Chapter 26

Why Does Intelligent Design Act so Much Like the Tobacco Lobby?

The tobacco lobby was a pioneer in denying scientific evidence. Once the link between smoking and cancer became clear in the 1950s, the tobacco industry stood to lose billions of dollars if people quit smoking for fear of getting cancer.

With billions of dollars at stake, the tobacco industry did everything it could think of to try and deny the connection between tobacco use and cancer. It needed to keep people thinking that smoking was safe, at least long enough for them to get addicted.

With the amount of money that it had and the amounts it stood to lose or gain, the tobacco lobby could afford to develop whole new realms of dishonesty, and it did this with great success. So much so that subsequent science-denying enterprises such as ID have simply copied their playbook.

Here are the tobacco lobby’s ploys for denying science.

Manufacture a “Controversy”

The tobacco lobby is famous for manufacturing doubt. In the face of overwhelming evidence of the causal connection between smoking and cancer, the tobacco lobby continuously said that there was still uncertainty in the results. It also denied the fact that tobacco is addictive by insisting that scientific results on the subject were uncertain.

Here are a few gems from the 1954 advertisement by the Tobacco Industry Research Committee called “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers”:

Recent reports on experiments with mice have given wide publicity to a theory that cigarette smoking is in some way linked with lung cancer in human beings.” [Italics mine.]

Distinguished authorities point out:

1. That medical research of recent years indicated many possible causes of lung cancer.

2. That there is no agreement among the authorities regarding what the cause is.

3. That there is no proof that cigarette smoking is one of the causes . . .

Doesn’t this sound like ID’s arguments?

Hire a Few People with Fancy Degrees to Be Your Public Face

They got a few scientists to be lobbyists. They paid them very well. These former scientists prostituted themselves in public by saying that the tobacco/cancer link was uncertain. One of the people they hired was a guy named Fred Singer. Even as late as 1993, Fred Singer was denying the cancer risks associated with secondhand smoke. Dr. Singer has a PhD in physics.

Start a Fake “Research Institute”

The tobacco lobby also came up with the Tobacco Research Institute, which didn’t do much of any laboratory research, but which had nice stationery and other things that made it look like a real, respectable scientific research organization. It was just a front for tobacco’s well-paid lobbyists, but the “Tobacco Research Institute” sounds very official, and makes it sound as though it’s just another scientific research institute like, say, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

This way, tobacco lobbyists could pretend to be well-meaning, neutral academics, just trying to inform and protect the American people.

Pretend It’s a Debate

From this platform they then went on to claim that because of the “uncertainty” (that they created), the two “sides” had equal merit, which they didn’t. It also turned very serious cancer research into something that sounded like a high school debate.

The tobacco lobby further insisted that simply because it claimed that the two sides had equal merit, that meant that the two sides did have equal merit.

Repeat Untruths Unashamedly

The tobacco lobby happily repeated the same untrue things over and over, no matter how often they were corrected in public with facts that proved their assertions wrong.

Pretend You’re a Victim

The tobacco lobby loved to pretend that they were victims, instead of admitting that they were a powerful multibillion-dollar industry. They pretended that smokers were victims of anti-smoking campaigns, rather than being the victims of a powerful and addictive substance that the tobacco lobby was making billions of dollars from selling. They objected strenuously to efforts to help people stop smoking, or get away from smoke-filled areas, but they did not object to their own multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns aimed at getting people to start or continue smoking. They also pretended that they were being victimized if people were warned about the proven health hazards of smoking.

People are generally kind and forgiving toward victims. So the tobacco lobbyists probably thought that by portraying themselves as victims, they could get people’s sympathy, and then people would be less likely to hold them responsible for tobacco’s deleterious health effects.

Talk About Freedom

The tobacco lobbyists loved to talk about freedom. They talked about how smokers “rights” were being infringed. Of course, when they talked about freedom, they didn’t mean the freedom of the American people to know the true dangers of smoking cigarettes. That freedom they kept as far from the American people as possible and they spent a lot of money doing it. Instead, they insisted that informing the American public of the tobacco/cancer link was an unwarranted intrusion on their freedom.

The real reason that the tobacco lobbyists loved to talk about freedom was that it allowed them to change the subject. They could move the conversation away from all the deaths caused by smoking, and pretend instead that they were just sticking up for freedom, which is an emotionally charged topic. It allowed them to pretend that they were heroes instead of very well-paid lobbyists.

Hook ’Em While They’re Young!

Tobacco companies made deliberate attempts to hook people on cigarettes while they were young. These attempts included everything from advertisements that featured kid-oriented cartoon characters to giving away free cigarettes to small children at playgrounds.65

So, to recap, the tobacco lobby’s playbook looked like this:

1. Manufacture “uncertainty.” It doesn’t matter how you do it. You don’t need any results of your own. Just call other people’s work into question. Use the word “controversy” when describing the opposition’s scientific results.

2. Get some spokespeople who have fancy degrees, who will say anything so long as you pay them enough.

3. Invent an “institute” as a front for your lobbyists.

4. Pretend it’s a debate. Claim that “uncertainty” means that both sides have equal merit.

5. Repeat things that are untrue, even after you have been publicly corrected.

6. Portray yourself and your followers as victims. It gets people’s sympathy.

7. Talk about freedom. It’s very important to talk about freedom, since it’s a way of changing the subject and moving the conversation away from the fact that tobacco products cause cancer.

8. When possible, convince children to be your followers—the younger, the better.

The tobacco lobby did all this hoping to cover up for the fact that all the experimental data from laboratories all over the world showed a clear link between tobacco products and cancer.

Intelligent Design Follows the Tobacco Lobby’s Example

The intelligent design lobby has done the same thing.

1. They have manufactured “uncertainty” about evolution where none exists. They claim that uncertainty exists, even though 99 percent of all scientists state that evolution by natural selection is a fact.

2. They have some lobbyists with fancy degrees, like Michael Behe and William Dembski, both of whom have PhDs. Also remember Dr. Fred Singer, who I mentioned earlier as denying the link between secondhand smoke and cancer? Now he’s denying the link between CO2 and global warming. You know where his coauthor gave a public speech on the topic? The Discovery Institute.

Figure 26.1 Event announcement from the Discovery Institute.

Here is the announcement for the event denying human-caused global warming. The event took place at the Discovery Institute. The coauthor of the book being presented is Fred Singer.

3. They have a fancy-sounding institute, the “Discovery Institute,” which has no scientific equipment, not even a microscope, but does have nice stationery.

4. They claim that “uncertainty” means that ID, which has no experimental evidence, has just as much merit as evolution by natural selection, which has 150 years of scientific evidence behind it.

5. They say things that are untrue, even after they have been corrected. For instance, they still claim that Of Pandas and People (renamed Design for Life) was neither a creationist nor a religious text. See Chapter 6 for more details.

6. They portray themselves and their movement as victims. They portray themselves as ignored by the scientific “establishment” and unable to get them to pay attention. In fact, ID is treated remarkably well considering that its proponents have not provided a single piece of experimental evidence to support their claims. Despite ID’s lack of evidence and its proponents’ lack of willingness to make predictions or otherwise use the scientific method, the scientific community pays ID and its proponents far more respectful attention than they would to any other group of people who had no evidence.

Scientific journals routinely review books by ID proponents. They do not extend this courtesy to other groups with ideas that have a similar lack of scientific evidence, such as astrologers or UFO believers. In fact, ID generally gets treated with kid gloves by the scientific community.

By contrast, real scientists have to present solid evidence before they are given so much notice, and they have to present many years’ worth of evidence before their ideas become fully accepted. For instance, the scientists who showed that stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria had to work in laboratories and produce convincing evidence for twenty years before their ideas were considered to be proven true. For more discussion of stomach ulcer research, see Chapter 28.

What’s more, ID proponents get interviewed on television and radio, which is more attention than most serious scientists ever get, and which does not make it sound as though intelligent design is being silenced. ID gets lots of funding from the Discovery Institute, and gets lots of political support from the likes of former and current presidential candidates Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, Ben Carson, and Michele Bachmann.

7. Then they talk about freedom. This is a classic move to try and change the subject and move away from their very weak case, and toward an emotional subject that Americans care deeply about, but which is not relevant to whether or not ID has any scientific merit.

So ID promoters always try to bring up the phrase “academic freedom,” even though public school teachers don’t have it and have never had it. It’s just a way for them to try and change the subject to something emotional, so that people won’t notice how bad their arguments are in terms of solid evidence. I talk more about academic freedom and what it is, and is not, in Chapter 16.

The ID lobby does all this, hoping to cover up for the fact that there is no experimental evidence in favor of ID.

8. They’re deliberately targeting young people. The ID lobby wants to promote ID to school children, in public schools, using the children’s authority figures, teachers, as their pitchmen.

Straight to Textbooks

Then they do the tobacco lobby one better, by insisting that their idea should not only be taught in schools, it should be printed in textbooks before it has produced any experimental evidence.

This is in direct contradiction to how real science is done. When real scientists have a new idea, they make predictions, do experiments, and get their results published in scientific journals that are vetted and reviewed by other scientists. This goes on for many years before the new idea is fully accepted. Only then does it go into textbooks. But all this scientific work and waiting is just too tedious for ID promoters. They want their ideas taught as truth, or perhaps I should say gospel, right now.

Imagine what would have happened if science textbooks had been required to print the bogus claims of the cigarette manufacturers.

Now that I’ve talked about the folks in the tobacco and ID lobbies, let’s move on to some much nicer creatures. Let’s talk about sharks.

65. Milton J. Valencia, “Smoker’s suit wins award of $71m,” Boston Globe, December 5, 2010.