About the book Buy the book Chapter 11: “Creation Science” 2.0 The following excerpt contains an update not found in the original hardcover edition. NEARLY FORTY YEARS AGO, in 1966, two talented young political thinkers published an extraordinary book, one that reads, in retrospect, as a profound warning to the Republican Party that went tragically unheeded. The authors had been roommates at Harvard University, and had participated in the Ripon Society, an upstart group of Republican liberals. They had worked together on Advance, dubbed “the unofficial Republican magazine,” which slammed the party from within for catering to segregationists, John Birchers, and other extremists. Following their graduation, both young men moved into the world of journalism and got the chance to further advance their “progressive” Republican campaign in a book for the eminent publisher Alfred A. Knopf. In their spirited 1966 polemic The Party That Lost Its Head, they held nothing back. The book devastatingly critiqued Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential candidacy—the modern conservative movement’s primal scene—and dismissed the GOP’s embrace of rising star Ronald Reagan as the party’s hope to “usurp reality with the fading world of the class-B movie.“ Read today, some of the most prophetic passages of The Party That Lost Its Head are those that denounce Goldwater’s conservative backers for their rampant and even paranoid distrust of the nation’s intellectuals. The book labels the Goldwater campaign a “brute assault on the entire intellectual world” and blames this development on a woefully wrongheaded political tactic: “In recent years the Republicans as a party have been alienating intellectuals deliberately, as a matter of taste and strategy.“ The authors charge that Goldwater’s campaign had no intellectual heft behind it whatsoever, save the backing of one think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, which they denounce as “an organization heavily financed by extreme rightists.” Continuing in the same vein, they slam William F. Buckley, Jr., for his attacks on leading universities and describe the advent of right-wing anti-intellectualism as “crippling” to the Republican Party. The book further deplores conservatives’ paranoid distrust of the “liberal” media and the “Eastern Establishment,” and worries that without the backing of intellectuals and scholars, the GOP will prove unable to develop “workable programs, distinct from those of the Democrats and responsive to national problems.” If the party wants to win back the “national consensus,” the authors argue, it must first win back the nation’s intellectuals. Clearly, The Party That Lost Its Head failed in its goal of prompting a broad Republican realignment. The GOP went in precisely the opposite direction from the one these young authors prescribed—which is why the anti-intellectual disposition they so aptly diagnosed in 1966 still persists among many modern conservatives, helping to fuel the current crisis over the politicization of science and expertise. In fact, the chief difference between the Goldwater conservatives and those of today can often seem more cosmetic than real. A massive number of think tanks have now joined the American Enterprise Institute on the right, but in many cases these outlets still provide only a thin veneer of intellectual respectability to ideas that mainstream scholarship rejects. Certainly, the proliferation of think tanks has not had as a corollary that conservatives now take scientific expertise more seriously. On the contrary, the Right has a strong track record of deliberately attempting to undermine scientific work that might threaten the economic interests of private industry. Perhaps more alarmingly still, similar tactics have also been brought to bear by the Right in the service of a religiously conservative cultural and moral agenda. The next three chapters demonstrate how cultural conservatives have disregarded, distorted, and abused science on the issues of evolution, embryonic stem cell research, the relation of abortion to health risks for women, and sex education. In the process, we will encounter more ideologically driven think tanks, more questionable science, and more conservative politicians willing to embrace it. The story begins, however, with a narrative that cuts to the heart of the modern Right’s war on science. You see, despite the poignant accuracy of their critique, the authors of The Party That Lost Its Head—Bruce K. Chapman and George Gilder—have since bitten their tongues and morphed from liberal Republicans into staunch conservatives. In fact, you could say that they have become everything they once criticized. Once opponents of right-wing anti-intellectualism, they are now prominent supporters of conservative attacks on the theory of evolution, not just a bedrock of modern science but one of the greatest intellectual achievements of human history. With this transformation, the modern Right’s war on intellectuals—including scientists and those possessing expertise in other areas—is truly complete.   Three decades ago, no one could have guessed that Bruce Chapman—who did not respond to interview requests for this book—would wind up at the helm of a religiously inspired crusade against evolution. After the publication of The Party That Lost Its Head, Chapman carried on his liberal Republican campaign through his involvement in Washington state politics. Elected to the Seattle city council in 1971, he later became secretary of state of Washington and made an unsuccessful stab at the governorship in 1980, running to the left of conservative Democrat (and later ozone depletion denier) Dixy Lee Ray. (Both Chapman and Ray lost in their respective primaries.) Throughout this period, evolution historian and Chapman acquaintance Edward J. Larson has noted, Chapman was a moderate “Rockefeller Republican” to the core. That changed, however, when Chapman entered the Reagan administration in 1981 as director of the Census Bureau. In a Washington atmosphere in which Reagan himself catered to antievolutionist religious leaders like Jerry Falwell, Chapman moved to the right relatively quickly. Indeed, in Chapman’s transformation into a conservative who would absurdly declare evolution a “theory in crisis,” which he did in 2003, one can trace key trends in the development of the modern conservative movement, such as the rising influence of the religious Right and the launch of an array of ideological think tanks. Among the latter must certainly be counted Seattle’s Discovery Institute, where Chapman currently serves as president and where George Gilder—who underwent a similar ideological transformation, becoming a supply-side economics guru—now serves as a senior fellow. By June 4, 1983, Chapman could be found publicly condemning liberalism for its “shabby, discredited, sophistical values” and defending “traditional morality.” In an article on the “Harvard-trained former liberal,” the New York Times even singled out Chapman’s political shift as emblematic of “a converging of the intellectual left with the religious right within the [Republican Party] under the Reagan banner.” Chapman soon left the Census Bureau to work in the White House under Reagan adviser (and later antipornography crusading attorney general) Edwin Meese. “I have become more conservative as I have grown older,” he observed at the time. As the 1980s ended, Chapman initially seemed to veer away from his newfound social conservatism. In the early days of the Discovery Institute—which originated as a Seattle branch of Indianapolis’s center-right Hudson Institute—he drew heavily on connections from his moderate Seattle past. The Institute’s first slate of directors read “like the guest list for a gathering of liberal Republicans,” noted Seattle Times columnist Herb Robinson in 1991. Originally, Discovery focused on issues like the economic competitiveness of Seattle and telecommunications policy. The vibe was forward-looking, futuristic, and intellectually contrarian. Yet much as Chapman himself swung to the right during the Reagan years, Discovery too has turned to religious conservatism. In recent years, it has become home to a reactionary crusade against the theory of evolution that goes under the banner of “intelligent design” (ID). Bringing creationism up to date, ID proponents insist that living organisms show detectable signs of having been designed (that is, specially created) by a rational agent (presumably God), while denouncing “Darwinism” for inculcating atheism and destroying cultural and moral values that had previously been grounded in piety. Such arguments put the ID campaign squarely at the center of a religiously driven culture war, and Chapman has described ID as the Discovery Institute’s “No. 1 project.” His friend Gilder, meanwhile, has ridiculously pronounced that “the Darwinist materialist paradigm . . . is about to face the same revolution that Newtonian physics faced 100 years ago.“ Such declarations appear to have made more moderate Republicans rather uncomfortable. During a November 2004 science journalism conference in Seattle, I had the opportunity to ask former EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus, who once sat on the Discovery Institute’s board, what he thought of its antievolutionist activities. Ruckelshaus told me he hadn’t been interested in being involved in such a project. (In fact, in a 2000 speech on how to save the Pacific salmon, posted on the Discovery Institute’s website, Ruckelshaus called the fish “a marvel of evolutionary adaptation.“) Clearly, Bruce Chapman has presided over an uncomfortable merger between pragmatic, centrist Republicanism and the antievolutionist, culture-warrior wing of the Right. Today, Discovery touts Cascadia, a technology-intensive project to improve transportation in the Pacific Northwest that is funded in part by the Microsoft fortune (through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) even as it seeks to replace one of the cornerstones of biology with what Wired magazine has labeled the 2.0 version of creationism. And Chapman—a man who by all accounts cares deeply about ideas and whom the New York Times once called “serious and scholarly“—has morphed into a leader of the nation’s most prominent religious crusade against modern science.   Intelligent design, as advanced by the Discovery Institute, has many antecedents. An older and more explicitly theological version of the idea holds that the universe itself shows evidence of God’s handiwork, a claim that science—which is limited by its methodology to studying natural causes, not allegedly supernatural phenomena—can neither confirm nor refute. Similarly, before the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, many, indeed most, educated men and women accepted the precepts of “natural theology,” an argument by analogy that just as human artifacts like watches show signs of a designer’s hand, so do specialized organs like the eye. Perhaps the most famous proponent of this argument was the Reverend William Paley, author of the 1802 work Natural Theology. Darwin read (and was impressed by) Paley as a young student at Cambridge. His Origin, however, unfolds as an elaborate rebuttal to Paley’s recourse to divine intervention, explaining how complex organs could have evolved through gradual stages from imperfect but still useful antecedents, or from simpler structures that were co-opted for new uses. As Darwin noted in a famous passage from the book’s second edition: To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. Providing the linchpin of modern biology, Darwin’s work supplanted natural theology’s argument from design and left it by the wayside, at least from a scientific standpoint. Representatives of Bruce Chapman’s think tank, however, have plucked the design argument from the annals of intellectual history and pronounced it modern science. Granted, today’s technophile ID advocates dress up their arguments “in the idiom of information theory,” as leading ID proponent William Dembski has put it, claiming (for instance) that the massive amounts of biological information encoded in DNA could not have arisen through natural selection and must therefore have been designed by an intelligent agent. But judging from ID’s poor scientific publication record, it has failed to convince working biologists to join in this quixotic enterprise.

Nevertheless, ID hawkers have crisscrossed the United States arguing that public schools should “teach the controversy” over evolution—a controversy they themselves have manufactured. These advocates have even outlined First Amendment legal strategies to justify their approach. In Ohio, one state where they have enjoyed considerable success, the state board of education adopted a model lesson plan in early 2004 inviting students to “critically analyze five different aspects of evolutionary theory.” In fact, the lesson plan contains spurious critiques of evolution that scientific experts have rejected and was explicitly opposed by the National Academy of Sciences. In the Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, local antievolutionists have actually gone further and explicitly introduced intelligent design into science classes (a tack the Discovery Institute has come to oppose, probably because of its obvious unconstitutionality). In late 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Dover district, touching off a case that would set a historic legal precedent.

As these activities suggest, ID proponents have adopted many of the same political tactics practiced by the old-school creationists. Granted, ID diverges in some respects from earlier forms of American antievolutionism. It certainly isn’t synonymous with “creation science,” which provided an allegedly scientific veneer for the biblically based belief that the earth is only between six thousand and ten thousand years old. “Creation scientists” seek to debunk radioisotope dating, which geologists use to determine the age of rocks. As we saw in Chapter 4, they also rely on the feverish nonsense of Flood geology, and wrongly assert that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics.

Intelligent design officially endorses none of these positions, and its proponents tend to shy away from espousing biblically literalist views in their publications. (With traditional creationists you didn’t have to dig as far to find quotations from the Bible.) None of this, however, rescues ID from the broader “creationist” label. Philosopher of science Robert T. Pennock defines creationism as “the rejection of evolution in favor of supernatural design.” ID clearly fits this description, even if we must now distinguish between “intelligent design creationism” and the other species that have cropped up in the United States, such as “young-earth creationism” and “creation science.“

In fact, the peculiar characteristics of the ID movement are a direct response to the tactical and legal failings of earlier creationists. Its strategies actually represent a natural evolution of the “creation science” movement, proceeding still further in the direction of claiming the mantle of science while denying religious intentions in argument. Although ID has improved and perfected them, one can even detect many rudiments of the current ID approach among earlier advocates of “creation science.“

As a legal strategy, “creation science” proved a dramatic failure. In the 1987 case Edwards v. Aguillard, seven out of nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law requiring the teaching of “creation science” as a counterpoint to evolution violated the First Amendment by promoting religion. Instrumental in the case was a statement from the real scientific community. Seventy-two Nobel laureates signed an amicus brief favoring the overturning of Louisiana’s law, arguing that “teaching religious ideas mislabeled as science is detrimental to scientific education.“

But though “creation science” failed politically and legally, the ID movement has taken its tactics—recruit Ph.D.s who are also conservative Christians, claim repeatedly to be doing science, and disavow religious motives—to a higher level. As Discovery Institute fellow Francis Beckwith boasts, advocates of ID have “better credentials than their creationist predecessors.” “Instead of young-earth creationism, which can be laughed out of the room, intelligent design creationism has a few scientists who are not crackpots defending it,” observes Harvard’s Steven Pinker, a prominent defender of evolution. “I don’t think scientists have woken up to it enough,” he adds.

ID officially eclipsed “creation science” as the leading antievolutionist strategy following a classic overreach by traditional creationists in Kansas. In 1999, state board of education members voted to strip evolution and even the Big Bang from state standards, prompting a national outcry. Several of the offending individuals were promptly thrown out of office in the next election. But as Kansas’s young-earth creationists beat an embarrassed retreat, ID advocates seized the opportunity. In the wake of the furor, the small Kansas town of Pratt flirted with including ID in its curriculum.

Since then, the ID movement has continued its quest to infiltrate academia, while the Discovery Institute has recruited a wide range of Ph.D.s to serve as fellows. ID claims, repeatedly, to represent a scientific innovation, even though “creation scientists” had always made the Paleyesque argument that living things, in their bodily and organizational complexity, show evidence of the hand of a designer. Even ID’s “teach the controversy” program—which advocates instructing public school students in the alleged weaknesses of evolutionary theory, rather than in ID itself, and has actually been adopted in Ohio—had emerged in a rudimentary form among “creation scientists.” Following the Supreme Court’s Edwards v. Aguillard decision, the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) prepared an intriguing evaluation of what the movement should try next. Among other points, ICR noted that “school boards and teachers should be strongly encouraged at least to stress the scientific evidences and arguments against evolution in their classes . . . even if they don’t wish to recognize these as evidences and arguments for creationism.” As Glenn Branch, of the anti-ID National Center for Science Education, has observed, this comment shows that the “teach the controversy” strategy was “pioneered in the wake of Edwards v. Aguillard.“

Clearly, ID proponents follow in the footsteps of their “creation science” forebears, especially when it comes to conveying the impression that they are doing science, instead of trying to advance religious and moral goals. Yet the express strategic objectives of the Discovery Institute; the writings, careers, and affiliations of ID’s lead proponents; and the movement’s funding sources all betray a clear moral and religious agenda. That might be a mere oddity if ID were actually producing good science, but it isn’t. In their book Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, philosopher Barbara Forrest and biologist Paul Gross exhaustively demonstrate that the movement is all religion and no science. The remainder of this chapter will take a similarly two-pronged argumentative approach.

First, ID is unmistakably a religious movement. The most eloquent documentation of this comes in the form of a Discovery Institute strategic memo that made its way onto the Web in 1999: the so-called Wedge Document. This seven-page paper represents the antievolutionist equivalent of the tobacco industry documents revealed as a result of litigation, or the American Petroleum Institute’s internal memo laying out a strategy to undermine mainstream climate science. The Wedge Document, though, outlines an agenda to undercut science not in the service of corporate goals, but rather to further those based on religion—or as the document states, “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.“

A broad attack on “scientific materialism,” Discovery’s manifesto asserts that modern science has had “devastating” cultural consequences, such as the denial of objective moral standards and the undermining of religious belief. In contrast, the document states that intelligent design “promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.” In order to achieve this objective, the ID movement will “function as a ’wedge’” that will “split the trunk [of scientific materialism] . . . at its weakest points.” Much like the strategy implicit in the American Petroleum Institute memo, part of the Wedge strategy involves currying influence with “individuals in print and broadcast media.” The document actually expends far more energy outlining media strategies and achievements than in describing a program of scientific research.

The Wedge Document puts ID proponents in an uncomfortable position. Discovery Institute representatives balk at being judged on religious grounds, and accuse those who probe their motivations of engaging in ad hominem attacks. Yet given the express language of the Wedge Document, it is hard to see why we shouldn’t take them at their own word. Discovery’s ultimate agenda—the Wedge—clearly has far more to do with the renewal of religiously based culture by the overthrow of key tenets of modern science than with the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Discovery’s antievolutionist branch, the Center for Science and Culture, was even previously named the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.

As it happens, I played a minor role in the history of the Wedge Document. As I worked on a highly critical article about the Discovery Institute for the American Prospect in late 2002, the organization still had not officially admitted that the memo was theirs. In an interview for my story, however, Discovery’s Stephen C. Meyer, a pro-life religious conservative who directs the Center for Science and Culture, admitted ownership of the Wedge Document for the first time, telling me that it “was stolen from our offices and placed on the Web without permission.“

Discovery has since broadly acknowledged the document as its own, describing it as an “early fundraising proposal.” The institute mocks the notion that the strategy paper outlines a conspiracy to “replace the scientific method with belief in God,” which it attributes to “our somewhat hysterical opponents.” Instead, Discovery describes its attack on “scientific materialism” as, of all things, a defense of “sound science.“

But though Discovery claims to support science, the Wedge Document makes it clear that the group actually hopes to radically redefine the very nature of scientific inquiry, smuggling assumptions about the supernatural into the very fabric of research and turning science into something much closer to pre-Enlightenment philosophy. The advances of modern science have relied on a “naturalistic” methodology, one that assumes continuous causal processes rather than supernatural interventions. Discovery’s radical agenda of reconstituting a religiously imbued science thus represents an assault on modern science itself. In fact, according to creationism historian Ronald Numbers, Discovery’s philosophical critique of modern science is probably the main thing that sets it apart from older forms of antievolutionism.

It is important to realize how radical this critique actually is. Consider a 2001 article published in World magazine and on the Discovery Institute’s website by Nancy Pearcey, a senior fellow of the organization and most recently the author of the book Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity. The article imagines that it is the year 2073, and ID’s theistic version of science has triumphed. Darwin has been overthrown, and the moral consequences have been dramatic: The threat of a “new era of eugenics” has been averted. Roe v. Wade has (apparently) been reversed. Science itself has led to the affirmation of Christian morality: “Human beings have an intrinsic nature and dignity only if the world is an embodiment of the Word, the Logos, the language of a personal Creator. Amazingly, it was the genetic revolution that brought this truth home, transforming the entire American culture.” ID theorists, apparently, have a very high opinion of themselves, believing that they are fueling a scientific revolution of Copernican proportions. ID proponent Michael Behe has even written that the alleged discovery of design in nature “rivals those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrödinger, Pasteur and Darwin.”

But Discovery’s critique of “scientific materialism“—Bruce Chapman has denounced the view that “unless you can see it, smell it, taste it, feel it, it doesn’t exist“—crumbles on examination. Philosophers of science distinguish between “methodological naturalism“—science’s procedural approach to studying nature by assuming that continuous causal processes occur without supernatural intervention—and “philosophical naturalism,” the atheistic conclusion that the supernatural doesn’t exist at all. Methodological naturalism can be justified on purely pragmatic grounds—it works. Indeed, it allows researchers of all religious beliefs to meet on common ground. Philosophical naturalism, in contrast, goes beyond science into the realm of metaphysics. Science, which studies only the natural world, can neither prove nor disprove the existence of the supernatural or God. And wisely, it doesn’t try.

In disingenuously pretending that modern science basically amounts to institutionalized atheism, the Discovery Institute wrongly conflates methodological and philosophical naturalism. But many religious scientists—including Brown University cell biologist and Finding Darwin’s God author Kenneth Miller, a leading critic of ID—accept the former but don’t endorse the latter. The truth is that science isn’t necessarily at war with religion at all, although the ID movement certainly does seem to be at war with modern science.

And just in case the Wedge Document doesn’t speak eloquently enough, leading proponents of ID, too, give explicitly religious reasons for their “scientific” advocacy.

The ID movement’s central strategist and popularizer, University of California, Berkeley, emeritus law professor and Darwin on Trial author Phillip Johnson, turned to Jesus “at the advanced age of 38” and went on to publish several books critical of evolution. Leading ID proponent Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth?, has written that the words of Unification Church leader Sun Myung-Moon, as well as his own studies and prayers, “convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism.“

And that’s just the beginning. William Dembski, another of ID’s leading proponents and armed with Ph.D.s in philosophy and mathematics, recently left Baylor University to head the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s newly established Center for Science and Theology. Commenting on his appointment to Baptist Press, a Southern Baptist national news service, Dembski welcomed the opportunity “to mobilize a new generation of scholars and pastors not just to equip the saints but also to engage the culture and reclaim it for Christ. That’s really what is driving me.” (Dembski left the position a year later, moving to the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.)

And then there’s the aforementioned Stephen C. Meyer, a Cambridge history and philosophy of science Ph.D. who seems to have developed ID’s philosophical critique of modern science to begin with. A conservative Christian with a background in Republican politics, Meyer has been described as “the person who brought ID to DI” by historian Edward Larson (who was a fellow at the Discovery Institute prior to its antievolutionist awakening). Seeking to institutionalize the ID movement, Meyer turned to the late timber industry magnate C. Davis Weyerhaeuser, a major funder of Christian evangelism in the U.S. through his Stewardship Foundation. Weyerhaeuser provided key “seed money” to establish the Discovery Institute’s ID program, according to Larson.

Meyer is also a “university professor” at Palm Beach Atlantic University, in West Palm Beach, Florida, a “Christian liberal arts college” that puts its professors in what can only be described as an intellectual straitjacket. According to the school’s “Guiding Principles,“

All those who become associated with Palm Beach Atlantic as trustees, officers, members of the faculty or of the staff, must believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments; that man was directly created by God; that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin; that He is the Son of God, our Lord and Savior; that He died for the sins of all men and thereafter arose from the grave; that by repentance and the acceptance of and belief in Him, by the grace of God, the individual is saved from eternal damnation and receives eternal life in the presence of God; and it is further resolved that the ultimate teachings in this college shall always be consistent with these principles.

ID proponents often denounce evolutionists for being closed-minded and perpetuating groupthink. Yet it appears that Meyer could not accept human evolution and still remain employed by Palm Beach Atlantic University.

The funding of the Discovery Institute, too, betrays its religious agenda. In addition to the Stewardship Foundation (which has generally funded mainstream, moderate evangelical activities), religious right tycoon Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., has heavily supported the group and sits on Discovery’s board of directors. Other ideologically oriented Discovery funders include the Tennessee-based Maclellan Foundation, which describes itself as “committed to the infallibility of Scripture, to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and to the fulfillment of the Great Commission.“

As befits this litany of evangelism, ID proponents cannot seem to keep out of churches and the company of old-school creationists. For example, at a 2004 conference held at the Community Bible Church in Highlands, North Carolina, leading ID advocate Michael Behe, a Catholic Lehigh University biochemist and author of Darwin’s Black Box, spent time with young-earth creationists from the Institute for Creation Research, ministers, and prison evangelist (and former Watergate felon) Chuck Colson. In so doing, Behe closely followed the Wedge Document, which observes that ID proponents must win “a popular base of support among our natural constituency, namely, Christians.“

Clearly, intelligent design proponents draw fuel from a radical religious agenda to reform American culture and counteract what they see as the corrosive influence of modern science (and its perceived moral implications). But if ID represents a religiously based strategy, it nevertheless claims to conduct scientific research. However questionable ID’s definition of science, then, it is worthwhile asking whether any work that ID’s supporters have published actually helps intelligent design qualify as science, or alternatively, whether the ID movement simply aims to dress up its religious agenda in scientific clothing.

The prima facie evidence in this regard does not look very good for ID proponents. In a 2002 resolution, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) firmly stated that “to date, the ID movement has failed to offer credible scientific evidence to support their claim that ID undermines the current scientifically accepted theory of evolution.” Indeed, literature searches have failed to turn up scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals that explicitly present research that supports the ID hypothesis. As Brown University’s Kenneth Miller, a practicing Catholic, has put it, “The scientific community has not embraced the explanation of design because it is quite clear, on the basis of the evidence, that it is wrong.“

The ID movement initially appeared to gain a shred of scientific credibility in late 2004, however, when a review essay explicitly supportive of ID by Stephen Meyer appeared in a little-known taxonomic journal called Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington (that’s D.C.). But as the subsequent fallout over Meyer’s paper demonstrated, this work’s publication represents a startling anomaly and came about through irregular means. The ID movement will have to do much better than this if it wants to be taken seriously on a scientific level (much less have its critiques of evolution taught in public-school classrooms).

The saga of Meyer’s paper bears telling resemblances to the story of the Soon and Baliunas paper on climate history, discussed in Chapter 7. In both cases, little-known journals published highly questionable papers, generating massive controversy in the process. Then, apparently thinking better of it, the journals backed away from the work.

Like the Soon and Baliunas article, Meyer’s article did not present original scientific research or data; instead, it reviewed and commented on existing literature. Focusing on the well-known “Cambrian explosion“—which occurred roughly 570 to 530 million years ago—Meyer argued that evolutionary theory could not account for the appearance of new organismal forms in a relatively short period of geological time. Instead, Meyer concluded by suggesting that “intelligent,” “rational” agents may have been responsible for the “origin of new biological information.” Even the Discovery Institute acknowledged that this marked the first time that an article openly advocating ID had been published in a peer-reviewed biology journal (though the group claims previous publications in peer-reviewed books and other outlets).

But soon after the article’s publication—which was accompanied by considerable media attention and apparently caused angry journal subscribers to pester the editorial offices demanding an explanation—facts came to light that cast doubt on whether the work should have appeared at all. It turns out that Meyer’s paper was accepted for publication by an editor named Richard Sternberg, who has signed a Discovery Institute statement entitled “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.” Sternberg’s credits also include sitting on the editorial board of the Baraminology Study Group, which studies “creation biology” and whose website is hosted by Bryan College, a fundamentalist Christian school in Tennessee fittingly named after anti-Darwin crusader William Jennings Bryan.

Although Sternberg later created a website on which he protested that (unlike most members of the Baraminology group) he did not subscribe to young-earth creationism, he also did not describe himself as an evolutionist. Sternberg also explained that although he no longer edits the Proceedings, his resignation preceded and had no connection to the publication of the Meyer paper.

According to the Biological Society of Washington, which publishes the Proceedings, Sternberg “handled the entire review process” for Meyer’s paper, a move that is “contrary to typical editorial practices” at the journal, which include review by an associate editor. Sternberg, for his part, counters on his website that “as managing editor it was my prerogative to choose the editor who would work directly on the paper, and as I was best qualified among the editors, I chose myself, something I had done before in other appropriate cases.” But the fact of Sternberg’s connections to evolution deniers raises questions about how he may have handled Meyer’s article.

In any case, the Biological Society of Washington has since backed away from the work, claiming that Meyer’s piece represents a “significant departure from the nearly purely systematic content for which this journal has been known throughout its 122-year history” and “does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings.” In so dramatically undermining a paper published by its own journal, the Biological Society of Washington also explicitly endorsed the AAAS resolution on intelligent design. (In response, the Discovery Institute has accused the society of imposing a “gag rule on science.“)

Granted, by its own admission, the Biological Society of Washington doesn’t specialize in the type of arguments Meyer makes in its journal. So it is conceivable the group was unfair to him. Just to make sure, I sought to learn what paleontologists knowledgeable about the Cambrian explosion thought of Meyer’s “science.“

After reviewing Meyer’s paper at my request, Yale University Cambrian expert Derek Briggs, president of the Paleontological Society, responded by e-mail with what he termed the “obvious” criticism: “Meyer finds explanations for the appearance of evolutionary novelties inadequate . . . so he substitutes one of his own that is totally untestable, so-called intelligent design.” Briggs’s critique highlights a key reason that ID fails as science. By postulating a supernatural cause involved in the origin and history of life, the ID movement has advanced a mysterious idea that science lacks the tools to evaluate fruitfully.

As an account of the origin and history of life, ID doesn’t have any meat to it. It doesn’t provide any details that scientists might confirm or refute through future experimentation. And most crucially of all, it doesn’t explain anything or predict anything, a key requirement for successful scientific theories. As three of Meyer’s scientific critics have noted, “’An unknown intelligent designer did something, somewhere, somehow, for no apparent reason’ is not a model.“

Another expert who commented on Meyer’s paper for me presented a related assessment of both the article and the intelligent design movement generally. “Presumably, this is their best work,” wrote Franklin and Marshall College paleontologist Roger Thomas.“Consequently, one must ask, where are the data in support of their position? Where is the fully developed positive case for the necessity of ID, backed by appropriate evidence, that one might expect? It is simply lacking.“

A lengthy critique of Meyer’s paper in the Palaeontology Newsletter, a publication of the UK-based Palaeontological Association, provides yet another nail in the coffin. The author, Ronald Jenner, calls Meyer’s paper “slipshod science,” writes that it “reads like a student report,” and comments that “the only trophy that proponents of ID can really boast about at home is that ID is promoted in a paper that should never have passed the reviewing process.” Jenner also remarks on how differently scientists and ID proponents approach problems:

Rather than continuing to trust in the ability of science to make progress, as it always has, Meyer is willing to throw up his hands in bewilderment, and exclaim miraculous intervention of an intelligent designer. That’s not the spirit of science. Meyer’s paper was neither deep nor comprehensive enough to merit being called an adequate review by any standard, certainly not in view of his profound conclusions.

These words adequately sum up the ID approach, which has often been described as the search to uncover a so-called God of the gaps. Essentially, ID proponents mine the scientific literature, trying to find places where they think they can plausibly charge that evolutionary theory has failed (the Cambrian explosion, for example). Never mind the stunning successes of the theory of evolution (which explains, among myriad other curiosities, why islands feature organisms related to but distinct from nearby mainland populations, or why closely related species have more DNA in common with one another than they do with more distant relatives). And never mind that scientists themselves are currently at work on the outstanding problems and making progress on them. Wherever uncertainty remains in the current evolutionary account—and as we have seen, uncertainty can never be fully dispelled in science—ID theorists swoop in and claim, “God must have done it.“

This approach, however, has a devastating drawback. Every time evolutionary theory fills another “gap,” critics have to retreat further and admit that they were wrong to invoke supernatural intervention to explain that particular wrinkle of life’s history. Oops, God didn’t do it after all.

Nevertheless, the “God of the gaps” approach can seem rhetorically convincing to those who, lacking much grasp of the massive number of mysteries that evolutionary theory has already solved, or the proven track record that it therefore enjoys in the scientific community, are greatly impressed to learn of alleged “holes” in the theory.

Despite failed attempts to win scientific backing for ID, this new blossoming of antievolutionism has found dramatic support both on the religious Right and among its political allies. ID critic Barbara Forrest has noted that virtually all of the leading organizations on the Christian Right have embraced or at least shown sympathy for ID, including James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, the Concerned Women for America, D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries, the American Family Association, and the Alliance Defense Fund (a Christian legal group).

ID proponents have also teamed up with conservative Republican legislators to further advance their agenda. ID’s most significant supporter has been Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, a strong pro-life Catholic who has hopped on the antievolutionist bandwagon even though the head of his church—the late Pope John Paul II—accepted evolution.

In 2001, Santorum teamed up with ID supporters to slip “teach the controversy” language into the so-called No Child Left Behind Act. Singling out evolution in particular, Santorum’s amendment to the Senate version of the bill stated that “good science education should prepare students to distinguish the data or testable theories of science from philosophical or religious claims that are made in the name of science.” This may sound innocuous enough, but when you learn that the language comes in part from ID movement progenitor Phillip Johnson, who believes that “Darwinism is based on an a priori commitment to materialism, not on a philosophically neutral assessment of the evidence,” you see where Santorum is headed.

The Discovery Institute widely heralded the Santorum amendment, claiming that “the Darwinian monopoly on public science education … is ending.” Santorum himself defended ID in an op-ed article in the conservative Washington Times, calling it a “legitimate scientific theory that should be taught in science classes,” and interpreted his amendment as stating “how students studying controversial issues in science, such as biological evolution, should be allowed to learn about competing interpretations.“

Ultimately, the Santorum amendment did not make its way into the actual No Child Left Behind Act, but similar language reappeared in a nonbinding conference report issued along with the bill (and with congressional endorsement). The conference report stated, in somewhat weaker language, that “where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist.” Discovery Institute representatives have used this language to claim that the U.S. Congress has endorsed the teaching of ID (which, of course, they insist is a scientific theory). More recently, perhaps seeing it as a political liability, Santorum has backed away from an outright embrace of teaching ID in public schools—even as president Bush, in August 2005, voiced his support for it. (Bush’s statement put his science adviser John Marburger, who has stated that ID is not science, in a truly awkward position.) But the president has little real role, other than a symbolic one, in the evolution fight: All of the antievolutionist action today is happening at the state and local level. According to the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), between 2001 and 2004, forty-three U.S. states saw significant antievolution activity within their borders. Much of this activity has been inspired by young-earth creationists, who remain highly motivated and active, but the strategies advanced by the Discovery Institute have increasingly taken precedence. Meanwhile, Republican state political parties have also embraced antievolutionism: A survey by the NCSE found eight state parties with explicitly antievolution platforms or public statements.

Which brings us back to Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman, a former Republican liberal who veered right and went on to found a think tank that would almost single-handedly lead a war against one of the most robust theories in the history of science: the theory of evolution. On the one hand, Chapman’s career suggests a stunning intellectual contradiction. Yet when viewed in a broader historical context, his personal evolution seems quite consistent with trends in the development of the modern Right and its strained relationship with science.

To be sure, the intelligent design movement does not claim an animus against science. Science abusers never do. Rather, the movement seeks to redefine the very nature of science to serve its objectives.

But just like “creation scientists” of yore, ID hawkers have clear and ever-present religious motivations for denying and attacking evolution. And like creationists of yore, they have failed the only test that matters: They simply are not doing credible science. Instead, they are appropriating scientific-sounding arguments to advance a moral and political agenda, one they hope to force into the public-school system.

That is where the true threat emerges. ID theorists and other creationists don’t like what the overwhelming body of science has to tell us about where human beings come from. Their recourse? Trying to interfere with the process by which children are supposed to learn about the best scientific (as opposed to religious) answer that we have to this most fundamental of questions. No matter how many conservative Christian scholars Bruce Chapman and the Discovery Institute manage to get on their side, such interference represents the epitome of anti-intellectualism.

Update

This book first appeared just as the Dover, Pennsylvania, evolution trial—technically Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District—built toward a dramatic courtroom confrontation. The case pitted a truly radical school board, which had gone further than any other in the nation in pushing “intelligent design” (ID) on its students, against the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Pennsylvania law firm Pepper Hamilton. Everyone called it a replay of the 1925 Scopes trial, but in fact it more closely paralleled 1982’s McLean v. Arkansas, a case that helped to determine whether ID’s predecessor, “creation science,” could be constitutionally taught in public school biology classes or whether it violated the First Amendment doctrine of separation of church and state.

The judge in McLean, William Overton, wrote a scathing opinion denouncing creation science as religion in disguise; and the judge in the Dover trial, John E. Jones III, more or less did the same with respect to ID. Perhaps the main difference was that Jones’s opinion was considerably longer. Released in December 2005 and 139 pages in length, it demonstrated just how rigorously the legal process can, at least sometimes, evaluate “scientific” disputes (a virtue unfortunately not possessed by some journalists who are called upon to cover science in its political context).

Jones’s opinion may well represent the death knell of “intelligent design,” both as a viable political strategy and as an idea with pretensions to intellectual seriousness. The judge proclaimed that ID does not and cannot constitute science because of its appeal to supernatural explanations and because its advocates do not (with rare exceptions) participate in the scientific process by publishing in peer-reviewed journals. He probed the religious motivations of the “intelligent design” movement and dredged up the “Wedge Document,” which he described as “a program of Christian apologetics to promote ID.” With all of this, Jones was only getting warmed up.

Drawing on new revelations dug up by the pro-evolution camp in preparation for the trial, Jones also explored the “history and historical pedigree” of the pro-ID textbook introduced into the Dover school district, Of Pandas and People. Published by a Christian organization called the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, it was originally authored by several creationists in the late 1980s, with drafts completed before and after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1987 ruling, in the landmark case Edwards v. Aguillard, that “creation science” could not be taught in science classes. What Jones found about the early drafts of Pandas absolutely devastates ID: In early versions, “creation” had the same definition used in later drafts for “intelligent design“; references to creationism in these earlier versions were then “systematically replaced” with references to ID; and most importantly, these telltale changes came right after the Edwards ruling that put an end to “creation science” as a political and legal strategy. From all of this, Judge Jones concluded that ID is simply “creationism re-labeled.“

In one of his most powerful passages, Jones underscored just how damaging the ID fight had been to the Dover community:

This case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

This from a judge who is a Republican and a Bush appointee. The passage underscores a point often missed: the evolution battle is not confined to the rarefied world of ideas. It has personal and human consequences. It causes intensive religious strife that can damage and tear apart communities—precisely what happened in Dover, Pennsylvania.

But leading Republicans in the United States, in positions of considerable power, do not apparently possess Judge Jones’s powers of discernment. Shortly before the Dover trial went to court, the teaching of “intelligent design” in public school science classes had won support from Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist as well as from President Bush. More recently, Republicans in the House of Representatives elected Congressman John Boehner of Ohio as their new majority leader. In 2002, before winning this role, Boehner coauthored a letter to the Ohio State Board of Education instructing it that students should learn about “differing scientific views on issues such as biological evolution.” If Boehner isn’t himself an “intelligent design” creationist, he certainly sounds sympathetic to them.

Yet ID’s most prominent backer in Congress, Pennsylvania Republican senator Rick Santorum, seemed to respond differently in the wake of the Dover trial. Even as Bush and Frist rushed to support this latest project of the Christian right, Santorum reversed his earlier position in support of teaching ID in our public schools, and retreated to a stance embraced by the Discovery Institute: ID shouldn’t officially be taught; rather, schools should teach about the “holes” in evolutionary theory. The catchphrase most frequently used to describe this strategy is “teach the controversy.” Santorum also resigned from the advisory board of the Thomas More Law Center, the Michigan-based “public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID” (as Judge Jones described the group) that unsuccessfully defended the school board in the Dover case.

“Teach the controversy” now becomes the likely ground on which the seemingly never-ending evolution battle will be fought. In the state of Kansas in November 2005, the antievolutionist Board of Education voted to adopt a science curriculum that casts doubt on evolution but does not explicitly propose ID as an alternative. But the board also redefined science so that it would not be limited to “natural” explanations, a change that both horrifies scientists and opens the door for ID-type ideas. Meanwhile, other states continue to experiment with various other antievolutionist tactics that may or may not pass constitutional muster. The only thing that seems certain, following the Dover trial, is that more litigation lies ahead—and that creationists will continue, as they have always done, to evolve.