[Discussion] Survival of the Slickest How anti-evolutionists are mutating thei r message

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Survival of the Slickest How anti-evolutionists are mutating their message 
By Chris Mooney </authors/mooney-c.html>
Issue Date: 12.2.02 </print/V13/22/index.html> 
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It must take guts to be a "young-Earth" creationist. After all, imagine
rejecting virtually all of modern science based on a literal interpretation
of Genesis. Imagine opening yourself up to ridicule by insisting that Adam
and Eve lived alongside the dinosaurs, Dinotopia-style, and that Noah
crammed brontosauruses onto the Ark -- necessary inferences if you think the
Bible is true and that God created the earth less than 10,000 years ago.
Sure, these views are way outside the scienti?c mainstream (though polls
suggest nearly half of Americans may hold them). But young-Earth creationism
is so rigid in its adherence to religious doctrine that there's almost a
kind of perverse integrity to it. 
Unfortunately, it's hard to say the same for the much more polished -- and
less openly religious -- group of anti- evolutionists who have recently
upstaged young-Earthers in the public eye. These "Intelligent Design" (ID)
theorists, as they call themselves, are epitomized by Stephen C. Meyer, an
anti-Darwinian philosopher who made the following appeal to The American
Prospect: "People with liberal credentials ought to understand what we're up
against. This is an entrenched establishment." 
ID theorists posit that living things, due to their organizational
complexity and magni?cent design, simply must be the creations of some form
of intelligence. Where evolutionary biologists see species evolving through
a blind process of natural selection acting over millions of years, ID
theorists assert that life as we know it simply could not have arisen in
such a manner. Furthermore, they claim that this is a scienti?c observation.
ID advocates don't always articulate precisely what sort of intelligence
they think should stand in lieu of evolution on textbook pages, but God --
defined in a very nebulous way -- generally outpolls extraterrestrials as
the leading candidate. 
ID's home base is the Center for Science and Culture at Seattle's
conservative Discovery Institute. Meyer directs the center; former Reagan
adviser Bruce Chapman heads the larger institute, with input from the
Christian supply-sider and former American Spectator owner George Gilder
(also a Discovery senior fellow). From this perch, the ID crowd has pushed a
"teach the controversy" approach to evolution that closely in?uenced the
Ohio State Board of Education's recently proposed science standards, which
would require students to learn how scientists "continue to investigate and
critically analyze" aspects of Darwin's theory. 
This language may seem innocuous enough, but it clearly allows teachers room
to bring up ID if they choose. Moreover, the proposal is insidious because
the standards don't ask for the critical analysis of any other bedrock
scienti?c theories, such as plate tectonics or quantum mechanics. Unless
there's a shift in the political winds, however, Ohio will ?nalize the
troubling new standards in December. 
If that happens, it won't be a surprise to Brown University biologist
Kenneth Miller, a leading Darwin defender. The Discovery Institute, Miller
says, has been "the most effective group in the last ?ve years in advancing
the anti-evolution agenda." It awards fellowships, publishes books, holds
conferences and gets into speci?c local school-board ?ghts, as in Ohio. Yet,
to borrow language from the Book of Proverbs (via Inherit the Wind), the
Center for Science and Culture may be troubling its own house. By rejecting
a crucial tenet of modern science, ID would seem inimical to other Discovery
Institute initiatives with a large scienti?c and technological component,
such as a regional transportation project for the Paci?c Northwest called
"Cascadia." 
"Gilder and the Discovery Institute more generally embody the intellectual
crisis of a certain strain of contemporary conservatism," explains Nick
Gillespie, editor-in-chief of the libertarian magazine Reason. Though they
have "one foot in the Enlightenment," Gillespie says, they're unwilling to
cop to the conclusion that "God is dead, or, same thing, no longer the
center of the universe." 
Granted, Meyer would say that it's unfair to discredit ID theorists by
citing their religious motives rather than by refuting their arguments.
"Darwinian theory has grave evidential problems, and in response to that
we're getting a lot of this line of questioning," he complains. But the
motives of one of Discovery's other key fellows -- Jonathan Wells, a
Uni?cation Church member who says that he decided to "devote my life to
destroying Darwinism" at the behest of the Rev. Sun-Myung Moon -- suggest a
clear link between at least one religious sect and ID. 
The history of ID at the Discovery Institute also shows the strong in?uence
of some more mainstream religions. Darwin on Trial author Philip Johnson, a
retired University of California, Berkeley law professor and born-again
Christian, helped prompt the founding of the Center for Science and Culture
with a 1995 conference titled "The Death of Materialism and the Renewal of
Culture." Until this August, the center was called the Center for the
Renewal of Science and Culture, with obvious culture-war connotations. The
bulk of its roughly $1-million-a-year funding comes from evangelical
Christian foundations including Fieldstead & Co., whose owner, Howard F.
Ahmanson Jr., has long-standing ties to the theocratic Christian
Reconstructionist movement. 
The starkest evidence yet of the center's religious bent, however, is its
audience. Consider Johnson's speaking schedule for the fall of 2002: Every
event was set to take place at a church or was otherwise religiously
related. Even an apparent exception -- Johnson's appearance at Texas'
Foundation for Thought and Ethics in late November -- proves the rule. The
foundation produces pro-ID school textbooks such as Of Pandas and People.
Its academic editor is William Dembski, a Discovery fellow and author of The
Design Inference, who has written, "Christ transforms the world and pervades
the scientist's domain of inquiry." 
In fact, the textbook project, like Ohio, represents a turnaround for
Discovery. In the early- and mid-1990s, Dembski and Johnson disdained the
creationist strategy of trying to slip their ideas into the public schools.
As Dembski wrote in 1996, intelligent-design theorists should "aim to
convince the intellectual elite and let the school curricula take care of
themselves." But now that Discovery has gone after young minds, the American
Association for the Advancement of Science has fought back with a resolution
stating, "The ID movement has failed to offer credible scienti?c evidence to
support their claim that ID undermines the currently scienti?cally accepted
theory of evolution." 
Indeed, according to Lawrence Krauss, a Case Western Reserve University
physicist who has contested Meyer and others during the Ohio debates, a
recent survey of more than 10 million science articles published in the past
12 years shows just 88 references to "intelligent design," the vast bulk of
which appear in engineering journals. None reported favorably on ID theory,
according to Krauss. 
Meyer's response to this is predictable: crying persecution. "We are
producing scienti?c articles. The question is whether or not peer-reviewed
journals that are Darwinian in perspective would accept them under any
circumstances," he says, adding that Discovery will soon start publishing
its own journals. 
This wasn't how the institute originally planned to work, notes Barbara
Forrest, a philosopher at Southeastern Louisiana University who has
co-authored a forthcoming book on the ID movement. Creationism's Trojan
Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, to be published next year, cites a
widely circulated 1998 internal memo laying out Discovery's ambitious plan
to "drive a wedge" into the heart of "scienti?c materialism," thereby
divorcing science from its purely observational and naturalistic methodology
and reversing the deleterious effects of evolution on Western culture.
(Meyer complains that the document "was stolen from our of?ces and placed on
the Web without permission.") Forrest notes that a central item on this
agenda -- proving intelligent design by conducting actual scienti?c research
-- has clearly not been achieved. 
If ID theorists are now behaving more like old-school creationists -- giving
up on the mainstream, targeting schools and students -- creationists may
bene?t by the comparison. After all, if you gave young-Earthers a classroom,
they would teach something: dinosaurs on the Ark, how the biblical ?ood laid
down the entire fossil record and so on. ID theorists, on the other hand,
critique evolution but have few ideas with which to replace it. They have no
of?cial stance on the age of the earth, much less on whom the "designer" is.
"A historical narrative will start to ?ow out of this as we start to apply
design detection to the history of life," asserts Meyer. No doubt studious
Ohio high schoolers will help speed the process along. 
Chris Mooney </authors/mooney-c.html> 
Copyright © 2002 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Chris
Mooney, "Survival of the Slickest," The American Prospect vol. 13 no. 22,
December 16, 2002 . This article may not be resold, reprinted, or
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