Comic Predictability

The New York Times has become comically predictable in its reporting on intelligent design and people who question Darwinian orthodoxy. In her article yesterday, Laurie Goodstein notes at the outset:

To read the headlines, intelligent design as a challenge to evolution seems to be building momentum.

She then goes on to demonstrate, through selective anecdotes, how intelligent design is, in fact, dying.

Ironically, it is a little like the attack on intelligent design by some scientists. The logic goes like this:

We know that many aspects of biology appear designed. But we can explain those appearances away, with a theory that seems plausible to us. Therefore, there is no evidence of design, and anyone who says otherwise is dishonest and evil.

She notes the intolerance of Darwinian fundamentalists on college campuses, and cites it as positive evidence of the impending death of ID:

On college campuses, the movement's theorists are academic pariahs, publicly denounced by their own colleagues.

So this is how you kill a movement? You do not address the movement's claims on the merits, you denounce its proponents and render them pariahs, with the blessing of the New York Times? Some would say that is how you fuel the fire and kindle more interest, and I think that is what is happening in reality.

Of course, we know that there is a growing list of scientists who have publicly expressed doubts about Darwinian theory. A few years ago it was 100. In a short amount of time it has grown to 400 (despite the risk of being denounced and treated as a pariah for merely doubting a theory). How many of those scientists did she interview? None, apparently.

For some good fact-checking on the article, which Goodstein and the Times editors apparently failed to do, the Evolution News blog has several posts.