As part of the Discovery Institute's Teach the Controversy campaign, the statement expresses skepticism about the ability of random mutations and natural selection to account for the complexity of life, and encourages careful examination of the evidence for "Darwinism", a term intelligent design proponents use to refer to evolution.
[2][3] The Discovery Institute states that the list was first started to refute claims made by promoters of the PBS television series "Evolution" that "virtually every scientist in the world believes the theory to be true".
[citation needed] The statement has been criticized for being misleading and ambiguous, using terms with multiple meanings such as "Darwinism", which can refer specifically to natural selection or informally to evolution in general,[7] and presenting a straw man fallacy with its claim that random mutations and natural selection are insufficient to account for the complexity of life, when standard evolutionary theory involves other factors such as gene flow, genetic recombination, genetic drift and endosymbiosis.
[1][12] "A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism" states that:[13] We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.
[15][16] However, in the context of the creation–evolution controversy, the term "Darwinism" is commonly used by creationists to describe scientists and science teachers who oppose them,[17] and to claim that scientific disagreements about the specific mechanism can sometimes be equated to rejection of evolution as a whole.
Intelligent design proponents use the term in all these ways, including the idea that it is a materialist ideology,[18] and the claim that as it proposes natural processes as an explanation for evolution, Darwinism can be equated with atheism and presented as being incompatible with Christianity.
Southeastern Louisiana University philosophy professor Barbara Forrest and deputy director of the National Center for Science Education Glenn Branch comment on the ambiguity of the statement and its use in the original advertisement: Such a statement could easily be agreed to by scientists who have no doubts about evolution itself, but dispute the exclusiveness of "Darwinism," that is, natural selection, when other mechanisms such as genetic drift and gene flow are being actively debated.
[3]Skip Evans, also of the National Center for Science Education, noted that when interviewed, several of the scientists who had signed the statement said they accepted common descent.
[25] The Discovery Institute also asserts that this information is being withheld from students in public high school science classes along with "alternatives" to evolution such as intelligent design.
[6][27][28] In 2002, Stephen C. Meyer, the founder of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, presented the list as evidence to the Ohio Board of Education to promote Teach the Controversy.
[29] In the 2005 Kansas evolution hearings Meyer cited the list in support of his assertion that there was "significant scientific dissent from Darwinism" that students should be informed about.
The Discovery Institute compiled and distributed other similarly confusing and misleading lists of local scientists during controversies over evolution education in Georgia, New Mexico, Ohio, and Texas.
[1] In November 2001, the National Center for Science Education stated that the then current version of the document appeared "to be very artfully phrased" to represent a diverse range of opinions, set in a context which gives it a misleading spin to confuse the public.
Writing in Robert T. Pennock's Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics, Matthew J. Brauer and Daniel R. Brumbaugh say that intelligent design proponents are "manufacturing dissent" in order to explain the absence of scientific debate of their claims:[38]The "scientific" claims of such neo-creationists as Johnson, Denton, and Behe rely, in part, on the notion that these issues [surrounding evolution] are the subject of suppressed debate among biologists.
... according to neo-creationists, the apparent absence of this discussion and the nearly universal rejection of neo-creationist claims must be due to the conspiracy among professional biologists instead of a lack of scientific merit.In their 2010 book Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins, science and religion scholar Denis Alexander and historian of science Ronald L. Numbers tied the fate of the Dissent to that of the wider intelligent design movement: After more than a decade of effort the Discovery Institute proudly announced in 2007 that it had got some 700 doctoral-level scientists and engineers to sign "A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism."
[21] Professor Brian Alters of McGill University, an expert in the creation–evolution controversy, is quoted in an article published by the NIH as stating that "99.9 percent of scientists accept evolution".
Critics have noted that of the 105 "scientists" listed on the original 2001 petition, fewer than 20% were biologists, with few of the remainder having the necessary expertise to contribute meaningfully to a discussion of the role of natural selection in evolution.
[7][12] Critics have also noted that the wording and advertising of the original statement was, and remains, misleading,[7] and that a review of the signatories suggested many doubt evolution due to religious, rather than scientific beliefs.
[43] The claims made for the importance of the list have also been called intellectually dishonest because it represents only a small fraction of the scientific community, and includes an even smaller number of relevant experts.
Robert C. Davidson, a Christian, scientist, doctor, and retired professor at the University of Washington medical school said after having signed he was shocked when he discovered that the Discovery Institute was calling evolution a "theory in crisis".
[56] A Discovery Institute spokesperson responded that "if Project Steve was meant to show that a considerable majority of the scientific community accepts a naturalistic conception of evolution, then the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) could have saved its energies – that fact was never in question.
[57] After the Discovery Institute presented the petition as part of an amicus curiae brief in the Kitzmiller v. Dover intelligent design court case in October 2005, a counter-petition, A Scientific Support For Darwinism, was organized and gathered 7,733 signatures from scientists in four days.