Eugenie Carol Scott is an American physical anthropologist, a former university professor and educator who has been active in opposing the teaching of young Earth creationism and intelligent design in schools. She coined the term "Gish gallop" to describe a fallacious rhetorical technique which consists in overwhelming an interlocutor with as many individually weak arguments as possible, in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument.
Kenneth Raymond Miller is an American cell biologist, molecular biologist, and former biology professor. Miller's primary research focus is the structure and function of cell membranes, especially chloroplast thylakoid membranes. Miller is a co-author of a major introductory college and high school biology textbook published by Prentice Hall since 1990. Miller, who is Roman Catholic, is opposed to creationism, including the intelligent design (ID) movement. He has written three books on the subject: Finding Darwin's God, Only a Theory, and The Human Instinct. Miller has received the Laetare Medal at the University of Notre Dame. In 2017, he received the inaugural St. Albert Award from the Society of Catholic Scientists.
Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins is a controversial 1989 school-level supplementary textbook written by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, edited by Charles Thaxton and published by the Texas-based Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE). The textbook endorses the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design – the argument that life shows evidence of being designed by an intelligent agent which is not named specifically in the book, although proponents understand that it refers to the Christian God. The overview chapter was written by young Earth creationist Nancy Pearcey. They present various polemical arguments against the scientific theory of evolution. Before publication, early drafts used cognates of "creationist". After the Edwards v. Aguillard Supreme Court ruling that creationism is religion and not science, these were changed to refer to "intelligent design". The second edition published in 1993 included a contribution written by Michael Behe.
The "teach the controversy" campaign of the Discovery Institute seeks to promote the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design as part of its attempts to discredit the teaching of evolution in United States public high school science courses. Scientific organizations point out that the institute claims that there is a scientific controversy where in fact none exists.
Massimo Pigliucci is Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York, former co-host of the Rationally Speaking Podcast, and former editor in chief for the online magazine Scientia Salon. He is a critic of pseudoscience and creationism, and an advocate for secularism and science education.
McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, 529 F. Supp. 1255, was a 1981 legal case in the US state of Arkansas.
Clarence Cooper is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.
John F. Haught is an American theologian. He is a Distinguished Research Professor at Georgetown University. He specializes in Roman Catholic systematic theology, with a particular interest in issues pertaining to physical cosmology, evolutionary biology, geology, and Christianity.
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 was the first direct challenge brought in the United States federal courts testing a public school district policy that required the teaching of intelligent design (ID), ultimately found by the court to not be science. In October 2004, the Dover Area School District of York County, Pennsylvania, changed its biology teaching curriculum to require that intelligent design be presented as an alternative to evolution theory, and that Of Pandas and People, a textbook advocating intelligent design, was to be used as a reference book. The prominence of this textbook during the trial was such that the case is sometimes referred to as the Dover Panda Trial, a name which recalls the popular name of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, 80 years earlier. The plaintiffs successfully argued that intelligent design is a form of creationism, and that the school board policy violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The judge's decision sparked considerable response from both supporters and critics.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the creation–evolution controversy.
The intelligent design movement has conducted an organized campaign largely in the United States that promotes a pseudoscientific, neo-creationist religious agenda calling for broad social, academic and political changes centering on intelligent design.
Selman v. Cobb County School District, 449 F.3d 1320, was a United States court case in Cobb County, Georgia involving a sticker placed in public school biology textbooks. The sticker was a disclaimer stating that "Evolution is a theory, not a fact, concerning the origin of living things." The plaintiffs were parents of children in Cobb County schools who claimed the sticker violated both the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution and the separation of church and state clause in the Georgia State Constitution because its purpose and effect was to cast doubt on the scientific consensus regarding evolutionary theory in order to promote religious beliefs in the schools.
Brian J. Alters, Ph.D. is a professor in Chapman University's College of Educational Studies. He directs Chapman's Evolution Education Research Center, has taught science education at both Harvard and McGill Universities, and is regarded as a specialist in evolution education.
Steven Paul Novella is an American clinical neurologist and associate professor at Yale University School of Medicine. Novella is best known for his involvement in the skeptical movement as a host of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast and as the president of the New England Skeptical Society. He is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI).
This timeline of intelligent design outlines the major events in the development of intelligent design as presented and promoted by the intelligent design movement.
John Donald "Don" McLeroy is a dentist in Bryan, Texas, and a Republican former member of the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE). The SBOE establishes policy for the state public school system. McLeroy, who represented SBOE District 9, served on the board from 1998 until 2011. He was appointed in 2007 as SBOE chairman by Governor Rick Perry. The term ended in February 2009.
The Cobb County School District (CCSD) is the county government agency which operates public schools in Cobb County, Georgia, United States. The school district includes all of Cobb County except for the Marietta City Schools, though a number of schools in unincorporated parts of the county have Marietta addresses. It is the second-largest school system in Georgia and 25th largest in the United States. The district is the county's largest employer and one of the largest in the US. All Cobb County schools are accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), and the district is among the first to have earned district-wide accreditation. The superintendent of the school district is Chris Ragsdale.
In American schools, the Genesis creation narrative was generally taught as the origin of the universe and of life until Darwin's scientific theories became widely accepted. While there was some immediate backlash, organized opposition did not get underway until the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy broke out following World War I; several states passed laws banning the teaching of evolution while others debated them but did not pass them. The Scopes Trial was the result of a challenge to the law in Tennessee. Scopes lost his case, and further U.S. states passed laws banning the teaching of evolution.
Donald Ross Prothero is an American geologist, paleontologist, and author who specializes in mammalian paleontology and magnetostratigraphy, a technique to date rock layers of the Cenozoic era and its use to date the climate changes which occurred 30–40 million years ago. He is the author or editor of more than 30 books and over 300 scientific papers, including at least 5 geology textbooks.
Bertha Vazquez is director of education for the Center for Inquiry, director of the Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science (TIES), a program of the Center for Inquiry and a project of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, and a middle school science teacher at the George Washington Carver Middle School in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools. She also manages the educational aspects of Science Saves and Young Skeptics, two other CFI programs.
