Committee for Skeptical Inquiry

[Barry Karr <SkeptInq@AOL.COM>]

It Just Takes One
Chris Mooney; February 9, 2004

How an advertisement for Intelligent Design theory made its way into the Harvard Law Review.


Run and edited entirely by students, the Harvard Law Review may be the most prestigious legal journal in the country. According to the Harvard Gazette, its circulation--roughly 8,000--is the largest of "any law journal in the world." And the Review's influence extends far beyond the number of copies lying around. Partly thanks to the Harvard name, publication in this journal automatically elevates an academic's legal scholarship above the rest of the pack.

Given all this, it was more than a tad shocking to find a highly promotional article about the latest pseudoscientific rival to Darwin's theory of evolution--so-called "Intelligent Design" theory (ID)--in the January, 2004 Harvard Law Review. Several thousand words in length and titled, "Not Your Daddy's Fundamentalism: Intelligent Design in the Classroom," the piece glowingly reviewed Francis J. Beckwith's Law, Darwinism, and Public Education: The Establishment Clause and the Challenge of Intelligent Design, a recent book making a legal case for teaching ID alongside evolution in public schools. Beckwith, the anonymous reviewer writes, "persuasively argues that presentation of ID in public schools would not impermissibly 'establish' religion"; he "provides four potent secular reasons why schools may permit or require the presentation of ID"; he "pulls the trigger in the final chapter"; and so on (italics added).

To Read the entire column visit:

http://www.csicop.org/doubtandabout/harvard-design/