Slide 1: My talk is "Beyond the wedge: Intelligent Design, Science, and Culture" Slide 2: In keeping with the conference theme, I want to take the 25 year view. I'll note that a number of problems are likely to be of import over the next 25 years, including habitat loss and subsequent reduction in biodiversity, global climate change, biotechnology in medicine, use of genetically manipulated crops in agriculture, resource assessment and management, and socio- political constraints on the practice of science. Slide 3: So, with so many problems of great import at hand, why should we care about the "intelligent design" movement? First, the "intelligent design" movement aims to affect science education. Second, science education is a critical factor in society's response to the problems just noted. As a result, we need to consider what effect "intelligent design" concepts will have on the public understanding of science. Slide 4: It will be important to understand what the "intelligent design" movement is. Its current focus establishes it as another form of antievolution. The establishment of the movement followed the setbacks to the legal efforts made by young-earth creationists in the 1980s. All the high-profile intelligent design proponents are creationists in the sense used by Phillip Johnson in "Darwin on Trial". Slide 5: What are the characteristics of the "intelligent design" movement as observed? It is antievolutionary. Both common descent and natural selection have been attacked by intelligent design proponents. It is anti-science. The intelligent design movement seeks to re-define science to eliminate both metaphysical and methodological naturalism, replacing it with a "theistic science". It uses socio-political "wedging". Rather than stating forthrightly the full scope of the changes the movement seeks, intelligent design proponents have adopted a strategy of concentrating on biological evolution first, with the intention to expand their activity to their other goals later. The motivation behind the intelligent design movement is primarily religious. The high-profile advocates are uniformly Christian believers. There is one organization which has provided the driving impetus for the intelligent design movement since 1996: the Discovery Institute Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. Slide 6: If you want to know what intelligent design will look like over the next 25 years, the answer is pretty simple. One should first examine their plans. These may be found in the "wedge" document and also in various essays written by CRSC Fellows. Just as important, though, one should watch their actions. The actions of special note show their political involvement and their choice of venues for discussion of their ideas. Slide 7: The order in which the intelligent design advocates do things is important. It is clear that the plan early on was to accomplish research first, and then move to politics later. The intelligent design movement did not stick to this plan, though, as we will see shortly. Slide 8: An important piece of information comes in the form of the "wedge" document. This document surfaced in 1999. It was described by the CRSC as "promotional material". It is essentially the manifesto of the intelligent design movement. It outlines goals of the CRSC at 5, 10, and 20 years. Some have doubted its provenance, but passages identical to those found in the "wedge" document have been utilized on the public web pages of the CRSC. Further, one can see a consonance between what the "wedge" document lays out for activities and what the CRSC Fellows have actually done with their time, with one notable exception. The "wedge" document shows what is desired: nothing less than the re-definition of what science means. The "bad guy" in all this is the concept of "naturalism". Slide 9: Here's a picture of the cover page of the "wedge" document. The imagery speaks for itself. The next several slides are heavy with text. I'll tell you the parts I'm especially interested in. Slide 10: The wedge document lists two governing goals: defeat scientific materialism and establish the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God. Slide 11: Within the 5 year goals, one should note that scientific research was listed as the very first thing to be attended to. Slide 12: In the 20 year goals, we essentially have a vision of intelligent design triumphant. By then, it should be the dominant perspective in science. Its application should be seen in many sciences, in theology, in philosophy, in the humanities, and even in the fine arts. Its influence should extend pervasively into our culture. Slide 13: But getting back to the beginning, note that the wedge document identifies writing and research as the essential basis of everything that is to follow. Remember what I said about the order of things to occur. Here the wedge document clearly asserts that a research program comes first. Slide 14: And in wedge phase 2, we see that political activity comes second. Note especially that influence on congressional staff is part of the political action program of phase 2, which is supposed to follow after phase 1 is completed. Slide 15: Other political aspects of phase 2 include popular op-ed publishing, and building a base of support via apologetics seminars among the intelligent design movement's natural constituency, namely, Christians. Slide 16: Phase 3 takes the wedge more fully into political action. Note again the order asserted by the wedge document: do the research first, then do the politics. I keep pointing this out because this is where things have gone wrong. The political actions to be taken after the research is in place include direct confrontation with mainstream science through the use of challenge conferences. Intelligent design advocates will also pursue possible legal assistance in order to put "design theory" (that would be the stuff resulting from the research) into the public school *science* curricula. Slide 17: Rob Koons, a CRSC Fellow and philosopher at UT Austin, made the point that intelligent design needed to make a positive scientific case for its major claims. He specifically took issue with advancing intelligent design simply by the expedient of negative argumentation against evolutionary biology. Slide 18: William Dembski, Senior Fellow of the CRSC, has also had his say on the correct order of pursuing things. He contrasts the intelligent design movement with young-earth creationism, saying that the success of intelligent design is due to intelligent design taking the approach that the intellectual elite should be convinced of the correctness of intelligent design, and that intelligent design proponents do not seek to intrusively insert their views into school curricula via legislation or coercion via the courts. This may actually have been true at the time that Dembski penned these words, but it would not remain true for long. Slide 19: By the year 2000, it was obvious that the political action portions of the wedge had been prematurely started. This is reflected in this statement from the Michael Polanyi Center at Baylor University in response to faculty concerns there. "The whole politicization of ID research associated with the "wedge" is something from which we want to distance ourselves." Slide 20: Phillip Johnson, advisor to the CRSC, made this statement in an interview. It is very interesting. Notice the date of publication, June of 2001. This will be important. Basically, Johnson derides the use of legislation to advance the intelligent design agenda, and says that the intelligent design position is that they are against that in principle. Slide 21: Intelligent design advocates did not wait for the research program to mature before engaging in political action. In contravention of their own stances, they started taking up the politics outlined in phase 2 and phase 3 of the wedge document before phase 1 was done. Slide 22: In 1998, the CRSC Fellows began an association with Roger DeHart, a science teacher in the Burlington-Edison, Washington school district, who sought to teach intelligent design materials in his science classes. DeHart wrote materials which were part of the CRSC web site on science education. The CRSC again lent support to a science teacher, Rodney LeVake, who sought to present "evidence against evolution". In 2000, an item from the phase 2 wedge plan was implemented, as the CRSC held a briefing with legislators and staff of the US congress. Also in 2000, the CRSC Fellows made their presence felt in Kansas in the fight over the statewide science standards. In 2001, a number of bills in state legislatures were entered that were based either in whole or in part on stances promulgated by CRSC fellows. Another important item is that the "Santorum" amendment was implemented in the US Congress. DI CRSC advisor Phillip Johnson drafted the text of this amendment. This happened just about the time that Johnson gave that interview stating that intelligent design advocates were opposed in principle to trying to legislate their views. In 2002, the political machinations of the CRSC continue, as seen in these various state legislation and policy efforts. Slide 23: Johnson drafted the amendment for Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. Santorum proposed it as an amendment of senate bill 1. The amendment was removed in joint committee, but a variant was added to the Joint Explanatory Statement. Slide 24: President Bush signed the bill into law. Already, the CRSC has advised school boards that they should comply with the law. They have quibbled and obfuscated, sometimes saying the report language has "the force of law", and sometimes that it has "the effect of law". But the Johnson/Santorum language is not part of the text of the law, it was specifically considered, rejected, and removed from that text and placed into the report language. I predict that we will see more obfuscation from the CRSC concerning this issue. Slide 25: We've seen that the politics of "intelligent design" are well underway. So that means that the phase 1 goal of getting the writing and research out of the way is done, right? Unfortunately not. Slide 26: So, what about the science of intelligent design? In 1997, there was a conference held called "Naturalism, Theism, and the Scientific Enterprise". The intelligent design advocates there were seeking a philosophical conclusion that intelligent design could be science. The attitude of the intelligent design advocates has changed over the intervening years. Now, they simply assert that intelligent design is science. But the work that would show that and that would go toward convincing the "intellectual elite" that intelligent design is science is curiously absent. Gilchrist conducted a literature survey to gauge how much scholarly work on the topic of intelligent design had made it into the peer-reviewed literature. His conclusion: none was evident. Slide 27: Sometimes ID advocates will point to published articles as evidence of the scientific nature of the ID movement. However, one needs to distinguish modes of argument. We aren't interested here in negative argumentation made against evolutionary biology. We are looking for some positive development of "intelligent design", as Koons outlined. But so far there appears to be little, if any, progress. Slide 28: What progress has been accomplished in intelligent design? Back in 1997, I presented at the NTSE conference mentioned earlier. Jonathan Wells, Bill Dembski, and Paul Nelson were there. Earlier this year, I asked DI CRSC Senior Fellow Jonathan Wells for a progress report on scientific advances in intelligent design made *since* the 1997 NTSE conference. Wells talked about Michael Behe's concept of "irreducible complexity". But Behe published that in 1996, which last I checked predates 1997. I translate Wells's answer as "no progress". Slide 29: A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to ask DI CRSC Senior Fellow Bill Dembski much the same question. Bill was more negative than Wells; he didn't even offer Behe's 1996 work. Instead, Bill complained about the lack of funding for intelligent design. All the funding goes to evolutionary biology, he said. This is a curious stance for someone who gets a fellowship from an organization with a multi-million dollar operating budget. Many papers are published in evolutionary biology by graduate students who only get departmental support, mostly getting perhaps one-third or less of what a CRSC Fellow receives in his fellowship checks. Perhaps the CRSC is funding the wrong people. In any case, work is promised to be coming soon, just like I heard at the 1997 conference. But it isn't here yet. Slide 30: Who decides on these issues? The intelligent design strategy over the past four years can be seen as bypassing scientists and the generally skeptical scientific community, and going straight to the public. We've seen that the CRSC Fellows are pushing their political agenda at various levels, starting from the US Congress, through state legislatures, boards of education, school boards, all the way down to individual teachers, who may find CRSC-promoted labels decorating their textbooks or CRSC-promoted questions being asked by their students to try to disrupt lessons on evolutionary biology. Slide 31: The "intelligent design" advocates may have failed to produce a positive research program thus far, but one may wonder whether their record on negative argumentation shows some better trend. Again, it would appear not. ID advocates parasitize two other groups. They borrow criticisms from evolutionary biologists and use those. They recycle negative arguments already promulgated by young-earth creationists. They also seek to make the voting power of the young-earth creationist community their own. Slide 32: In summary, the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture is out to make science safe for theism. The goal of the CRSC is to re-define science. As stated by intelligent design proponents, the research basis of intelligent design was supposed to come first. It is also evident that the research and scientific justification for a positive program in "intelligent design" is on the back burner, and it appears that the pilot light is out. Instead, the CRSC has moved forward with a focus on political activism. This activism covers a number of levels, from congress down to individual teachers. The CRSC has moved beyond the stated guidelines given in the wedge document. We can expect more of the same emphasis on politics in the future from the CRSC. Bill Dembski likes to say that there is no free lunch. It is time that scientists and those interested in good science education make sure to tell their representatives, legislators, school boards, and science teachers that there should be no free ride for intelligent design. Intelligent design should make its case to the scientific community first, just as the intelligent design advocates said it should several years ago. Slide 33: There are several excellent resources online. For intelligent design advocacy, see the DI CRSC site, Access Research Network, and Bill Dembski's International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design site. For skeptical views of intelligent design, there are several other sites that you should check out. The National Center for Science Education site and TalkReason.Org are a couple. I have the pleasure of announcing the rollout of a new site devoted to critiquing intelligent design claims, TalkDesign.Org. For more general critical views of the antievolution movement, the TalkOrigins archive site is a must-see stop online. There is also Antievolution.org, which is the critic's resource on antievolution. This site features a discussion board aimed at collaborative efforts on critiquing specific arguments. Thank you for your attention.