Zack Kopplin
Writing in The Daily Beast (December 28, 2015), Zack Kopplin reviews the last decade of antievolution strategies — with the assistance of a former employee of the Discovery Institute, the de facto institutional home of "intelligent design" creationism.
The Discovery Institute "is religiously motivated in all they do," the former employee told Kopplin. "One way to tell that the motivation is religion, and not science, is to compare DI work product to tech papers produced by working scientists in the field of biology or subfield of evolutionary biology. The two kinds of work product look very different, read very different, and were produced by very different means."
"Critical thinking, critical analysis, teach the controversy, academic freedom — these are words that stand for legitimate pedagogical approaches and doctrines in the fields of public education and public education policy," the former employee added. "That is why DI co-opts them. DI hollows these words out and fills them with their own purposes; it then passes them off to the public and to government as secular, pedagogically appropriate, and religiously neutral."
A persistent critic of antievolutionist efforts, especially in his native Louisiana, where he launched a campaign to repeal the so-called Louisiana Science Education Act as a high school senior in 2011, Kopplin received NCSE's Friend of Darwin award in 2012.