. "15 Biological Design in Science Classrooms--EUGENIE C. SCOTT and NICHOLAS J. MATZKE." In the Light of Evolution: Volume 1. Adaptation and Complex Design. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2007.
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In the Light of Evolution, Volume I: Adaptation and Complex Design
ID therefore is making a serious challenge not in the world of science, but in the world of public educational policy. It aims to be a “big tent” presenting a minimalist form of creationism on which all creationists can agree (Scott, 2001), focusing on the supposed impossibility of the natural origin of biological complexity. In addition to its unsuitability for the public school classroom because of its promotion of a sectarian religious position, ID is also a failure as science and has not earned the right to be taught in precollege classrooms. For all its opportunistic use (and misuse) of recent biological discoveries, ID offers only a premodern and impoverished perspective to explain complex functional biological phenomena, a perspective different indeed from the fertile and unifying evolutionary principles underlying the field of evolutionary biology.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We thank Glenn Branch for very useful comments on both content and style.
