IS IT BY DESIGN, OR THROUGH CONVERGENT EVOLUTION? One way or the other, Evolution News and Views, the blogging arm of the Discovery Institute, has clearly adopted the proven survival technique of wildebeest on the Serengeti: form a herd, and stampede past the predators!

Just as the superabundance of galloping wildebeest ensures only a few are lost to the lionesses, so the sheer volume of blog pieces hurtling out of the Discovery Institute enables many otherwise unsustainable contentions amongst the galloping gallimaufry to survive and even propagate in the blogsphere. Given that most of the writers for Panda’s Thumb and other sites have day jobs actually doing science, it’s commendable that they pick off the few DI blog pieces that actually attempt to discuss a morsel of science and make thereof a reasonable snack.

So I had to count myself lucky last month when I stumbled across, at the Discovery Institute’s website, Dr. Michael Egnor’s article, Dunford, Darwinism, and the Paranoid Style, a whole herd of frantic claims limping across the virtual veldt of the internet with no visible means of support. Had the big predators somehow missed this easy meat, or simply turned up their noses at so sickly a herd? Or perhaps had even left it for an inexperienced cub such as myself to bring back alive to the lair to ‘play’ with as an induction to true hunting?

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FORMER GEOLOGIST (NOW ATTORNEY) CASEY LUSKIN, a prolific blogger for the Discovery Institute (DI) of Seattle, has sounded another clarion call against the marching jack-boots of Totalitarian Scientists in a stirring new offering, European Darwinists Attempt to Criminalize Intelligent Design as a “Threat to Human Rights”.

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IN THE YEAR SINCE JUDGE JONES’ RULING blunted its notorious Wedge Strategy in Pennsylvania, the ID Think-Tankers of the Discovery Institute would appear to have been preparing a fresh assault on another Dover — this time, the eponymous white cliffs of Darwin’s own ancestral Albion. And, as in the American case, the DI would appear to be working through a proxy player the better to maintain ‘plausible deniability.’

Over the past year, a mysterious organisation has been established in the UK, styling itself Truth in Science (TiS)“ a private limited company. While the company’s source of income is not published, in September of this year it nonetheless distributed free ‘teaching packs (DVDs and literature) advocating ‘Intelligent Design’ to all UK secondary school science teachers. Some useful light may be cast upon the nature of the shadowy ‘Truth in Science’ organisation thanks to the diligence of the splendid British Centre for Science Education (link highly recommended for facts on TiS).

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[Establishing shot: pan over cityscape, somewhere on the Great Plains.]

THIS IS THE CITY: Dembskiopolis, Kansas.

There are 2 million people in this city, most of them Second-Thermodynamic-Law-abiding.

Some are not. They say we’re just monkeys.

That’s when I step in.

My name is Sunday. I carry The Book.

[Music: Dum-dee-dum-dum. Dum-dee-dum-dum-DUM!]

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“THERE IS AN INVISIBLE, INTANGIBLE, ODOURLESS ELEPHANT standing in this room, and that is why you are feeling cold: True or False?”

So the Professor wrote on the chalkboard not five minutes into the first session of an “Introduction to the Philosophy of Science” course in an icy lecture hall. It was enough to persuade me I had made a serious error in my selection of a freshman elective course. Maybe I really should have gone for Music Appreciation instead, which now sounded more intellectually engaging.
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GOOD MORNING, MR. FILKS. ONE OF OUR TOP AGENTS, Codename ‘Cora Tunnel’, has recently filed a profoundly disturbing report entitled Codpiece: The Protocols of the Elders of Darwin. Her account, now published under statutory provisions of the Freedom of Misinformation Act, chillingly reveals the existence of a brutal junta, relentless in its quest to extirpate morality and presiding over the most vile and ruthless conspiracy ever devised since the creation of the world late in the evening of October 4^th, 4004 BC.

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IT WAS AN HOUR before lunch, but I didn’t have a client and there was nowhere to look for one. So I put my feet on my desk, pulled a bottle out of the bottom drawer and poured a slug of bourbon into my coffee cup. From the window, the Golden Gate was half-hidden in the dirty fog, the thin sunlight falling on my desk was sliced to ribbons by the Venetian blinds. I lit up a Camel, watched the smoke rise languidly until it hit the ceiling fan, then started to study the racing form. I was thinking about placing a punt on a filly in the 12:40 Santa Anita Handicap when the door opened.

She was blonde and slim and her legs held my eyes like two long strips of flypaper curling out from a little black cocktail dress they’d ban in Boston. This was a doll with the kind of looks to give you the KO punch in the first round.
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