World Magazine interviews Stephen Meyer (behind a paywall unfortunately) about Darwin’s Doubt…and the future of the intelligent-design movement. Regarding the latter, reporter Daniel James Devine elicited a delightful and very telling anecdote from Steve:
Right, you want to know whether anyone actually agrees with us. Here’s what’s happening. I’m actually very optimistic because Thomas Kuhn, the famous historian of science, said scientific revolutions don’t happen when the old guard suddenly changes their mind. They happen one funeral at a time. And what we have found is we’re attracting an awful lot of young talent. We had an experience a couple years ago where some of the Discovery scientists were traveling with one of our supporters. So that night, we were at this cowboy steakhouse feeding the troops. So I jumped in and offered the Discovery Institute credit card to pay for the Discovery Institute scientists, and this young waitress came back with the bill and the credit card. And she looked left and looked right and lowered her voice and said, “Can you tell me what the Discovery Institute is?” Well, I said, we’re a scientific think tank, and we’re investigating the evidence for intelligent design and challenging standard Darwin. She says, “I thought so!” She said, “Our professors hate you.” And then she motioned to three other waiters and waitresses. She says, “I’m a bio major at the U, and so are they, and, I’m telling you, our professors hate you. But then we go on your website and we see those animations of all those little machines and we say, ‘No way did that evolve.'” So this is a little, in microcosm, a picture of what’s happening. The establishment is terrified of this idea. But students can’t help, they can’t help tumbling to it just by learning the facts of biology without even learning our arguments.
I love this, not only because the young lady was evidently talking about ENV. It’s an end run around the dead wood, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor.