Teach the Controversy

"Teach the Controversy" is a campaign, conducted by the Discovery Institute, to promote the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design, a variant of traditional creationism, while attempting to discredit the teaching of evolution in United States public high school science courses. The campaign claims that fairness and equal time requires educating students with a 'critical analysis of evolution' where "the full range of scientific views", evolution's "unresolved issues", and the "scientific weaknesses of evolutionary theory" will be presented and evaluated alongside intelligent design concepts like irreducible complexity presented as a scientific argument against evolution through oblique references to books by design proponents listed in the bibliography of the Institute-proposed "Critical Analysis of Evolution" lesson plans.

The intelligent design movement and the Teach the Controversy campaign are directed and supported largely by the Discovery Institute, a conservative Christianthink tank based in Seattle, Washington. The overall goals of the movement were stated as "to defeat scientific materialism" and "to replace [it] with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."

The scientific community and science education organizations have replied that there is no scientific controversy regarding the validity of evolution and that the controversy exists solely in terms of religion and politics. A federal court, along with the majority of scientific organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, say the Institute has manufactured the controversy they want to teach by promoting a "false perception" that evolution is "a theory in crisis" by falsely claiming it is the subject of wide controversy and debate within the scientific community.McGill University Professor Brian Alters, an expert in the creation-evolution controversy, is quoted in an article published by the NIH as stating that "99.9 percent of scientists accept evolution", whereas intelligent design has been rejected by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community. In the December 2005 ruling of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, Judge John E. Jones III concluded that intelligent design is not science and "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents". The Dover ruling also characterized "teaching the controversy" as part of a religious ploy.

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