Forrest reviews Darwin, Design, and Public Education
Barbara Forrest, a philosopher at Southeastern Louisiana University and co-author of Creationism’s Trojan Horse, reviews Darwin, Design, and Public Education, an ID anthology that was published as part of Michigan State University’s “Rhetoric and Public Affairs” series.
Her extensive review is available for free at RedNova.com, which is nice because the original publication of the review, in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology, requires a subscription. You should get the pdf from the journal if you want the authoritative text, since it looks like the RedNova text was scraped from the pdf and therefore has a few conversion errors.
A representative quote of Forrest’s review:
Recycling substitutes for novelty in this intelligent design creationist offering.
DDPE is not a new book but rather an anthology consisting largely of warmed-over essays from a 1998 issue of Michigan State University Press’s journal, Rhetoric and Public Affairs. Neither of the book’s editors is a scientist. John Angus Campbell, who also serves on the journal’s editorial board, is a rhetorician. Stephen C. Meyer is a philosopher who serves as director of the Center for Science and Culture (CSC), the creationist subsidiary of the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank in Seattle. Campbell is a longtime CSC fellow. Although a Discovery Institute-owned website (www.darwinanddesign.com) falsely advertises DDPE as a “peer-reviewed science book,” it was published as part of MSU Press’s Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series. Despite a Discovery Institute press release announcing that the book “features new scientific arguments for design based on evidence in paleontology and comparative anatomy,” it offers no new scientific arguments and cannot be reviewed as a science book since intelligent design (ID) science is nonexistent.
There is one humdinger of an error in Darwin, Design, and Public Education that seems to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the book was not peer-reviewed on the science (it may have been peer-reviewed on the rhetoric – the rhetoric in DDPE is first-rate). I may prevail upon Wes to post that a little later.