Intelligently designed : how creationists built the campaign against evolution (University of Illinois, October 2013)
Tracing the growth of creationism in America as a political movement, this book explains why the particularly American phenomenon of anti-evolution has succeeded as a popular belief. Conceptualizing the history of creationism as a strategic public relations campaign, Edward Caudill examines why this movement has captured the imagination of the American public, from the explosive Scopes trial of 1925 to today’s heated battles over public school curricula. Caudill shows how creationists have appealed to cultural values such as individual rights and admiration of the rebel spirit, thus spinning creationism as a viable, even preferable, alternative to evolution.
In particular, Caudill argues that the current anti-evolution campaign follows a template created by Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, the Scopes trial’s primary combatants. Their celebrity status and dexterity with the press prefigured the Moral Majority’s 1980s media blitz, more recent staunchly creationist politicians such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, and creationists’ savvy use of the Internet and museums to publicize their cause. Drawing from trial transcripts, media sources, films, and archival documents, Intelligently Designed highlights the importance of historical myth in popular culture, religion, and politics and situates this nearly century-old debate in American cultural history.
It’s by U Tennessee journalism prof Edward Caudill. I assume it’s anti-design because he seems to think that everything depends on expert public relations and nothing on actual evidence from nature of the inadequacies and defects of Darwinian theory.
By the way, doubts about Darwin cannot be just an American phenomenon, not if you go by: Researcher Ken Ammi on that British Darwin doubt
Here is Intelligently Designed on Amazon, at 633,000.
Meanwhile, Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt, published the same year:
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #69,420 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #13 in Books > Christian Books & Bibles > Theology > Creationism
- #20 in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Paleontology
- #30 in Books > Science & Math > Evolution > Organic
It’s got to be PR. Couldn’t have anything to do with problems around Darwinian evolution, such as Meyer describes. That would just complicate the narrative. Or, as an English prof would say these days, meta-narrative.
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