Via politicaltheory.info come this piece in Wired on the spread of creation “science”:
“‘[T]each the controversy’ has become the rallying cry of the national intelligent-design movement, and Ohio has become the leading battleground. Several months after the debate, the Ohio school board voted to change state science standards, mandating that biology teachers ‘critically analyze’ evolutionary theory. This fall, teachers will adjust their lesson plans and begin doing just that. In some cases, that means introducing the basic tenets of intelligent design. One of the state’s sample lessons looks as though it were lifted from an ID textbook. It’s the biggest victory so far for the Discovery Institute. ‘Our opponents would say that these are a bunch of know-nothing people on a state board,’ says Meyer. ‘We think it shows that our Darwinist colleagues have a real problem now.’
But scientists aren’t buying it. What Meyer calls ‘biology for the information age,’ they call creationism in a lab coat. ID’s core scientific principles – laid out in the mid-1990s by a biochemist and a mathematician – have been thoroughly dismissed on the grounds that Darwin’s theories can account for complexity, that ID relies on misunderstandings of evolution and flimsy probability calculations, and that it proposes no testable explanations.
As the Ohio debate revealed, however, the Discovery Institute doesn’t need the favor of the scientific establishment to prevail in the public arena.”