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Quotes from Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools — Eugenie Scott

born 1945 United States

← All quotes by Eugenie Scott

16 quotes

ID, like creation science, has goals that are primarily religious.

Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (2006)

By now it should be clear that “teaching the controversy” is not about the concern for good pedagogy but about advancing the antievolution agenda.

Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (2006)

Thus, it seems clear that intelligent design should be considered a religion for First Amendment purposes.

Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (2006)

To a biologist, the “it’s just microevolution” argument is painfully obtuse.

Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (2006)

To be scientific in our era is to search for solely natural explanations.

Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (2006)

To anyone familiar with the history of the antievolution movement, the attacks on evolution are perhaps the most obvious link between ID and earlier forms of creationism.

Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (2006)

The objections to evolution are not serious scientific arguments; they are superficially investigated and poorly reasoned talking points.

Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (2006)

Dogma doesn’t build better medical devices; good science does.

Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (2006)

The actual point of the peppered moth example—that it illustrates how camouflage, a common adaptation that appears designed, can evolve through a simple natural process—is always completely ignored.

Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (2006)

The critiques of evolution offered in such ID literature, however, is recognizable as a proper subset of the critiques offered by creation science literature, and they are no more valid.

Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (2006)

In special creationism, living things do not share common ancestry….common ancestry is the fundamental difference between special creationism and evolution.

Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (2006)

Significantly, the first publication to use the phrase intelligent design was not a theoretical paper but a high school textbook, Of Pandas and People! Ordinarily, one does the research first and then produces the textbook.

Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (2006)

Three of intelligent design’s most damaging constitutional problems: its singling out of evolution education for reform, its explicitly religious background, and it status as unsuccessful science.

Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (2006)

The first problem with this argument (“teach the controversy”) is that there is no scientific controversy about evolution, and the second problem is that intelligent design doesn’t qualify as a scientific theory.

Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (2006)

ID advocates complain that their views are rejected out of hand by the scientific establishment, yet they do not play by normal rules of presenting their views first through scientific conferences and then to peer-reviewed journals and then in textbooks.

Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (2006)

The proponents of the latest tactical assault on evolution simply invent a new spin to describe their position or find new legal attacks. The rhetoric is designed to cover up the unquestionably religious motivation they have.

Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools (2006)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Eugenie Scott (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.