I'm sorry to say that I missed the Nightline segment on Intelligent Design creationism, but Nick Matzke has a review (does anyone have a transcript or video capture? There is a BitTorrent here, but it isn't working for me). It sounds like they did exactly the right thing, and went to real biologists to ask them what they think of this imaginary "controversy", and they all stuck out their tongues and went "phbhththt", or some version thereof.

Of course the Discovery Institute is going insane over it. Their excuse?

Nightline's main point appears to be that there really isn't any scientific controversy over Darwinism and intelligent design. How do they know this? They checked with several Darwinists, who told them so!

Oh, dear. It sounds so circular. Only it's not correct. They checked with the chairpersons of the top ten biology departments in the country, that is, these people who manage successful biology programs with a proven track record in the subject. The people who get things done. The ones who do real, high quality research. And it turns out they all support evolution (not "Darwinism", you clueless bozos at the DI), and think Intelligent Design creationism is a useless crock.

Maybe if they'd consulted institutes that don't do research and were populated with people who have no training in biology—you know, conservative think-tanks and right-wing bible colleges—they'd have gotten a different answer. And if you ask me about the details of aerospace engineering you might also get a very different answer than if you asked someone who was, like, qualified.

Then they mangle their inappropriate analogy yet further.

Hmm. Nightline could apply this logic to a lot of other issues besides intelligent design:

To determine whether there is any debate about embryonic stem cell research, they could interview only the scientists who support such research. To determine whether there is any debate over partial-birth abortions, they could interview only proponents of partial-birth abortions. Back in the heyday of eugenics, if journalists had wanted to determine whether there was a debate about the validity of eugenics, they could have interviewed only the scientists advocating eugenics.

Hey, I know some of those people, and have talked with stem cell researchers and doctors who do abortions. That would be an interesting discussion; I can tell you what they would say.

Stem cell researchers would tell you that there is a legitimate debate over the ethics of what they are doing. They're concerned—they're working with material of a human source, after all, with consequences for human reproduction—and while they will strongly argue in favor of their work, they will recognize the validity of some of their opponent's concerns.

There are no partial-birth abortion proponents. There are also no proponents for cracking your chest open, ripping out your heart, and replacing it with someone else's. These are treatments for serious, dangerous conditions, surgeries that are done to save lives when no other alternative is available, and are done because they are necessary, not because someone thinks hacking people open is fun. They do argue over these things, though, and are always balancing concerns like the probability of success and failure, quality of post-surgical life, etc.

They do have a case in the example of eugenics. Of course, eugenics was more of a social movement than anything founded in science, and even in its heyday, if you'd polled the heads of biology departments, you would have found some dissent. What do you think would happen if you followed the Nightline methodology today, and asked today's biology chairpersons about eugenics? It would be as dead as Intelligent Design creationism.