Oh, OK. I did not recognize the Of Pandas and People controversy from the man's description. It appeared to me from Ann's post that the man was saying some ID proponents had taken a previously published book about creationism, changed the word "God" to "creator" and then declared it to be a book about ID. This simply did not happen.
The supposedly "telling, significant, and revealing" chain of events regarding Of Pandas and People is as follows: The authors of Pandas believe in Intelligent Design. They wrote a book, in which they did not discuss religion or religious doctrine, but rather explained why empirical evidence and observation had led them to believe in ID.
The controversy stems from the fact that in an early draft of their book, the authors used the word "creation" to describe the, well, creation of life. Before the final draft was written, however, the Supreme Court ruled in the Edwards case that Biblical Creationism is religion and cannot be taught as science. Although their book is not about Biblical Creationism, the authors were certainly well aware of the efforts of Evolutionists to paint the ID movement as "stealth Creationism". If I were one of the authors, I might also have looked again at my rough draft and said, "You know, *I* know what I meant and *you* know what I meant, but I can just see the Evolutionists jumping on this word here, claiming it is proof positive that they were right all along about ID being nothing more than creationism in disguise. I think it would be best to change this word before we publish, just to be sure there is no confusion."
As it turned out, the plaintiffs in the Dover case argued that the efforts by the authors of Panda to distance themselves from Biblical Creationism was proof that ID is, in reality, nothing but Biblical Creationism. Unfortunately, the judge agreed. I guess it just goes to show that sometimes, you can't win for losing.
