DS: How did Intelligent Design come about, who cooked this up?
Barbara: It's important to distinguish between the development of the ID creationists' Wedge Strategy, which I describe below, and the development of the ID movement itself. The ID movement began in the early 1980s with the publication of The Mystery of Life's Origin (MoLO 1984) by creationist chemist Charles B. Thaxton with Walter L. Bradley and Roger L. Olsen. Thaxton worked for Jon A. Buell at the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE) in Texas, a religious organization that published MoLO. When FTE published MoLO, work had already begun on the book that later became Of Pandas and People, written by creationists Dean Kenyon and Percival Davis. Thaxton was the Pandas project chairman and academic editor. Thaxton called a 1988 conference, "Sources of Information Content in DNA," which attracted creationists such as Stephen C. Meyer, who later helped Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman establish the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (1996). In December 1988, Thaxton decided to use the label "intelligent design" instead of creationism for his new movement. He was the ID movement's most important early figure. He and Bradley later became Discovery Institute fellows at the CRSC.
It is important to note that both Thaxton's conference and his decision to use the term "intelligent design" occurred after the 1987 Edwards ruling. In addition, as I showed during my testimony in the Kitzmiller trial, the terminology used in Pandas was changed after the Edwards v. Aguillard ruling in 1987: the term "creationism" and its cognates were changed to "intelligent design."
All of this activity marked the beginning of the post-Edwards transformation of creation science to "intelligent design." ID proponents knew they could not continue to call themselves creationists. But Kenyon, who had been an expert witness as a "creation scientist" in the Edwards case at the same time he was writing Pandas, has plainly stated that "Scientific creationism, which in its modern phase began in the early 1960s, is actually one of the intellectual antecedents of the Intelligent Design movement" (Source).
In 1987, Stephen Meyer had met Phillip E. Johnson, a law professor at the University of California-Berkeley, while Johnson was on sabbatical in England and Meyer was completing his Ph.D. at Cambridge. Meyer told his fellow creationists about Johnson, who had undergone a religious conversion and decided to devote his life to crusading against evolution. After Johnson returned to the U.S., Meyer and his creationist associates united under Johnson's leadership, and Johnson developed his "Wedge Strategy." As I mentioned above, the ID movement was deliberately crafted, with Johnson as chief strategist, to avoid the constraints of the Edwards decision.
The "Wedge Strategy," Johnson's term for his plan to split open the "log of naturalism," began with Johnson's 1991 book Darwin on Trial. He rejects science's naturalistic methodology and wants to alter the definition of science to include the supernatural. He wants to reinstate in the public mind a pre-modern-- and pre-Darwinian-- understanding of science. Johnson considers his early work to be the "thin edge of the wedge," creating an opening for the work of younger ID creationists to gain entry into the science curriculum. Moreover, working with Religious Right groups such as Focus on the Family, American culture will be "renewed," i.e., returned to what ID proponents regard as its properly Christian foundation. (This reveals their agenda not only to subvert evolutionary theory, but secular constitutional democracy. See "The Wedge of Intelligent Design: Retrograde Science, Schooling, and Society," which Paul Gross and I wrote for Noretta Koertge's book, Scientific Values and Civic Virtues, Oxford University Press, 2005.)
After the 1996 establishment of the CRSC, ID creationists began to execute the Wedge Strategy in earnest. They sketched out their goals for the next twenty years in a tactical document entitled "The Wedge Strategy." Intended as a fundraising tool, it was leaked by Matt Duss, a part-time employee of a Seattle company who was instructed to photocopy it. His friend, Tim Rhodes, posted it on the Internet in February 1999. The Discovery Institute did not directly acknowledge ownership of the document until 2002. I had independently authenticated it in early 2000 during my research for Creationism's Trojan Horse. The "Wedge Document," as it is familiarly known, has served as a yardstick by which to measure the ID movement's advancement of its strategy.
DS: So, is there even a theory of Intelligent Design?
Babara: No. A scientific theory is a well-established scientific explanation of natural phenomena using abundant data acquired through rigorous scientific testing and research. ID proponents have produced absolutely nothing except a spate of books aimed at the popular audience. They have produced not one scintilla of scientific data because they have no scientific research program. ID is nothing more than a slightly repackaged extension of pre-Edwards creationism, advanced through the Discovery Institute's political connections, lucrative donor funding, Religious Right allies, and a slick public relations program. The Discovery Institute recently hired Creative Response Concepts, the same PR firm that represented Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
Although scientific research is listed as the first goal in Phase I of the Wedge Strategy (probably as reassurance to potential donors), no scientific research on ID has even been attempted in any meaningful way by ID proponents. No scientific data supporting ID has ever been published in a peer-reviewed science journal. If such data existed, the Discovery Institute could make it readily available on one of its many websites. Of the relative handful of scientists who have endorsed the ID agenda, not a single one uses intelligent design as a working, professional scientist. Even biochemist Michael Behe, ID's premier scientist, has produced absolutely no scientific data to support it, nor does he himself use ID as a scientific theory in his own professional work as a scientist. Kenneth Chang's August 22, 2005, New York Times article on the ID movement refers to an ID research center called the Biologic Institute. But no announcement of it is posted on the Discovery Institute's website. An Internet search turns up neither a website or a phone listing. I suspect that the Discovery Institute tossed this out in advance of the Dover trial, which began one month after the article appeared.
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