Dover, PA vs. Darwin update (II)

Proponents of Intelligent Design are always trying to draw a line between their hypothesis and the politically charged and discredited label, 'creationism.'

However, as I blogged about a week ago, two reporters agreed to testify to the veracity of stories they wrote saying that members of the Dover school board did in fact discuss 'creationism' during the meeting they held adding intelligent design to the biology curriculum. Now, there is more evidence that in fact intelligent design is still the same old creationism.

Yesterday, in the new Scopes monkey trial, Barbara Forrest, a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, testifed that a textbook that the Dover school board had approved for use in their biology class, titled 'of Pandas and People,' is in fact just an edit of a creationist textbook in which the term, 'creationism' has been written out and replaced with the term, 'intelligent design.'

Forrest reviewed drafts of the textbook as a witness for eight families who are trying to have the intelligent design concept removed from the Dover Area School District’s biology curriculum...Forrest outlined a chart of how many times the term “creation” was mentioned in the early drafts versus how many times the term “design” was mentioned in the published edition.

“They are virtually synonymous,” she said.

You'd think they would at least find a textbook from someone who started from scratch and wrote their own textbook.

Forrest also made the following observation about the general thrust of advocates for Intelligent Design:

Forrest also said that intelligent-design proponents have freely acknowledged that their cause is a religious one. She cited a document from the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that represents intelligent-design scholars, that says one of its goals is “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”

It is true that there is no evidence that the Dover school board had read this statement from the Discovery Institute, but lack of evidence of collusion isn't a defense against the charge that they were once again trying to put creationism into the Biology classroom.