The Intelligent Design creationists keep trying the same old tactics of making their case with phony PR, but I don’t think it’s working so well anymore. For example, take a look at this op-ed from Richard Buggs of “‘Truth’ in Science”; he makes a futile attempt to throw out some of the usual creationist talking points, like these:

But, whatever the limitations of Darwinism, isn’t the intelligent design alternative an “intellectual dead end”? No. If true, ID is a profound insight into the natural world and a motivator to scientific inquiry. The pioneers of modern science, who were convinced that nature is designed, consequently held that it could be understood by human intellects. This confidence helped to drive the scientific revolution. More recently, proponents of ID predicted that some “junk” DNA must have a function well before this view became mainstream among Darwinists.

It’s rather pathetic. Buggs doesn’t even seem to understand how science works, and he makes vague claims that don’t make sense, and specific claims that are simply wrong.

• We aren’t Darwinists any more. This isn’t 1859, OK?

• The existence of Spiderman would also profoundly affect how we think about biology, evolution, physics, etc., if true. That final clause makes the whole idea non-scientific, if we recognized that Spiderman is a fictional character…what needs to be done is to support the initial premise. IDists want us to assume that major premise and act as if what follows from that invention is science.

• The point about “confidence” in a designer driving the scientific revolution doesn’t make any sense. Does he think people who don’t believe in a designer just throw up their hands and give up because that means the world is unknowable?

• The idea that large swathes of the genome have no adaptive utility is non-Darwinian. Functional roles were assumed by biologists first, certain stretches of non-coding DNA were known to be essential, and in general, IDists should avoid talking about junk DNA altogether, because all they do is reveal that they don’t understand the concept.

Now read the comments on Buggs article. It’s heartening: the readers slam the poor guy unmercifully. That’s what I like to see, every false claim made by an ID flak getting swarmed and ripped apart by an informed citizenry.

Jim Lippard continues to present his reports on creationist finances, and this time he shows the Discovery Institute’s balance sheet. They brought in $3.5 million in 2004, almost all of it in the form of donations.

That sounds like a lot of money, but to put it in perspective, you could take a look at a representative university’s operating budget. The small liberal arts university I’m at, with about 2000 students, brings in about $11 million per year in tuition, and I believe that charitable donations were on the order of $1 million per year. In that absolute sense, the Discovery Institute is small potatoes. The difference is, though, that a university actually provides services by highly trained staff, and most of its income is plowed right back into doing real work. The DI uses its income almost entirely for PR.

Keep that in mind when you hear them talking about gearing up to do actual research: they don’t have the infrastructure or the people in place to do that much science, and they certainly don’t have the income to make much real progress. Maybe if they fired a bunch of flacks and philosophers, they’d have enough to fund one solid lab, if they could piggy-back on existing facilities somewhere.

Of course, they do have more than enough money to make a bigger public relations splash than a small university.

The definitive book on the history of the creationism movement is The Creationists^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)} by Ron Numbers (and I have to remember to get a copy of the new expanded edition). Numbers has an interview in Salon which starts off well, but as it goes on, my respect for the guy starts sinking, sinking, sinking. He’s another hamster on the exercise wheel, spinning around the same old ineffective arguments that get us nowhere, and he can’t even follow through on his own chain of logic.

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Bill Dembski has posted a list of three pathetic predictions for Intelligent Design: that there will be two books published by the usual suspects (Behe, and Wells and Dembski) and that there will be a ‘research center’ at some unspecified university. Whoop-de-doo. For a major, groundbreaking, revolutionary new scientific paradigm, as they like to think of it, that’s nothing—when they crow about their triumphs, all they can do is mention a few PR efforts, and they’re so paltry that you could count them on the fingers of one partially maimed hand? John Lynch mocks their feeble vision, and offers a few suggestions for trivial additions which we know they will not produce.

After you’re done laughing at that silliness, here’s some more: Howard Smith is looking for the ethical imperative in cosmology and the kabbalah…it’s another respectable scientist suspending his credulity to build a pseudo-scientific link between reality and the fantasies of medieval mystics. It’s going to be very interesting when the Christian IDists like Dembski finally rout the entire mainstream scientific community with a couple of books and a church-sponsored room at a bible college, and then they have to turn and deal with the non-Christian heretics.

It’s hard to believe, but there is more information on the absurd board game designed by Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort.

Cameron said, “We are very excited about this game because it presents both sides of the creation evolution argument, and in doing so, shows that the contemporary theory of evolution is perhaps the greatest hoax of modern times.”

Uh, sure they’re going to show “both sides”: you can get an idea of what they think is the evolution side by the illustrations. There is a frog with bull horns (a bullfrog! Get it? Ha ha.), and a couple of other chimeras whipped up in Photoshop, and unless they’re using them to illustrate what evolution does not predict and what would constitute evidence against evolution—which I doubt—these are examples of utterly bogus creationist arguments, and do not bode well for the intellectual content of the game. Which promised to be pretty much nonexistent, given the identities of the authors.

I wonder if there’s a banana in the game?

Jason pitches into that twit, Peter Hitchens—you may recall that I dealt with the same column a while back, but that level of stupid does support double-teaming to counter it, I think.