Postcards from The Wedge: review and commentary on Explore Evolution
The latest out of the Discovery Institute is 159 glossy pages of color-illustrated creationist nostalgia published by Hill House Publishers, best known for lavish butterfly books by their founder, antievolution lepidopterist Bernard d’Abrera. All the old favorites are here—fossils saying no, all the Icons, flightless Ubx flies, irreducible flagella, even that irritating homology-is-circular thing. There are no new arguments, no improved understanding of evolution, just a remastered scrapbook of the old ideas patched together in a high-gloss package pre-adapted to survive the post-Dover legal environment. The whole effort would be merely pathetic if it did not actually represent a serious and insidious threat to education.
Everything about this book is designed to avoid the legal obstacles that have impeded previous anti-evolution efforts. Foremost is the meticulous omission of all red-flag words and any direct statements of the nonscientific conclusions it proffers. And it is surely no coincidence that this book came out just as a number of states began passing legislation allowing supplemental materials for teaching the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolutionary science.
This book is part of a strategy (Matzke 2006) that resembles not so much a Trojan horse as an email virus, or the introduction of sterile males into an insect population. Its effect in schools will be to teach students that the process of science consists of fatuous discussions using context-free quotes and no cogent treatment of any clear questions. Together with new state education bills allowing local groups to push this stuff into classrooms, it will help dilute and weaken the already thin preparation students receive for dealing with a world full of information they need to be able to think about.
RTWT