I have mixed feelings about the latest NYT story on Intelligent Design creationism. On the one hand, it does clearly state how politicized the Discovery Institute is, describes the religious sources of their funding and how some charitable institutions find the DI repugnant, and gives a decent account of the Institute's history. On the other hand, Arthur Silber dislikes it intensely, and I can see why. It also allows a gang of pseudoscientific frauds to state their message loudly on the pages of a fairly prestigious newspaper. Even the title is objectionable: "Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive". The first word is good, but it's all downhill from there. They are not scholars, except in the loosest sense of the word. They have most emphatically not put evolution on the defensive; evolutionary biology is completely untouched by their posturings. Some biologists are on the attack now, because the creationists have made political gains in damaging public school education in biology. Basically, this article gave the creationists free rein to repeat their lies over and over again, such as that they are funding actual research. Carl Zimmer, while acknowledging that the article is a "useful overview", rips that claim apart.

A search for "Intelligent Design" on PubMed yields 22 results--none of which were published by anyone from the Discovery Insittute. There are a few articles about the political controversy about teaching it in public schools, and some papers about constructing databases of proteins in a smart way. But nothing that actually uses intelligent design to reveal something new about nature. ScienceDirect offers the same picture. (I'm not clever enough with html to link to my search result lists, but try them yourself if you wish.)

Here's another search: "Discovery Institute" and "Seattle" (where the institute is located). One result comes up: a paper by Jonathan Wells proposing that animal cells have turbine-like structures inside them. It describes no experiments, only a hypothesis.

Perhaps the other prominent fellows of the Discovery Institute (Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, and William Dembski) have published scientific papers that have a bearing on intelligent design, without identifying their affiliation. Aside from a couple letters to the editor, the databases yielded only one paper, in which Behe offers a simple model of gene duplication and expresses doubt that new genes could evolve by this process. Given that other scientists have published 2266 papers exploring gene duplication's role in evolution, it's safe to say that his is not a view held by most experts.

That's the kind of response I would have expected from the NYT—when someone says, "$792,585 financed laboratory or field research in biology, paleontology or biophysics, while $93,828 helped graduate students in paleontology, linguistics, history and philosophy", don't just report it, investigate and follow through and see where the money is actually going, because it sure isn't funding real science.

There are a few errors of fact that you should expect to see dismantled on The Panda's Thumb soon, and I was also surprised to see this statement fly by unchallenged:

…the institute has opposed legislation in Pennsylvania and Utah that pushes intelligent design, instead urging lawmakers to follow Ohio's lead.

They are setting Ohio as an example to follow? The Ohio situation is a clear case of biased backroom politicking, in which corrupt ideologues maneuvered to override the recommendations of qualified scientists and educators to impose anti-scientific changes on Ohio school curricula. Why not point out in an article on "politicized scholars" that they are representing the worst of politics, using croneyism and dishonesty to squirt their slime in through the back door? The Discovery Institute is very good at that, I will admit.

I won't be as harsh on the article as Arthur Silber…yet. There's supposed to be a second article in the series coming up, which I presume will express the views of real scientists and will attempt to counter the facade of "scholarship" the DI put up in the first one. I do wish the reporter had been more thorough in dismissing those claims in this first one, though.