will National Geographic News’s portrayal of “evolution vs. intelligent design” be fair and balanced?
“[T]he theory that new species can arise from old ones through natural selection is still met with some resistance,” the story begins (in understatement). The article then lists six major empirical disagreements between “evolution” and “intelligent design.” (That dichotomy is imperfect, however; many intelligent design advocates [IDers] still accept billions of years of evolution between the hypothesized instances of intelligent design.) We were pleasantly surprised to see that National Geographic let each side (or, at least, one representative from each) speak for itself, although the evolutionary perspective was given the last word on each debate. On the whole, the six-page article gives not a bad overview of evolution versus bare-bones intelligent design—i.e., a view much more open-ended than young-earth creation. Here is a summary of the six debates, along with intelligent design and evolutionary perspectives offered by the Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin and Occidental College’
