# Project Steve **Domain:** Science Education / Public Communication / Evolution **Doc Type:** Canonical Campaign Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Project Steve** is an NCSE parody of creationist lists of scientists presented as evidence against evolution. Its signatories support a statement affirming evolution and must be named Steve or a recognized variant, honoring Stephen Jay Gould. ## Epistemic Function The project does not establish evolution by vote. Its point is to expose how easily lists of credentialed dissenters can misrepresent the distribution of expert opinion. By restricting eligible signers to roughly one percent of common first names, it demonstrates that even an intentionally tiny pool can produce a large pro-evolution list. [[articles/The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley|The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley]] places Project Steve within the Bay Area's institutional defense of evolutionary literacy. [[articles/STEVE|STEVE]] develops the wider cultural argument. ## Machine-Intelligence Context Project Steve is a lesson in evidence aggregation. Counts, credentials and testimonials require a sampling model; otherwise social proof can masquerade as scientific inference. ## People and Scientific Culture The campaign honors [[Stephen Jay Gould]]. Its early and numbered signatories include [[Steven Pinker]], [[Stephen Hawking]], [[Steven Weinberg]], and [[Steven Chu]]. It was unveiled at an [[American Association for the Advancement of Science|AAAS]] meeting after a lecture by [[Lawrence Krauss]] and administered by the [[The National Center for Science Education|National Center for Science Education]] under [[Eugenie Scott]]. Project Steve also produced a durable comic culture: the [[Steve-O-Meter]], [[Steve Song]], Professor Steve Steve, the kilosteve, and [[The Morphology of Steve]] by [[Eugenie Scott]], [[Glenn Branch]], [[Nick Matzke]], and hundreds of participating Steves in the _[[Annals of Improbable Research]]_. Its T-shirt became the “experimental [[Steveometry]] apparatus.” ## Cross-Corpus Routes [[articles/STEVE|STEVE]] · [[Team Leela]] · [[articles/Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution|Digital Darwinism]] · [[articles/The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley|The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley]] · [[articles/The Hawking Continuity|The Hawking Continuity]] · [[collections/Consciousness Continuity|Consciousness Continuity]] ## Sources / Provenance - NCSE, Project Steve: https://ncse.ngo/project-steve - NCSE, “Twenty years of Project Steve”: https://ncse.ngo/twenty-years-project-steve - Improbable Research, “The Morphology of Steve”: https://improbable.com/2004/09/03/the-morphology-of-steve/ ## See Also [[wiki/The National Center for Science Education|The National Center for Science Education]], [[wiki/Steven Pinker|Steven Pinker]], [[wiki/Stephen Hawking|Stephen Hawking]], [[wiki/Public Mythology|Public Mythology]]