Scientifi c Methods 329by the tangible and powerful postwar products of science, from nuclear
weapons to spacecraft to computers as means of making science appear
culturally signifi cant and relevant. Those public fi gures defending evolu-
tion against the inroads of intelligent design rarely cited the broad intel-
lectual or ethical relevance of scientifi c ideas to justify their labors. Rather,
many held up a presumed link between Darwinian evolution and the
technological fruits of scientifi c research. Zoologist and educator Robert
George Sprackland asserted that “America will continue to fall behind in
medicine, technology, and other fi elds of science as long as our children
are denied a good science education—one based on an understanding of
what is, and is not, science.”^80 Opponents of evolution also sometimes
presented technology as the least problematic symbol of science and its
relevance. An early draft of revised Kansas science standards that sought
to de- emphasize the teaching of evolutionary ideas in public schools, of-
fered in collaboration with a local creation science organization, focused
on “technological science” and rejected “theoretical science,” including
Darwinism, as speculative and unreliable.^81 Intelligent design was itself,
according to some of its foremost theorists, profoundly technological,
borrowing mechanical metaphors with gusto and depicting living things
as fi nely tuned machines. One prominent advocate noted that “the reason
evolutionary biology has lost all sense of proportion about how much
evolution is possible as a result of blind material mechanisms (like ran-
dom variation and natural selection) is that it fl oats free of the science
of engineering.”^82
Talk about technology has become such an attractive rhetorical strat-
egy for making science culturally relevant because it has provided a far
more robust and immediate bridge between science and the world of or-
dinary human experience. Yet, when the opposite shore is so far away,
sometimes the bridge itself becomes the focus of attention. In fact, just as
the scientifi c once began to obscure the harmonious world of truth that
formerly stood behind all specifi c forms of human knowledge, technol-
ogy has come to eclipse science in much of public parlance. In a way that
resembles the later hyphenation of “American,” numerous Americans be-
gan to engage in a kind of linguistic expansion of science, rhetorically at
least, during the decades straddling the turn of the last century. References
to scientifi c medicine, scientifi c engineering, scientifi c management, sci-
entifi c advertising, and even scientifi c motherhood all spread, often justi-
fi ed by adoption of scientifi c method.
Few of these scientifi c fi elds have survived into the present day as
widely used categories. Rather, we fi nd biotechnology, information tech-
nology, and nanotechnology increasingly in the headlines, on television,