Politicized Scholars
Put Evolution
on the Defensive
By JODI WILGOREN,
NYTimes on the Web, August 21, 2005
SEATTLE -- When President Bush
plunged into the debate over the teaching of evolution this month, saying, "both
sides ought to be properly taught," he seemed to be reading from the playbook of
the Discovery Institute, the conservative think tank here that is at the helm of
this newly volatile frontier in the nation's culture wars.
After toiling in obscurity for nearly a decade, the institute's Center for
Science and Culture has emerged in recent months as the ideological and
strategic backbone behind the eruption of skirmishes over science in school
districts and state capitals across the country. Pushing a "teach the
controversy" approach to evolution, the institute has in many ways transformed
the debate into an issue of academic freedom rather than a confrontation between
biology and religion.
Mainstream scientists reject the notion that any controversy over evolution even
exists. But Mr. Bush embraced the institute's talking points by suggesting
that alternative theories and criticism should be included in biology
curriculums "so people can understand what the debate is about."
Financed by some of the same Christian conservatives who helped Mr. Bush win the
White House, the organization's intellectual core is a scattered group of
scholars who for nearly a decade have explored the unorthodox explanation of
life's origins known as intelligent design.
Together, they have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the
bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front
pages and putting Darwin's defenders firmly on the defensive.
Like a well-tooled electoral campaign, the Discovery Institute has a carefully
crafted, poll-tested message, lively Web logs -- and millions of dollars from
foundations run by prominent conservatives like Howard and Roberta Ahmanson,
Philip F. Anschutz and Richard Mellon Scaife.
The institute opened an office in
Washington last fall and in January hired the same Beltway public relations firm
that promoted the Contract With America in 1994.
"We are in the very initial stages of a scientific revolution," said the
center's director, Stephen C. Meyer, 47, a historian and philosopher of science
recruited by Discovery after he protested a professor's being punished for
criticizing Darwin in class. "We want to have an effect on the dominant
view of our culture."
For the institute's president, Bruce K. Chapman, a Rockefeller Republican turned
Reagan conservative, intelligent design appealed to his contrarian, futuristic
sensibilities -- and attracted wealthy, religious philanthropists like the
Ahmansons at a time when his organization was surviving on a shoestring.
More student of politics than science geek, Mr. Chapman embraced the evolution
controversy as the institute's signature issue precisely because of its
unpopularity in the establishment.
"When someone says there's one thing you can't talk about, that's what I want to
talk about," said Mr. Chapman, 64.
As much philosophical worldview as scientific hypothesis, intelligent design
challenges Darwin's theory of natural selection by arguing that some organisms
are too complex to be explained by evolution alone, pointing to the possibility
of supernatural influences. While mutual acceptance of evolution and the
existence of God appeals instinctively to a faithful public, intelligent design
is shunned as heresy in mainstream universities and science societies as
untestable in laboratories.
Entering the Public Policy Sphere
From its nondescript office suites here, the institute has provided an
institutional home for the dissident thinkers, pumping $3.6 million in
fellowships of $5,000 to $60,000 per year to 50 researchers since the science
center's founding in 1996. Among the fruits are 50 books on intelligent
design, many published by religious presses like InterVarsity or Crossway, and
two documentaries that were broadcast briefly on public television. But
even as the institute spearheads the intellectual development of intelligent
design, it has staked out safer turf in the public policy sphere, urging states
and school boards simply to include criticism in evolution lessons rather than
actually teach intelligent design.
Since the presidential election last fall, the movement has made inroads and
evolution has emerged as one of the country's fiercest cultural battlefronts,
with the National Center for Science Education tracking 78 clashes in 31 states,
more than twice the typical number of incidents. Discovery leaders have
been at the heart of the highest-profile developments: helping a Roman
Catholic cardinal place an opinion article in The New York Times in which he
sought to distance the church from evolution; showing its film promoting design
and purpose in the universe at the Smithsonian; and lobbying the Kansas Board of
Education in May to require criticism of evolution.
These successes follow a path laid in a 1999 Discovery manifesto known as the
Wedge Document, which sought "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and
its cultural legacies" in favor of a "broadly theistic understanding of nature."
President Bush's signature education law, known as No Child Left Behind, also
helped, as mandatory testing prompted states to rewrite curriculum standards.
Ohio, New Mexico and Minnesota have embraced the institute's "teach the
controversy" approach; Kansas is expected to follow suit in the fall.
Detractors dismiss Discovery as a fundamentalist front and intelligent design as
a clever rhetorical detour around the 1987 Supreme Court ruling banning
creationism from curriculums. But the institute's approach is more
nuanced, scholarly and politically adept than its Bible-based predecessors in
the century-long battle over biology.
A closer look shows a multidimensional organization, financed by missionary and
mainstream groups -- the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1 million a
year, including $50,000 of Mr. Chapman's $141,000 annual salary -- and asserting
itself on questions on issues as varied as local transportation and foreign
affairs.
Many of the research fellows, employees and board members are, indeed, devout
and determinedly conservative; pictures of William J. Bennett, the moral
crusader and former drug czar, are fixtures on office walls, and some leaders
have ties to movement mainstays like Focus on the Family. All but a few in
the organization are Republicans, though these include moderates drawn by the
institute's pragmatic, iconoclastic approach on nonideological topics like
technology.
But even as intelligent design has helped raise Discovery's profile, the
institute is starting to suffer from its success. Lately, it has tried to
distance itself from lawsuits and legislation that seek to force schools to add
intelligent design to curriculums, placing it in the awkward spot of trying to
promote intelligent design as a robust frontier for scientists but not yet ripe
for students.
The group is also fending off attacks from the left, as critics liken it to
Holocaust deniers or the Taliban. Concerned about the criticism,
Discovery's Cascadia project, which focuses on regional transportation and is
the recipient of the large grant from the Gates Foundation, created its own Web
site to ensure an individual identity.
"All ideas go through three stages -- first they're ignored, then they're
attacked, then they're accepted," said Jay W. Richards, a philosopher and the
institute's vice president. "We're kind of beyond the ignored stage.
We're somewhere in the attack."
Origins of an Institute
Founded in 1990 as a branch of the Hudson Institute, based in Indianapolis, the
institute was named for the H.M.S. Discovery, which explored Puget Sound in
1792. Mr. Chapman, a co-author of a 1966 critique of Barry M. Goldwater's
anti-civil-rights campaign, "The Party That Lost Its Head," had been a liberal
Republican on the Seattle City Council and candidate for governor, but moved to
the right in the Reagan administration, where he served as director of the
Census Bureau and worked for Edwin Meese III.
In late 1993, Mr. Chapman clipped an essay in The Wall Street Journal by Dr.
Meyer, who was teaching at a Christian college in Spokane, Wash., concerning a
biologist yanked from a lecture hall for discussing intelligent design.
About a year later, over dinner at the Sorrento Hotel here, Dr. Meyer and George
Gilder, Mr. Chapman's long-ago Harvard roommate and his writing partner,
discovered parallel theories of mind over materialism in their separate studies
of biology and economics.
"Bruce kind of perked up and said, 'This is what makes a think tank,' " Dr.
Meyer recalled. "There was kind of an 'Aha!' moment in the conversation,
there was a common metaphysic in these two ideas."
That summer of 1995, Mr. Chapman and Dr. Meyer had dinner with a representative
of the Ahmansons, the banking billionaires from Orange County, Calif., who had
previously given a small grant to the institute and underwritten an early
conclave of intelligent design scholars. Dr. Meyer, who had grown friendly
enough with the Ahmansons to tutor their young son in science, recalled being
asked, "What could you do if you had some financial backing?"
So in 1996, with the promise of $750,000 over three years from the Ahmansons and
a smaller grant from the MacLellan Foundation, which supports organizations
"committed to furthering the Kingdom of Christ," according to its Web site, the
institute's Center for Science and Culture was born.
"Bruce is a contrarian, and this was a contrarian idea," said Edward J. Larson,
the historian and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Scopes Monkey
Trial, who was an early fellow at the institute, but left in part because of its
drift to the right. "The institute was living hand-to-mouth. Here
was an academic, credible activity that involved funders. It interested
conservatives. It brought in money."
Support From Religious Groups
The institute would not provide details about its backers "because they get
harassed," Mr. Chapman said. But a review of tax documents on
www.guidestar.org, a Web
site that collects data on foundations, showed its grants and gifts jumped to
$4.1 million in 2003 from $1.4 million in 1997, the most recent and oldest years
available. The records show financial support from 22 foundations, at
least two-thirds of them with explicitly religious missions.
There is the Henry P. and Susan C. Crowell Trust of Colorado Springs, whose Web
site describes its mission as "the teaching and active extension of the
doctrines of evangelical Christianity." There is also the AMDG Foundation
in Virginia, run by Mark Ryland, a Microsoft executive turned Discovery vice
president: the initials stand for Ad Majorem Dei Glorium, Latin for "To
the greater glory of God," which Pope John Paul II etched in the corner of all
his papers.
And the Stewardship Foundation, based in Tacoma, Wash., whose Web site says it
was created "to contribute to the propagation of the Christian Gospel by
evangelical and missionary work," gave the group more than $1 million between
1999 and 2003.
By far the biggest backers of the intelligent design efforts are the Ahmansons,
who have provided 35 percent of the science center's $9.3 million since its
inception and now underwrite a quarter of its $1.3 million annual operations.
Mr. Ahmanson also sits on Discovery's board.
The Ahmansons' founding gift was joined by $450,000 from the MacLellan
Foundation, based in Chattanooga, Tenn.
"We give for religious purposes," said Thomas H. McCallie III, its executive
director. "This is not about science, and Darwin wasn't about science.
Darwin was about a metaphysical view of the world."
The institute also has support from secular groups like the Verizon Foundation
and the Gates Foundation, which gave $1 million in 2000 and pledged $9.35
million over 10 years in 2003. Greg Shaw, a grant maker at the Gates
Foundation, said the money was "exclusive to the Cascadia project" on regional
transportation.
But the evolution controversy has cost it the support of the Bullitt Foundation,
based here, which gave $10,000 in 2001 for transportation, as well as the John
Templeton Foundation in Pennsylvania, whose Web site defines it as devoted to
pursuing "new insights between theology and science."
Denis Hayes, director of the Bullitt Foundation, described Discovery in an
e-mail message as "the institutional love child of Ayn Rand and Jerry Falwell,"
saying, "I can think of no circumstances in which the Bullitt Foundation would
fund anything at Discovery today."
Charles L. Harper Jr., the senior vice president of the Templeton Foundation,
said he had rejected the institute's entreaties since providing $75,000 in 1999
for a conference in which intelligent design proponents confronted critics.
"They're political -- that for us is problematic," Mr. Harper said. While
Discovery has "always claimed to be focused on the science," he added, "what I
see is much more focused on public policy, on public persuasion, on educational
advocacy and so forth."
For three years after completing graduate school in 1996, William A. Dembski
could not find a university job, but he nonetheless received what he called "a
standard academic salary" of $40,000 a year.
"I was one of the early beneficiaries of Discovery largess," said Dr. Dembski,
whose degrees include a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago,
one in philosophy from the University of Illinois and a master's of divinity
from Princeton Theological Seminary.
Money for Teachers and Students
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.
The 40 fellows affiliated with the science center are an eclectic group,
including David Berlinski, an expatriate mathematician living in Paris who
described his only religion to be "having a good time all the time," and
Jonathan Wells, a member of the Unification Church, led by the Rev. Sun Myung
Moon, who once wrote in an essay, "My prayers convinced me that I should devote
my life to destroying Darwinism."
Their credentials -- advanced degrees from Stanford, Columbia, Yale, the
University of Texas, the University of California -- are impressive, but their
ideas are often ridiculed in the academic world.
"They're interested in the same things I'm interested in -- no one else is,"
Guillermo Gonzalez, 41, an astronomer at the University of Iowa, said of his
colleagues at Discovery. "What I'm doing, frankly, is frowned upon by most
of my colleagues. It's not something a 'scientist' is supposed to do."
Other than Dr. Berlinski, most fellows, like their financiers, are
fundamentalist Christians, though they insist their work is serious science, not
closet creationism.
"I believe that God created the universe," Dr. Gonzalez said. "What I
don't know is whether that evidence can be tested objectively. I ask
myself the tough questions."
Discovery sees the focus on its fellows and financial backers as a diversionary
tactic by its opponents. "We're talking about evidence, and they want to
talk about us," Dr. Meyer said.
But Philip Gold, a former fellow who left in 2002, said the institute had grown
increasingly religious. "It evolved from a policy institute that had a
religious focus to an organization whose primary mission is Christian
conservatism," he said.
That was certainly how many people read the Wedge Document, a five-page outline
of a five-year plan for the science center that originated as a fund-raising
pitch but was soon posted on the Internet by critics.
"Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist
worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and
theistic convictions," the document says. Among its promises are seminars
"to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidence that support the
faith, as well as to 'popularize' our ideas in the broader culture."
One sign of any political movement's advancement is when adherents begin to act
on their own, often without the awareness of the leadership. That,
according to institute officials, is what happened in 1999, when a new
conservative majority on the Kansas Board of Education shocked the nation -- and
their potential allies here at the institute -- by dropping all references to
evolution from the state's science standards.
"When there are all these legitimate scientific controversies, this was silly,
outlandish, counterproductive," said John G. West, associate director of the
science center, who said he and his colleagues learned of that 1999 move in
Kansas from newspaper accounts. "We began to think, 'Look, we're going to
be stigmatized with what everyone does if we don't make our position clear.' "
Out of this developed Discovery's "teach the controversy" approach, which
endorses evolution as a staple of any biology curriculum -- so long as criticism
of Darwin is also in the lesson plan. This satisfied Christian
conservatives but also appealed to Republican moderates and, under the First
Amendment banner, much of the public (71 percent in a Discovery-commissioned
Zogby poll in 2001 whose results were mirrored in newspaper polls).
"They have packaged their message much more cleverly than the creation science
people have," said Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science
Education, the leading defender of evolution. "They present themselves as
being more mainstream. I prefer to think of that as creationism light."
A watershed moment came with the adoption in 2001 of the No Child Left Behind
Act, whose legislative history includes a passage that comes straight from the
institute's talking points. "Where biological evolution is taught, the
curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much
continuing controversy," was language that Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of
Pennsylvania, tried to include.
Pointing to that principle, institute fellows in 2002 played important roles in
pushing the Ohio Board of Education to adopt a "teach the controversy" approach
and helped devise a curriculum to support it. The following year, they
successfully urged changes to textbooks in Texas to weaken the argument for
evolution, and they have been consulted in numerous other cases as school
districts or states consider changing their approach to biology.
But this spring, at the hearings in Kansas, Mr. Chapman grew visibly frustrated
as his supposed allies began talking more and more about intelligent design.
John Calvert, the managing director of the Intelligent Design Network, based in
Kansas, said the institute had the intellectual and financial resources to "lead
the movement" but was "more cautious" than he would like. "They want to
avoid the discussion of religion because that detracts from the focus on the
science," he said.
Dr. West, who leads the science center's public policy efforts, said it did not
support mandating the teaching of intelligent design because the theory was not
yet developed enough and there was no appropriate curriculum. So the
institute has opposed legislation in Pennsylvania and Utah that pushes
intelligent design, instead urging lawmakers to follow Ohio's lead.
"A lot of people are trying to hijack the issue on both the left and the right,"
Dr. West said.
Dr. Chapman, for his part, sees even these rough spots as signs of success.
"All ideas that achieve a sort of uniform acceptance ultimately fall apart
whether it's in the sciences or philosophy or politics after a few people keep
knocking away at it," he said. "It's wise for society not to punish those
people."
Jack Begg, David Bernstein and Alain Delaquérière contributed
reporting for this article.
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