Abstract
In 1989 a contentious textbook entitled Of Pandas and People was published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, a Christian non-profit organization based in Richardson, Texas. The authors of the book, Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, have some training in scientific fields (Davis – zoology; Kenyon – biophysics) and are the Professor of Life Science at Hillsborough Community College and Professor Emeritus of Biology at San Francisco State University, respectively. However, both of these men are also admitted creationists and proponents of intelligent design which naturally calls into question their intentions behind publishing a school-level textbook which clearly espouses intelligent design sentiments. After On Pandas was roundly rejected by many school boards across America during the 1990s and early 2000s, conservative Christian activists in Dover, Pennsylvania, successfully managed to convince the Dover Area School Board to accept the ID textbook as an appropriate reference book for biological studies. Naturally, this created uproar in the scientific community and led to the 2004 “Panda Trial” (Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District), a parody of the infamous Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925. The following year, the U.S. District Court ruled in the Dover case that teaching intelligent design was unconstitutional because it was religious in nature, and therefore, not science. In this essay, I will focus on several key issues in the philosophy of science such as pseudoscience and the proper role (if any) of the scientific community in regards to formulating and regulating public education policy. For instance, I will examine the validity of the Dover ruling by exploring various notions of pseudoscience in the McLean vs. Arkansas Board of Education(1982) decision, Michael Ruse’s essay entitled “Creation Science is Not Science (1982),” Paul Feyerabend’s “How to Defend Society Against Science (1988),” and Richard Feynman’s “Cargo Cult Science” (1999). Additionally, I will pick up Heather Douglas’s discussion in her Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal (2009) on the (legitimate) authority of the scientific community to determine the appropriate direction and scope for public education policies. Furthermore, I will also address Philip Kitcher’s suggestion in his Science, Truth, and Democracy (2001) that scientists take an active role as ethical stewards of public policy in his “enlightened democracy” as a check against the anti-scientific, fundamentalist Christian groups which temporarily governed the Dover Area School Board and pushed for the wholesale adoption of On Pandas in the American public school system.