Fuller’s Folly, Kuhnian Paradigms, and Intelligent Design

Abstract

Some of the most telling arguments against 'intelligent design' (ID), in the recent Dover Area School District 'Darwin trial', came from analyzing drafts of the school textbook, Of Pandas and People (Davis & Kenyon, 2005). The three 'astonishing points' that emerged from that analysis were: '(1) the definition for creation science in early drafts is identical to the definition of ID; (2) cognates of the word creation ... were deliberately and systematically replaced with the phrase ID; and (3) the changes occurred shortly after the Supreme Court held that creation science is religious and cannot be taught in schools.'1 As a former high school teacher, I was not surprised to find a textbook at the center of the latest controversy or that the textbook's own history is significantly intertwined with the history of the debate. I was very pleased, therefore, to see that this was also recognized by Judge John E. Jones III, who was forthright in naming 'intelligent design' as a mere re-labeling of creationism and not a scientific theory, an opinion that has been rightly seen as an important victory for the teaching of science in US schools. It has been much harder to understand how Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology at Warwick University in England, could testify that ID was indeed a science. Tellingly, his paragraph on the Pandas textbook in the justification of his position in this journal ends with the rather disdainful dismissal that: 'In any case, my own testimony was limited to the general matter of whether IDT [Intelligent Design Theory] counts as science' (Fuller, 2006: 828). In order to demonstrate why Fuller's testimony and the arguments promoting ID or creationist school text books are more closely connected than Fuller would have us believe, I want to follow back a single phrase from the introduction of Pandas explaining its goal: '[to] present inter pretations of the data proposed by those today who hold the two alternative concepts; those with a Darwinian frame of reference, as well as those who