Scientists Rally to Defend Evolution
A large gathering of scientists in St. Louis met this past weekend to rally in support of evolution as the intelligent design movement spreads across the nation.
A large gathering of scientists in St. Louis met this past weekend to rally in support of evolution as the intelligent design movement spreads across the nation.
Over the weekend many at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation’s largest gathering of scientists, defended evolution from what they called religious pressure in public schools, reported the Associated Press. Some 300 teachers from across the Midwest attended the conference and discussed the debate over evolution.
"We are not rolling over on this," Alan Leshner, chief executive of AAAS and executive publisher of the journal Science, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "It's too important to the nation and to the nation's children."
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Some of the teachers recall parents who insist on replacing high school biology texts with biblical creationism or intelligent design. Teachers also spoke about the pressure from the school board in science classroom.
Intelligent Design (ID) holds that certain aspects of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause or designer, not an undirected process such as natural selection – a key tenet of evolution theory. The theory does not claim that it can identify intelligent cause and does not rely on the Genesis account of creation.
Scientists announced on Sunday morning the formation of the Alliance for Science, a new organization of scientists, scientific groups and supporters with the goal to fight what they consider “an assault on science from religious conservatives,” according to AP.
Critics of the conference, afterwards, pointed out the one-sidedness of the debate.
"I don't understand how you can have a discussion of intelligent design if you only invite critics," said John West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that supports scholars researching intelligent design, according to AP. "That sounds like a monologue, not a discussion. I thought this was supposed to be science, not a pep rally."
Challenge to ‘Big Transformation’ Scientists
Less than two weeks prior to the gathering in St. Louis, the Christian law professor who helped start the intelligent design movement spoke at Campbell University’s Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law in Buies Creek, N.C.
Phillip E. Johnson, Professor Emeritus of law at the University of California at Berkeley, challenged scientists who claim that the evidence of evolution is everywhere – from fruit flies branching into new species to bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics – by insisting that scientists use only small scale variations within a species to explain evolution.
There are no fossil records for the big transformation, he said, according to Campbell University.
When explaining how he came to work on his book “Darwin on Trial,” Johnson said he discovered “a lot of loose ends in Darwin’s theory.”
“And I’m the kind of person who, when I see a loose end, I have this irresistible desire to pull on it,” he added.
The professor also said scientists could not dismiss the theory of an intelligence “because they investigate types of intelligence all of the time.”
