Disingenuous Institute
The Philadelphia Inquirer ran two amusing pieces relating to the Kitzmiller case today. They were amusing in wryly different ways.
In the first article, “All sides of the issue belong in classroom,” Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute argued with a straight face that intelligent-design creationism is not a political issue but rather a scientific issue. Since the Discovery Institute has done its damnedest to make political hay of ID creationism, Mr. Luskin’s argument is disingenuous at best (http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/12759702.htm ).
(Mr. Luskin’s claim that ID creationists have published three papers in the last year would also be risible if it weren’t pathetic: None of the papers received an iota of support from any mainstream scientists, one was debunked here on PT (/archives/2004/10/theory-is-as-th.html ), and a second was repudiated by its journal following a scandal involving the outgoing editor.)
In a second article, “ID proponents like designer-less market,” John Allen Paulos (author, most famously, of Innumeracy) asks why “some of the most ardent opponents of Darwinian evolution … are among the most ardent supporters of the free market.” In short, why do they believe in social Darwinism but not evolutionary biology, even though “biology is a much more substantive science than economics”? Paulos does not answer, but concludes (http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/12759703.htm ),
What would you think of someone who studied economic entities and their interactions in a modern free-market economy and insisted that they were, despite a perfectly reasonable and empirically supported Smithian account of their development, the consequence of some all-powerful, detail-obsessed economic lawgiver? You might deem such a person a conspiracy theorist.
And what would you think of someone who studied biological processes and organisms and insisted that they were, despite a perfectly reasonable and empirically supported Darwinian account of their development, the consequence of some all-powerful, detail-obsessed biological lawgiver?