Chapter 28
The Discovery Institute Hasn’t Discovered Anything (Sort of Like the Tobacco Institute)
“. . . we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism.”
—The Wedge Strategy
The Discovery Institute is an oddly named organization, especially since it hasn’t discovered anything. In fact, it doesn’t even own a microscope. Sort of like the way that the Tobacco Research Institute didn’t do any scientific research.
What they are good at doing is complaining about other people’s scientific research. However, they are very bad at figuring out what they themselves actually think.
They are also very good at arguing. In fact, that’s mostly what they do. Except that they call this arguing “research.” This is different from the research that scientists do, which generally involves going into the laboratory, or doing field work, and writing down observations, and doing experiments, and subjecting their results to statistical analysis, and so on. The only thing that the folks at the Discovery Institute do is argue. A lot. They argue on television, they argue on the radio, they argue in print. They never talk about their experiments.
Q: When is an Institute not a scientific research Institute?
A: When they don’t do scientific research.
Papers written by people at the Discovery Institute contain lots of arguments. Scientific papers, by contrast, tend to be fairly dry, and they stick to facts such as how the experiments were done, and what the results were. Arguing is rarely a part of a scientific paper. Scientists tend to believe that the facts speak for themselves. This is why it is easy to tell a scientific paper from almost anything else. Scientific papers talk almost exclusively about experiments, observations, data, results, and other things that matter to scientific research. What you will not find in scientific papers are thundering arguments, fiercely held contentions, or other forms of rhetoric commonly used by theologians and philosophers.
In fact, the contrast between scientific papers and other forms of writing is so pronounced that I did an experiment to check the truth of the claim that ID really is science.
Here’s what I did:
Articles by design proponents that were claimed to be both scientific and peer reviewed and that were available on the Discovery Institute (DI) website were analyzed, looking for the word data, including both data and database, which would indicate a quantitative approach to their work. I also looked for words containing the root “argu-,” which would indicate a debate-like approach to scholarship more characteristic of philosophy or religion. These results were compared to word counts from an identical analysis of papers by evolutionary biologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI).
I predicted that articles by ID proponents from the Discovery Institute would use words with the root argu- more than the word data, while articles by scientists from the STRI would have the reverse proportions. What I found was that the root argu- was frequent in the papers from the Discovery Institute but nearly nonexistent in the papers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. By contrast, data was abundant in the STRI papers, but infrequent in papers from the DI (see figure 28.1).
Figure 28.1 Histogram of word frequencies.
The frequency of the use of the words argu- and data by proponents of intelligent design at the Discovery Institute, and by scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). Scientists at STRI made heavy use of data, but rarely used or cited argumentation in their articles. Discovery Institute writers rarely referred to data, and never to testing a hypothesis, but referred heavily to argumentation. The difference was extreme. These results were significant to p < 1.9 x 10 -53. That’s: significant to p < .000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000019, using a chi-square test.
Having ascertained that Discovery Institute authors rarely use the word data, I then examined every case in which they did, to see if they ever used it to refer to their own testing of a prediction that they had made, using a hypothesis generated by ID. I found that out of the twenty-four instances in DI-published papers in which the word data was used, nineteen referred to data generated by other people, usually data on Cambrian fossils; four referred to data as a concept; and one referred to data that were original, but that did not test a hypothesis.
In short, in all of the supposedly peer-reviewed ID literature that the Discovery Institute has published, there was not a single instance of hypothesis testing.
So although proponents of ID like to claim that it is science, these data, taken from their own writings, strongly contradict this claim.
These results were published in the September 2015 issue of The American Biology Teacher, a peer-reviewed journal.
The Discovery Institute has had twenty years in which to come up with hard scientific data in support of ID. They have not done so.
Real, significant science can be done in twenty years. Scientists are very open to new ideas, when they are backed up with solid experimental data. Since the 1970s, other scientific paradigms have been upended and replaced with newer, better ones, when the newer ones had better evidence. For example, up until the 1970s, it was considered to be common knowledge that stomach ulcers were caused by stress. This was the accepted explanation in all medical textbooks. Since then, it has become accepted common knowledge that stomach ulcers are caused by infection by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, because the necessary research was done and convincing scientific evidence produced, which led to this idea’s acceptance. So the scientific community is willing to dispense with old ideas, however venerated, in the face of convincing new evidence. During this same time period, ID has not produced convincing new evidence in favor of its claims.
What Would a Real Theory of ID Look Like?
If the Discovery Institute were serious about science, it would put together a real, coherent theory of intelligent design, and then do experiments that might provide evidence for it.
A real, scientifically serious theory about ID would look different from the stuff that ID promoters talk about. It would include research on how often the Creator comes around. How we can tell newly designed species from slight variations in old ones. When should we next expect to see the Creator, and what would be on his to-do list?
Instead, the ID folks disagree among themselves about just about everything. They cannot agree on the age of the earth, what fossils are, whether or not ID is religion, or whether the Creator worked only once or has shown up many times. They cannot make coherent predictions about the natural world.
In fact, I’m not sure that they could agree among themselves that gravity makes things fall down.
A genuine theory of ID would also make testable predictions. Without testable predictions, you don’t have a theory. A genuine theory of ID would also include genuine experimental results.
Who Can Successfully Control Antibiotic Resistance?
Antibiotic and antimicrobial resistant organisms present a golden opportunity for ID to prove itself. ID proponents could successfully provide evidence that ID exists by predicting how to control antibiotic resistant bacteria in a way that is different from the ways predicted by evolution by natural selection.
If ID promoters then do the experiments in the lab showing how they can control antimicrobial resistance using predictions made exclusively by ID, then they will have convincingly shown evidence for their case.
What we have found thus far, however, is that evolution by natural selection both predicts these problems, and shows us ways of dealing with them. ID has done neither.
In fact, in the more than twenty years that ID has been in existence, none of its promoters has run a single experiment. The only thing they’ve run is their mouths. They’ve had lots of money, but they still haven’t produced a single experimental result. Remember, the Discovery Institute doesn’t even own a microscope.
During this time, evolutionary biology has racked up hundreds more papers showing good evidence for evolution by natural selection. In fact, evolution now has 150 years of scientific evidence to back it up. What’s more, the theory of evolution by natural selection has led to medical breakthroughs.
Evolutionary Theory Leads to Medical Breakthroughs
Scientific breakthroughs have resulted from accepting that evolution by natural selection is true. Evolution by natural selection has helped researchers find new treatments for cancer.67
Evolution by natural selection has helped researchers discover a new hormone. In fact, “Darwin led us to this new hormone,” said Aaron Hsueh, PhD, an endocrinologist and professor of obstetrics and gynecology, whose laboratory discovered an important appetite-suppressing hormone. His research was sponsored by Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development, LLC.68
ID has not helped in either cancer research or hormone research.
Follow the Money
If ID is so right, then why don’t big drug companies and big agricultural companies do research that’s based on it?
Follow the money. Pharmaceutical and agricultural research companies solve problems and make money when they make predictions using evolutionary biology. They risk their money on research based on evolution by natural selection. They don’t risk their money on ID. Why? Because it’s not science. It doesn’t make predictions. Its only product is uncertainty. Medical breakthroughs based on ID do not exist.
Pharmaceutical and agricultural companies are in business to make a profit, and will invest in just about anything that they think will work. They are not part of a government plot, an atheist plot, or anything else. They just want good, usable results, and they will use whatever methods produce them. ID doesn’t produce them. Drug and agriculture companies are in business to make money, and the smart money is behind evolution-based, real science.
Always remember: the only thing that ID produces is uncertainty. Who do you want to go with, ID promoters who only manufacture “uncertainty,” or the evolutionary biologists, who get real, useful results?