School District Debates Adopting Darwin-Debunking Text
by Jim Brown
October 1, 2004
(AgapePress) - A Pennsylvania school district is embroiled in a controversy over a book that espouses the theory of intelligent design.
The Dover School Board could decide as early as Monday on whether to approve the use of the book Of Pandas and People: the Central Question of Biological Origins to supplement a ninth-grade biology textbook. Published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics in 1989, the book explores the controversy that has been growing around evolution and neo-Darwinian theory over the past several decades and proposes an alternative, which the authors termed "intelligent design."
Members of the science faculty and others who oppose the idea of using Of Pandas and People view it as an attempt to proselytize students who do not believe in God. However, the school district's curriculum chairman, Bill Buckingham, says adding the book will simply provide a balanced presentation that allows students not only to learn about Darwin's theories on the origins of species, but also to hear about the possibility that some of Darwin's suppositions -- including the idea that human beings evolved from apes -- were wrong.
Buckingham does not understand the fierce opposition to the supplement. "Why people are so afraid of this book I don't know," he says. "In the book, there's no mention of any particular god, the Bible's not mentioned, creation isn't mentioned. It just mentions that there is a possibility we were designed by something of intelligence."
Some science teachers in the Dover School District argue that adopting Of Pandas and People for classroom use would amount to an unconstitutional endorsement of religion by the public school district. However, Buckingham says the book would simply allow both sides of the evolution debate to be heard.
The district curriculum chairman notes, "A lot of top biologists in this country who were more or less teethed on Darwin's theory of evolution, after they got out of college and through doing their own work, have found so many holes in Darwin's theory that, in my mind, it perpetrates a fraud on the taxpayers of any school district and the students who attend there, not to give the balanced view of intelligent design and Darwin's theory."
Also, Buckingham adds, such a balanced view should not hesitate to point out the numerous scientifically documented problems and fallacies of evolutionary theory.
The Dover School Board could decide as early as Monday on whether to incorporate Of Pandas and People into the district's biology curriculum. Buckingham is confident that the pro-intelligent design book will be approved. He says he has the five favorable votes needed from the nine-member school board as well as the support of the Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center and the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.
