“Intelligent Design” Polemics Examined

Some time ago, an Insight article by Stephen Goode quoted ID advocate and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow William A. Dembski as saying that biologists opposed to “intelligent design” were like the repressive former Soviet regime. Knowing something of the history of science under Soviet rule, I knew that the actual lessons of history were being completely inverted by Dembski. Scientists who applied principles of biology accepted in the West were, in fact, repressed under Soviet politically mandated biological doctrines, specifically those teleological principles of Michurinism promulgated by Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.

I joined with Mark Perakh, who lived through Soviet scientific repression and encountered Nazi materials in World War II, to write an essay that explores the ID advocates’ deployment of invidious comparisons of biologists to the Soviet and Nazi regimes. We conclude that these comparisons cannot be sustained, that they can only be proposed through thorough ignorance of the actual historical record, that politically mandated biology is a costly proposition, and that the elements of self-aggrandizement in ID advocacy ironically echo the Soviet and Nazi regimes that they invoke as being like their opponents.

The essay is available on TalkReason.org and as a PDF at Antievolution.org.