“The NY Times has a long article on the history and finance of the Discovery Institute, as well as its campaign to inject non-science into the science classroom”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/national/21evolve.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5089&en=24bc7c9c168ac8a8&ex=1282276800&adxnnl=0&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1124576825-jnRIYk4t25rJCvsuvxP4ww.
Here are a few things I found fascinating and scary:
* “When someone says there’s one thing you can’t talk about, that’s what I want to talk about.” This was a statement by the DI’s president, Mr. Chapman. I guess he’s referring to the fact that hypothesizing an unverifiable or irrefutable creator/designer just isn’t science. My colleagues and I discuss religion and philosophy all the time. Over several lunches this last week, several of my physics friends and I talked about our feelings on God, our worry about the misuse of God by organized religions, and the place of a God or a founding principle in modern science. Without the idea of a single idea upon which rests the firmament of the universe, we physicists would never have gotten as far as we did in reducing the universe to the Standard Model and General Relativity. God lies in the math, in the laws, in the order. I can’t prove or disprove the reality of God, but I feel closer to the universe when I study math or nature – close to God – than I ever did in church.
* The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation provides $1M per year to the DI. That’s another reason I use Linux.
* “Since its founding in 1996, the science center has spent 39 percent of its $9.3 million on research, Dr. Meyer said, underwriting books or papers, or often just paying universities to release professors from some teaching responsibilities so that they can ponder intelligent design. Over those nine years, $792,585 financed laboratory or field research in biology, paleontology or biophysics, while $93,828 helped graduate students in paleontology, linguistics, history and philosophy.” That means the DI spends less than half its budget on research. It’s published only one paper in a mainstream scientific peer-reviewed journal, and that was onl a review of the gaps in evolutionary theory. Most of its money is spent, it seems, on one form of self-aggrandizement or another – books, lobbying, pamphlets, etc. If we scientists spent that little of our hard-earned money on research, the public would shut us down and burn us at the stake. I’d really like to know what the fruit of all that research money spent by the DI has actually been. I’ll wager they still haven’t devised an experiment to prove or disprove a creator. I’ll bet their research is more like this: they follow legitimate scientists around, watch their work and conclusions over their shoulders, and then say at the end, “Oop! You missed something. I’ll be that’s God in there.”
