Listening to Richard Land on the Rehm show reminded me of something. He was very repetitive, insisting that the fact that a few hundred scientists with Ph.D.s thought that Intelligent Design creationism was valid was really, really important. You can see that in much of what the Discovery Institute does—they love to find a few scientists who support them, and then they wave them around and try to argue that this means they really are scientific.

It doesn't work that way.

Scientists are human beings, too, and we all have our personal quirks and failures to think rationally. You will always be able find some small fraction of the population of scientists who believe in some wacky thing, whether it is UFOs, bigfoot, or that ST:TNG is better than ST:TOS. It is nothing but background noise. Finding that I have an irrational infatuation with cephalopods does not mean that squid-loving is scientific.

Here's another example: Kary Mullis. He won the Nobel Prize! He invented PCR, which even laypeople know is some extremely cool DNA technology that they use all the time on CSI!

At the same time, he's an HIV denier (and coauthored papers with the Discovery Institute's Philip Johnson, no less). I know, I know, many of the same crackpots who love Intelligent Design creationism will think that's a point in his favor, but how about this: he's also an astrologer. He believes the stars influence everyone's destiny. And astrologers do exactly what the Discovery Institute does, and claim validation by listing the 'scientists' who support their ideas. (You know, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that there are just as many scientists out there who think there is something to astrology, as there are those who think Intelligent Design creationism is Da Bomb. I've seen polls that show over half the population believe astrology works. Shall we start teaching it in the schools?)

Mullis wrote an autobiography, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, that is depressing in how it reveals the poor understanding of science held by an actual Nobel Prize winner. He has a chapter on his personal discovery of the validity of astrology. He ran through a whole heap of astrological descriptors from his birthdate. Some fit, some didn't (no surprise there). He then filtered those assessments, picking the ones that fit best, and announced that the astrological factors behind the good predictions were correct, while the others were invalid.

Methodologically, it was a disgraceful example of blatant selection bias, and cherry-picking the data to his hypothesis. It was very, very bad science. I literally cringed on reading it, it was so embarrassingly stupid. He even ended the chapter by saying that he really hadn't needed to write an abutobiography—all he needed to do was publish his birth data, and everything else was derivable.

It just goes to show that finding a few scientists, even prominent scientists, who believe in something doesn't make it so. That Argument from Miniscule Fraction of Authority of which the Discovery Institute is so fond is utterly bogus. Science rests on replicable experiment and observable evidence, not the credentials of one or four hundred or even ten million scientists.