Tuesday, October 11, 2005

A Rose By Any Other Name...

We have the first of the exhibits we introduced during Dr. Barbara Forrest's testimony last week. As you may recall, Dr. Forrest is an expert on intelligent design and co-author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. During her testimony, she traced the historical progression from creationism to intelligent design.

These exhibits (all in PDF) show that after the 1987 US Supreme Court decision in Edwards v. Aguillard that found the teaching creationism in public schools unconstitional, the publishers of the textbook originally called Biology and Origins and later Of Pandas and People substituted the word "intelligent design" almost every place that "creationism" had appeared.

Graphs comparing use of creationism/intelligent design -related words over different versions (Note the change in 1987, the year of the Supreme Court decision!)

Comparison of a paragraph through different versions of Of Pandas and People

Timeline showing the textbook's revisions relative to the 1987 decision

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I wonderd what the graphs looked like as the read the transcript of her testimony.

Truly, a picture tells a thousand words.

10:35 PM  

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