Teach the Controversy is the name of a Discovery Institute campaign to promote intelligent design, a variant of traditional creationism, while discrediting evolution in United States public high school science courses.[1][2][3][4][5][6] A federal court, along with the majority of scientific organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, say the Institute has manufactured the controversy they want to teach by promoting a false perception that evolution is "a theory in crisis" due to it being the subject of purported wide controversy and debate within the scientific community. [7][8][9][10] McGill University Professor Brian Alters, 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"[11] whereas intelligent design has been rejected by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community. [12][13]Teach the Controversy is also the name of a line of T-shirts that parodies this manufactured "controversy" of science vs. pseudoscience and mythology. There are two designs that I haven't seen yet - so I've sketched out my own versions. Quite literally "sketched" on a piece of scrap cardstock I happened to have floating around. The first one is actually my first and favorite version* of my sketch of the explanation of solar eclipses through the action of a dragon that eats the sun. I've seen an old image of this in a book, but I can't locate it online. I thought this was in Cosmos, but I've flipped through my well-worn copy several times and haven't been able to find it.
The second is a much rougher thumbnail version of my standard rebuttal to anyone who suggests that Creationism should get equal time with the teaching of evolution because "there are two sides to every story": "Should weather reports give equal time to the 'Weather God' theory of low pressure systems?" In this image is a partial scribble of Thor, the Norse God of Thunder, complete with Mjöllnir and a cartoon/opera horned Viking helmet. Would Thor hang with Zeus / Jupiter, who could throw lightning bolts to accompany Thor's thunder?
Silly stuff, I know. But the pseudoscientific phony "controversies" we see and hear every day are silly - and dangerous. Best to inoculate yourself to the stupidity. Unless you're convinced that inoculations are a government plot, or will give you autism...* Here are the other two versions:
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