ABSTRACT
Source Cues involve appeals to academic qualifications and various other markers of a communicator’s apparent expertise. This chapter relates the ways in which Darwin-skeptic and counter-creationist media employ such persuasive elements. Additionally, it highlights how such claims intersect with the persistent use of Message Repetition. Source Cues are a significant persuasive constituent of Darwin-skeptic mass media and represent the most readily occurring variable exhibited in Young Earth Creationist communications. It is also an important feature of proevolutionist materials produced by the National Center for Science Education and the BioLogos Foundation. Nevertheless, the way that this cue is expressed varies according to the organization producing it, revealing the unique persuasion foci of both Darwin-skeptic and proevolutionist communications. For instance, antievolutionist Source Cues feature attempts at gaining religiously based credibility, including assertions that God sanctions Darwin-skeptic premises, or that religious scripture and respected religious figures are message partisans. Such claims are rare in counter-creationist messages, though a handful of proevolutionist articles do include appeals to expertise and evidence. Proevolutionist cases, however, occur without the culturally cognitive language and values discourse so often present in Darwin-skeptic media.
