Intelligent Design Timeline

From ResearchID.org, a nexus for researching Intelligent Design

Contents

History of ID

An abbreviated chronological list of events in the history of the term "intelligent design."[1]

BC

Marcus Cicero (106-43 BC) gave perhaps one of the first formulations of an informational/probabilistic account of the cosmos and biological organisms.[2] The quote is unmistakably a seminal and rough description of what William Dembski and others in the ID community would later call Specified Complexity.

AD

1700-1799

1776 Declaration of Independence

  • The United States of America is founded on the presupposition of and appeal to an Intelligent Cause in its first Organic Law, the Declaration of Independence, 1776. This includes: "that all men are created equal,” "that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” and entitlement by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” USC THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE - 1776

1800-1899

1847

  • Though unrelated to the current use of the term, the phrase "intelligent design" can be found in an 1847 issue of Scientific American.

1873

  • The term "intelligent design" is used in an address to the 1873 annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science by Paleyite botanist George James Allman.[3]

1900-1999

1903

  • In Humanism, Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller states, "It will not be possible to rule out the supposition that the process of evolution may be guided by an intelligent design."

1953

Watson and Crick's paper, A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid, was published on April 25. Their paper forever changed the way biologists and chemists looked at the living cell. The result is that the cell becomes a digital coding-programming entity, and molecular biology and bioinformatics became extremely important fields for biology.

1981

Sir Fred Hoyle, began to propose a hypothesis of "directed panspermia," in which it is proposed that an extraterrestrial "...intelligence which assembled the enzymes..." was responsible for the origin and diversity of life by bombarding our planet with comets laced with viruses. (Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe (1981), Evolution from Space (London: J.M. Dent & Sons), p 139)

1984

  • April: Charles B. Thaxton publishes The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories. (ISBN 0802224466)

1986

  • April 15: Agnostic Michael Denton publishes Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (ISBN 091756152X), which sparks subsequent scientific literature detailing the biological and microbiological weaknesses of modern evolutionary theory.[4] This book is mentioned by major intelligent design researchers, such as Michael Behe, as a book that brought them to question many assumptions of historical and modern evolutionary theory, and additionally brought new insight into design-theoretic concepts.

1988

  • The term intelligent design is mentioned at a conference in Tacoma, Washington, called Sources of Information Content in DNA.[5]

1989

  • August 1: Percival Davis and Dean Kenyon publish Of Pandas and People, a high-school level textbook that contains information on intelligent design and has been endorsed by some design proponents. The term first appeared in drafts of the book in 1987. (ISBN 0914513400)

1981-5

  • Sir Fred Hoyle uses the term "intelligent design" as part of his promotion of panspermia.[6]

1991

1993

  • June 22-24: Landmark meeting between various pioneers of the intelligent design community, including Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, William Dembski, and others, takes place at Pajaro Dunes, California.

1996

  • August 2: Michael Behe publishes Darwin's Black Box (ISBN 0743290313), popularizing the phrase "intelligent design" and introducing the concept of "Irreducible Complexity".
  • November 14-17: Mere Creation Conference held at Biola University unites more founders of the intelligent design community including Michael Behe, David Berlinski, Walter Bradley, William Dembski, Sigrid Hartwig-Scherer, Phillip Johnson, Robert Kaita, Steven Meyer, J. P. Moreland, Paul Nelson, Nancy Pearcey, Del Ratzsch, John Mark Reynolds, Hugh Ross, and Jonathan Wells.
  • The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, subsequently renamed the Center for Science and Culture, is founded as a Discovery Institute program.

1998

1999

  • Kansas removes some controversial aspects of macroevolution from the curriculum. Press ridicules Kansas and misrepresents what happened saying that they removed evolution entirely.

2000-present

2000

  • October 1: Jonathan Wells publishes Icons of Evolution (ISBN 0895262002).

2000

2001

  • PBS series Evolution first airs.
  • Ohio -- IDnet and members of the intelligent design community try to have the teaching of intelligent design required by educational curriculum. Jonathan Wells (author of 'Icons of Evolution') and the Santorum Amendment played a major role.
  • June 13: The United States Senate strongly supports the Santorum Amendment, which is now one of the primary arguments being used to allow classroom instruction on intelligent design and criticisms of evolution.

2002

  • September 1: Unlocking the Mystery of Life DVD is released by Illustra Media.
  • October 15: Ohio Board of Education unanimously approved new science education standards that mandate "teaching the controversy" about biological origins.

2003

  • March: Francis Beckwith publishes Law, Darwinism, and Public Education: The Establishment Clause and the Challenge of Intelligent Design (ISBN 0742514315).
  • December: Darwinism, Design, and Public Education is published by Michigan University Press (ISBN 0870136755), with editors John Angus Campbell, Stephen C. Meyer, and 25+ contributors from all sides of the issues, including Michael J. Behe, Steve Fuller, David Berlinski, Michael Ruse, Jonathan Wells, William Provine, Alvin Plantinga, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Paul Nelson, Paul Chien, William A. Dembski, Phillip E. Johnson.

2004

  • January: William Dembski publishes The Design Revolution: Answering The Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design(ISBN 0830832165).
  • October: Dover, PA school board votes to include intelligent design in the ninth grade biology science curriculum.

2005

  • December 20: U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case rules against inserting intelligent design into the science curriculum, saying that this violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

Notes

  1. ^  The textual basis of this timeline was formed from pages at ideacenter.org and wikipedia.org
  2. ^  "Can I but wonder here that anyone can persuade himself that certain solid and individual bodies should be moved by their natural forces and gravitation in such a manner that a world so beautiful adorned should be made by fortuitous concourse. He who believes this possible may as well believe, that if a great quantity of the one and twenty letters, composed of gold or any other matter, were thrown upon the ground, they would fall into such order as legibly to form the ‘Annals of Ennius’. I doubt whether fortune could make a single verse of them." -- Marcus Cicero, as he engages the Epicureans, who held that the world came about purely by chance. Cicero is quoted by the stoic Lucilius Balbus in De Natura Deorum.
  3. ^  "No physical hypothesis founded on any indisputable fact has yet explained the origin of the primordial protoplasm, and, above all, of its marvellous properties, which render evolution possible—in heredity and in adaptability, for these properties are the cause and not the effect of evolution. For the cause of this cause we have sought in vain among the physical forces which surround us, until we are at last compelled to rest upon an independent volition, a far-seeing intelligent design."
    'The British Association', The Times, Saturday, 20 September, 1873; pg. 10; col A.
  4. ^ Denton is a self-identified agnostic. In 1986 he described himself as an agnostic to a Sydney newspaper reporter.
  5. ^ Stephen C. Meyer, cofounder of the Discovery Institute and vice president of the Center for Science and Culture, reports that the term came up in 1988 at a conference he attended in Tacoma, Washington, called Sources of Information Content in DNA. Meyer attributes the phrase to Charles Thaxton, one of the authors of The Mystery of Life's Origin.
  6. ^  'Evolution according to Hoyle: Survivors of disaster in an earlier world', By Nicholas Timmins, The Times, Wednesday, 13 January, 1982; pg. 22; Issue 61130; col F.

See Also...