A Highly Evolved Discussion

You may recall last month's item on George Gilder's role in promoting "Intelligent Design," in which I mentioned his hand in the Discovery Institute, a think tank that's been pushing this issue especially hard. Well, I just caught up with Jodi Wilgoren's big story on the group. It's part of a NYT series called "A Debate Over Darwin," which also has Kenneth Chang laying out the science and Cornelia Dean on scientists with religious faith, whose "belief in God challenges scientists who regard religious belief as little more than magical thinking, as some do. Their faith also challenges believers who denounce science as a godless enterprise and scientists as secular elitists contemptuous of God-fearing people."

The issue probably resonates with me more than usual lately because I've just spent the last week writing about the scientific respectability that some folks have attributed to What the Bleep Do We Know?, when it's probably a lot closer to the New Age equivalent of creation science...or, as one journalist after another has suggested, recruitment propaganda for a cult. (See also this interview with Alexandra Bruce, the author of the "definitive unauthorized guide," Beyond the Bleep.)

But even for those of you who don't have that mental spur, the Times reporting makes for provocative reading. If a single reporter were doing all this, he or she would almost certainly have the makings of a book proposal by the end of the week.