Recently in Explore Evolution Category

By now regular readers of The Panda’s Thumb know that “academic Freedom” bills have been filed in the Florida legislature, and you know that the bills are Disco designed. You have also noticed Disco’s complaint that people get it. The complaint reads like disingenuous gibberish, but why that specific gibberish?

A blogger has an interesting report on the event that the Discovery Institute just held for teachers at Biola (Bible Institute of Los Angeles) University in order to promote their newest disguise for creationism, the textbook sneakily entitled “Explore Evolution.”

I’m sure it’s a just coincidence that the very first person to blog this event – this no-way-it’s-creationism-no-sirree event – did it from the Old Earth Creation Homeschool blog and works for the old-earth creationist ministry Reasons to Believe.

Anyway, here’s the interesting bit:

And they say evolution isn’t predictable. Ever since ID went down in flames in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, creationism watchers have predicted that creationism would evolve yet again, this time into something called “critical analysis of evolution” or “teach the [made-up] controversy”. For the last month or two I have been warning about the Discovery Institute’s new crypto-creationist textbook, which is sneakily entitled Explore Evolution: The Arguments For and Against Neo-Darwinism (yes, take a good hard look at the spiffy website). The book is clearly another shot at the Of Pandas and People strategy, namely, “when a court case goes against you, change the label and try again.”

We already knew that the first official big promotional conference for Explore Evolution was going to be at an event for teachers held at Biola University. (Formerly known as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, the only institute in the U.S. that has graduate courses in “intelligent design”, and pretty literally the place that put the fundamentals in fundamentalism. Oh yes, how could anyone ever think that Explore Evolution is crypto-ID/creationism?)

Now it looks like the Discovery Institute has engineered a cover story in World Magazine, a leading conservative evangelical magazine. The magazine has an interview with Behe about his new book, but more importantly has a story about a plan to insert Explore Evolution into a public school in Tacoma, Washington: