Uncloseting the Discovery Institute: The IDea that Dare Not Speak Its Name (Part 1)

October 17th, 2007 Jemmy Button

DISCOVERY INSTITUTE PUBLICIST ROBERT CROWTHER recently posted an especially self-pitying article on one of the DI’s blogging arms, ”Evolution News and Views”. Entitled Is Intelligent Design Such a Dangerous Idea That It Must Not Be Thought?, it’s a real tear-jerker, wending its way through the DI’s ever-popular “Mom, those mean scientists won’t play with me” themes and — in words echoing those of Lord Alfred Douglas that cost Oscar Wilde so dearly — concluding with the plaintive wail about persecuting “Darwinists” (my bolding):

Try as they might, they can’t ban thinking about intelligent design. Thoughtful students will continue to explore what is so dangerous about this idea that no one can even be allowed to whisper its name.

So poignant a plea could not fail to move even the stony hearts of Darwin Central, the Conspiracy that Cares. And so we at once resolved, not to whisper, but indeed to loudly proclaim, through this present series of articles, all that we have learned about the downtrodden Discovery Institute and its promotion of the IDea that dare not speak its name.

Thanks to some fine internet archaeology by Darwin Central Arch-Conspiratrix JennyP, it is possible to trace, over the last 11 years, how the Discovery Institute has been diligently scrubbing their website of any embarrassing hints about their true motivation for opposing evolution and replacing it with “intelligent design”. Using the Wayback Machine, we can follow how the Discovery Institute has been sanitising its propaganda, from initial call to arms to ‘topple naturalism’ to incessant plaints of ‘persecution’ by the jack-booted Thought Police of the Darwintern.

And lo, what do we find at the very outset? Far from not daring to whisper, in the beginning the Discovery Institute flamboyantly proclaimed its true agenda with an unbridled exuberance to belt even the most ostentatious Gay Pride Parade into drab and lacklustre monochrome. It was quite a smorgasbord they presented, so I hope you’ve brought a goodly appetite as we begin our little feast here.

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Not since Duranty won the Pulitzer…

October 12th, 2007 RWA

They could have given the Nobel Peace Prize to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Paul Rusesabagina or Oscar Biscet. They could have given it to all the activists working for peace in Africa, Afghanistan and the Balkans. But no, they gave it to ManBearPig, in what appears to be one of a successive series of deliberate jabs by the Nobel committee against the current U.S. President. The Nobel Peace Prize obviously now has about as much relevance to actual peace as the Stalin Peace Prize did.

Some more reactions from across the Internet:

Steven Hayward
Ronald Bailey
Lubos Motl
Rick Moran
Neo-Neocon

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This side up

October 8th, 2007 midwifetoad

A COUPLE OF DECADES AGO, I worked for a software company whose primary development machine was an AT&T 3B2. It shared a feature with many current computers, an external disk drive. The drive was connected by a flat cable, similar to the ones that have for many years connected hard drives in PCs. One day the computer was moved from one room to another.

In its new home, the critter refused to boot. Several hours of phone calls and diagnostics ensued. Among other suggestions, tech support asked us to be sure the drive cables were installed correctly. They were checked. The cables were clearly marked in plain English, This side up.

Finally it was decided to pack the thing up an take it to the shop. When the drive cable was disconnected, by pure chance, someone looked at the other side of the cable. It also said, This side up.
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Hey, whose war on science is this, anyway?

October 6th, 2007 Black Ops

IT’S PRETTY HARD TO TELL THESE DAYS, if you spend much time watching. Sure, plenty of attention is paid to the frontal assaults made by creationists and the like, not least by us here at Darwin Central. But that’s hardly the only agenda-driven perversion of good science, and now the inimitable Right Wing Professor has opened a new series, dedicated to the offenses of the ostensible defenders of science. Science is a fragile maiden, so pay close attention to the good doctor as he exposes those who, far from defending good science, instead sneak it off to a quiet back room where they might molest it undisturbed. Lots of creepy-crawlies under some of those rocks, so mind your fingers, and catch the first installment here.

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Europe Bitch-Slaps the Discovery Institute

October 5th, 2007 Jemmy Button

DISHONEST ATTEMPTS BY THE DISCOVERY INSTITUTE, its UK proxy organisation Truth in Science, and its Creationist bedfellow Harun Yahya to introduce Creationism/Intelligent Design into the science curricula of European Schools have been resoundingly smacked down by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Meeting in Strasbourg on 4 October, the Assembly passed by a vote of 48 to 25 the revised draft of the Committee on Culture, Science, and Education resolution on The dangers of creationism in education.

The Executive Summary of the Resolution reads:

Creationism in any of its forms, such as “intelligent design”, is not based on facts, does not use any scientific reasoning and its contents are definitely inappropriate for science classes.

However, some people call for creationist theories to be taught in European schools alongside or even in place of the theory of evolution. From a scientific view point, there is absolutely no doubt that evolution is a central theory for our understanding of life on Earth.

The Assembly calls on education authorities in member states to promote scientific knowledge and the teaching of evolution and to oppose firmly any attempts at teaching creationism as a scientific discipline.

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Will I ever laugh again?

October 3rd, 2007 RWA

The cartooning team of Cox and Forkum have announced their retirement from full-time editorial cartooning. I’ll not just miss them because they were by far the best Internet cartoonists around, but because of their political perspective, which was ostensibly Objectivist, but might more accurately be called “right-wing rationalism” or “Enlightenment Conservatism”. It is exceedingly rare to find commentators who are consistently well-informed and reasonable on all topics they tackle, so they were a real breath of fresh air. Appropriately enough, I’ll leave you with their cartoon on the Intelligent Design issue, which, better than any other, illustrates its true agenda:

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