cao, Axel Janke, Peter J. Waddell, Michael Westerman, Osamu Takenaka, Shigenori Murata, Norihiro Okada, Svante Pääbo, and Masami Hasegawa, "Conflict Among Individual Mitochondrial Proteins in Resolving the Phylogeny of Eutherian Orders," Journal of Molecular Evolution 47 (1998): 307–32

2. Simon Conway Morris, "Evolution: Bringing Molecules into the Fold," Cell 100 (2000): 1–11.

3. W. Ford Doolittle, "Tempo, Mode, the Progenote, and the Universal Root," in W. Fitch and F. Ayala, eds., Tempo and Mode in Evolution (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1995), pp. 3–24.

4. W. Ford Doolittle, "At the core of the Archaea," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 93 (1996): 8797–8799.

5. W. Ford Doolittle, "Uprooting the Tree of Life," Scientific American, February 2000, pp. 90–95.

6. W. Ford Doolittle, "Phylogenetic Classification and the Universal Tree," Science 284 (1999) :2124–2128.

7. W. Ford Doolittle, "The nature of the universal ancestor and the evolution of the proteome," Current Opinion in Structural Biology 10 (2000): 355–358.

8. Douglas H. Erwin, "Early introduction of major morphological innovations," Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 38 (1994): 281–294.

9. Trisha Gura, "Bones, molecules...or both?" Nature 406 (2000): 230–233.

10. Michael S. Y. Lee, "Molecular Clock Calibrations and Metazoan Divergence Dates," Journal of Molecular Evolution 49 (1999): 385–391.

11. Michael S. Y. Lee, "Molecular phylogenies become functional," Trends in Ecology and Evolution 14 (1999): 177–178.

12. Detlef D. Leipe, L. Aravind, and Eugene V. Koonin, "Did DNA replication evolve twice independently?" Nucleic Acids Research 27 (1999): 3389–3401.

13. Peter J. Lockhart and Sydney A. Cameron, "Trees for bees," Trends in Ecology and Evolution 16 (2001): 84–88.

14. David P. Mindell, Michael D. Sorenson, and Derek E. Dimcheff, "Multiple independent origins of mitochondrial gene order in birds," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 95 (1998): 10693–10697.

15. Paul Morris and Emily CoBabe, "Cuvier meets Watson and Crick: the utility of molecules as classical homologies," Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 44 (1991): 307–324.

16. Arcady R. Mushegian, James R. Garey, Jason Martin, and Leo X. Liu, "Large–Scale Taxonomic Profiling of Eukaryotic Model Organisms: A Comparison of Orthologous Proteins Encoded by the Human, Fly, Nematode, and Yeast Genomes," Genome Research 8 (1998): 590–598.

17. Gavin J. P. Naylor and Wesley M. Brown, "Amphioxus Mitochondrial DNA, Chordate Phylogeny, and the Limits of Inference Based on Comparisons of Sequences," Systematic Biology 47 (1998): 61–76.

18. Colin Patterson, David M. Williams, and Christopher J. Humphries, "Congruence Between Molecular and Morphological Phylogenies," Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 24 (1993): 153–188.

19. Michael K. Richardson et al., "There is no highly conserved stage in the vertebrates: implications for current theories of evolution and development," Anatomy and Embryology 196 (1997): 91–106.

20. Kensal E. van Holde, "Respiratory proteins of invertebrates: Structure, function and evolution," Zoology: Analysis of Complex Systems 100 (1998): 287–297.

21. Kenneth Weiss, "We Hold These Truths to Be Self–Evident," Evolutionary Anthropology 10 (2001): 199–203.

22. Carl Woese, "The universal ancestor," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 95 (1998): 6854–6859.

23. Robert L. Carroll, "Towards a new evolutionary synthesis," Trends in Ecology and Evolution 15 (2000):27–32.

24. Douglas Erwin, "Macroevolution is more than repeated rounds of microevolution," Evolution & Development 2 (2000): 78–84.

25. Scott F. Gilbert, Grace A. Loredo, Alla Brukman, and Ann C. Burke, "Morphogenesis of the turtle shell: the development of a novel structure in tetrapod evolution," Evolution & Development 3 (2001): 47–58.

26. Olivier Rieppel, "Turtles as Hopeful Monsters," BioEssays 23 (2001): 987–991.

27. Scott F. Gilbert, John M. Opitz, and Rudolf A. Raff, "Resynthesizing Evolutionary and Developmental Biology," Developmental Biology 173 (1996): 357–372.

28. George L. Gabor Miklos, "Emergence of organizational complexities during metazoan evolution: perspectives from molecular biology, palaeontology and neo–Darwinism," Mem. Ass. Australas. Palaeontols. 15 (1993): 7–41.

29. Neil H. Shubin and Charles R. Marshall, "Fossils, genes, and the origin of novelty," in Deep Time (2000, The Paleontological Society), pp. 324–340.

30. Keith Stewart Thomson, "Macroevolution: The Morphological Problem," American Zoologist 32 (1992): 106–112.

31. Bärbel M. R. Stadler, Peter F. Stadler, Günther P. Wagner, and Walter Fontana, "The Topology of the Possible: Formal Spaces Underlying Patterns of Evolutionary Change," Journal of Theoretical Biology 213 (2001): 241–274.

32. Günther P. Wagner, "What is the Promise of Developmental Evolution? Part II: A Causal Explanation of Evolutionary Innovations May Be Impossible," Journal of Experimental Zoology (Mol Dev Evol) 291 (2001): 305–309.

33. Philip Ball, "Life's lessons in design," Nature 409 (2001): 413–416.

34. Rodney Brooks, "The relationship between matter and life," Nature 409 (2001): 409–411.

35. David W. Deamer, "The First Living Systems: a Bioenergetic Perspective," Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews 61 (1997): 239–261.

36. Michael J. Katz, Templets and the explanation of complex patterns, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

37. Claire M. Fraser et al., "The Minimal Gene Complement of Mycoplasma genitalium," Science 270 (1995): 397–403.

38. Clyde A. Hutchison et al., "Global Transposon Mutagenesis and a Minimal Mycoplasma Genome," Science 286 (1999): 2165–2169.

39. Eugene V. Koonin, "How Many Genes Can Make a Cell: The Minimal–Gene–Set Concept," Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 1 (2000): 99–116.

40. Jack Maniloff, "The minimal cell genome: 'On being the right size,'" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 93 (1996): 1004–1006.

41. Arcady R. Mushegian and Eugene V. Koonin, "A minimal gene set for cellular life derived by comparison of complete bacterial genomes," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 93 (1996): 10268–10273.

42. Scott N. Peterson and Claire M. Fraser, "The complexity of simplicity," Genome Biology 2 (2001): 1–7.

43. Leslie E. Orgel, "Self–organizing biochemical cycles," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97 (2000): 12503–12507.

44. Eörs Szathmáry, "The evolution of replicators," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 335 (2000): 1669–1676.

Text in [brackets] is explanatory and was not part of the questionnaire.



Dear [addressee],

I'm writing from the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that works to defend the teaching of evolution in the public schools. We are an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

An article [or "a book" or "several articles" as appropriate] written [or "co-authored" as appropriate] by you — [citation of publication or publications] — has [or "have" as appropriate] been cited in a "Bibliography of Supplementary Resources for Ohio Science Instruction" prepared by the staff of the Discovery Institute (DI), a Seattle-based public policy organization. According to the DI, the publications cited in this bibliography

represent dissenting viewpoints that challenge one or another aspect of neo-Darwinism (the prevailing theory of evolution taught in biology textbooks), discuss problems that evolutionary theory faces, or suggest important new lines of evidence that biology must consider when explaining origins.

The DI prepared the bibliography to give to the Ohio Board of Education, which is presently being lobbied by several organizations either to weaken the newly-proposed state science standards' coverage of evolution or to include material on "alternative theories" in their coverage of evolution. The DI, for its part, is the institutional home of the so-called intelligent design movement, spearheaded by Phillip Johnson (author of Darwin on Trial) and having William Dembski (author of Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology), Michael Behe (author of Darwin's Black Box), and Jonathan Wells (author of Icons of Evolution) among its Senior Fellows.

We would appreciate your reviewing the information about your work included in the DI's bibliography and answering a few questions. Please feel free either to answer just yes or no, or to expand as you see fit.

1. The DI describes your work as follows:

[The Discovery Institute's summary of the publications, taken from the Bibliography.]

Do you consider this accurate?

2. The DI seeks to promote "intelligent design," which it describes on one of its web sites as follows:

"Intelligent design" refers to a scientific research program as well as a community of scientists, philosophers and other scholars who seek evidence of design in nature. Through the study and analysis of a system's components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof. … In nature, design theorists cite information rich systems like the genetic code, irreducibly complex systems like the bacterial flagellum, and the fine-tuning of the laws of physics as evidence of intelligent design. [See n. 1 above for the source of the description.]

Do you consider your work to provide scientific evidence for intelligent design?

3. Do you consider your work to provide scientific evidence against evolution?

[In questionnaires sent after the Bibliography appeared on the Discovery Institute's web site with the disclaimer, the sentence "Please note that (perhaps having gotten wind of our questionnaire) the DI now disclaims any intention to portray your work either as supportive of intelligent design or as providing evidence against evolution: see http://www.discovery.org/viewDB/index.php3?command=view& id=1127&program=CRSC%20Responses." appeared here. The same information was sent separately to those respondents to whom questionnaires were sent before the Bibliography appeared on the web site.]

4. Do you consider your work to be appropriate for use (e.g., as a supplement to a textbook) in high school biology classes?

5. May we have your permission to publish or otherwise disseminate your responses to this questionnaire?

Thanks very much for your time. We would appreciate hearing from you as soon as possible. If you have any questions about NCSE or this questionnaire, please feel free to get in touch with us.

Sincerely,