The "Teach the Controversy" campaign of the Discovery Institute seeks to promote the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design (a variant of traditional creationism) as part of its attempts to discredit the teaching of evolution in United States public high school science courses. Scientific organizations (including the American Association for the Advancement of Science) point out that the institute claims that there is a scientific controversy where in fact none exists. The campaign was started with the 1999 article "Teaching the Controversy: Darwinism, Design and the Public School Science Curriculum", which was published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics. The Discovery Institute is a conservative Christian think tank based in Seattle, Washington. The overall goals of the movement are "to defeat scientific materialism" and "to replace [it] with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God". It claims that fairness requires educating students with a "critical analysis of evolution" in which "the full range of scientific views", evolution's "unresolved issues", and the "scientific weaknesses of evolutionary theory" are presented and evaluated and in which intelligent design concepts such as irreducible complexity are presented. The scientific community and science education organizations have replied that there is no scientific controversy regarding the validity of the theory of evolution and that the controversy exists solely in religion and politics. A federal court has agreed with evaluation of the majority of scientific organizations (including the American Association for the Advancement of Science) that the institute has manufactured the controversy they want to have taught by promoting the false perception that evolution is "a theory in crisis" by falsely claiming the theory is the subject of wide controversy and debate within the scientific community. In fact, intelligent design has been rejected by essentially all of the members of the scientific community, including the numerical estimate of 99.9 percent of scientists. In December 2005, a federal judge ruled that intelligent design is not science and "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents". The federal ruling also characterized "teaching the controversy" as part of a religious ploy.
Origin of the campaign name The term "teach the controversy" originated with Gerald Graff, a professor of English and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, as a reminder to teach that established knowledge is created in a crucible of debate and controversy. To the chagrin of Graff, who describes himself as a liberal secularist, the idea was later appropriated by Phillip E. Johnson, Discovery Institute program advisor and father of the ID movement. Discussing the 1999–2000 Kansas State Board of Education controversy over the teaching of intelligent design in public school classrooms, Johnson wrote "What educators in Kansas and elsewhere should be doing is to 'teach the controversy'." In his book Johnson proposed casting the conflicting points of view and agendas as a scholarly controversy. Johnson's usage differs fundamentally and disingenuously from Graff's original use of the concept. While Graff advocated that a comprehensive understanding of what are considered to be "established" concepts must include teaching the debates and conflicts by which they were established, Johnson appropriated the phrase to cast doubt upon the very process and results of the scientific method of establishing knowledge through debate and conflict based on facts determined by experimentation. The phrase was picked up by the Discovery Institute affiliates Stephen C. Meyer, David K. DeWolf, and Mark E. DeForrest in their 1999 article "Teaching the Controversy: Darwinism, Design and the Public School Science Curriculum" published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics. This foundation also publishes the pseudoscientific intelligent design biology textbook Of Pandas and People suggested as an alternative to mainstream science and biology textbooks in the Critical Analysis of Evolution lesson plans proposed by proponents of the Teach the Controversy campaign.
Development of the strategy Comparisons of the drafts of the intelligent design textbook Of Pandas and People before and after the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard ruling showed that the definition given in the book for "creation science" in pre Edwards drafts is identical to the definition of "intelligent design" in post Edwards drafts; cognates of the word creation—creationism and creationist, which appeared approximately 150 times were deliberately and systematically replaced with the phrase 'intelligent design'; and the changes occurred shortly after the Supreme Court ruled in Edwards that creation science is religious and cannot be taught in public school science classes. The campaign was devised by Stephen C. Meyer and Discovery Institute founder and President Bruce Chapman as a compromise strategy in March 2002. They had come to the realisation that the dispute over intelligent design's (lack of) scientific standing was complicating their efforts to have evolution challenged in the science classroom. This strategy was designed to move the focus onto an approach that stresses open debate and evolution's purported weakness, but does not require students to study intelligent design. The intention was to create doubt over evolution and avoid the question of whether the intelligent designer was God, while giving the institute time to strengthen their purported theory of intelligent design. Another advantage of this strategy was to allay teacher fears of legal action.
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