Stan Metzenberg offers a critical analysis of the draft "Massachusetts Science and Technology/Engineering Standards," which are for pre-Kindergarten to Grade 8 and introductory high school courses. Metzenberg claims that the document reveals significant, unacceptable gaps in science content, as well as some notable errors and…

That Intelligent Design Creationism rejects the methodological naturalism of modern science in favor of a premodern supernaturalist worldview is well documented and by now well known. An irony that has not been sufficiently appreciated, however, is the way that ID Creationists try to advance their premodern view by adopting (if only tactically) a…

This article draws on M. M. Bakhtin's (1981) notion of dialogism to articulate what it means to understand a scientific idea. In science, understanding an idea is both conceptual and epistemic and is exhibited by an ability to use it in explanation and argumentation. Some distillation of these activities implies that dialogic understanding of a…

Until recently, little attention has been paid in the school classroom to creationism and almost none to intelligent design. However, creationism and possibly intelligent design appear to be on the increase and there are indications that there are more countries in which schools are becoming battle-grounds over them. I begin by examining whether…

A variety of different arguments have been offered for teaching "both sides" of the evolution/ID debate in public schools. This article reviews five of the most common types of arguments advanced by proponents of Intelligent Design and demonstrates how and why they are founded on confusion and misunderstanding. It argues on behalf of teaching…

The Answers in Genesis Creation Museum opened in May of 2007. During the opening day, a loosely affiliated group of scientists joined in a Rally for Reason as they termed it to protest the museum's potential effect on science in the United States. This paper discusses ethnographic data collected before and during the rally. Scientist narratives…