Editor’s note: C. W. Howell’s Designer Science has been pulled by its publisher, NYU Press. See, “Scholarship Hits the Fan: Designer Science Now Gone from Multiple Sites.”
This is the last post in a series (find it all here) looking at the history of intelligent design (ID), and reviewing a book that came out last year, Designer Science: A History of Intelligent Design in America. The book purports to give a “full-length history of ID” (p. 8), much like his PhD thesis abstract which promised “the first full-length historical overview of the intelligent design movement.” The book, whose most remarkable feature may be its fake “damning” quote from Michael Behe that forms its linchpin, was published by New York University Press. It’s based upon the PhD thesis of the historian C. W. Howell, which he earned from Duke University in 2021. Another remarkable feature is that Howell has missed many of the major the innovations in the world of ID over the past 20 years.
So what is Howell’s version of the historical arc of ID? In short, it’s that ID peaked in the Dover era, faced a “staggering defeat” at Dover (p. 117), indeed a “disastrous defeat” (p. 12), and then underwent a sharp decline. Although he frequently denies that ID is “dead,” he spends too much time thinking about that question, and frequently uses past-tense verbs to describe ID, presenting it as “defunct” (p. 7), and speaking of ID’s supposed “demise” (p. 8). That’s a plausible take only if you ignore a huge amount of what ID has been doing the past twenty years, which we saw previously is exactly what he does. In this final post, I want to fill some of those gaps in Howell’s history of ID with a broad brush.
A Media Frenzy
Howell bases his thesis about ID’s rise and fall upon Google searches over time, and the media frenzy about intelligent design that happened during the Dover era.
It’s true that the Dover era was a time of great media and public interest in ID. But ID didn’t seek that attention out. It happened because a small school district in rural Pennsylvania — going against advice from Discovery Institute — adopted a policy that required the teaching of intelligent design. This led to a lawsuit backed by the ACLU and NCSE, followed by numerous prominent media stories covering ID and that lawsuit throughout 2004, 2005, and 2006. The media coverage undoubtedly did lead to a spike in Google searches about ID, as Howell mentions, which peaked around 2005. That obviously tapered down as the Dover trial left the news cycle. But this doesn’t mean 2005 was when ID itself peaked and since then has all but disappeared.
After all, is Internet attention and media frenzy over a lawsuit really the right way to measure ID’s growth and success? Such a standard is contrived, and blind to the vast majority of what is really happening in the world of ID. Howell’s book feels stuck in a time warp from the Dover era. What he’s actually tracking is interest in the Dover case, not what’s going on with intelligent design long term.
When I talk about ID’s growth over time, I’m not interested in superficial things like media attention or Google searches. Fame and popularity are fleeting and should not be taken as a metric of success in the context of a scientific idea. When I think about ID’s growth I’m interested in things like its research program, peer-reviewed papers, and the number of students and academics getting involved over time.
I often liken ID’s growth to a snowball. Snowballs start small. But they grow steadily over time, and after a while they really start to get large and pick up speed. This is an accurate analogy for ID’s growth. That growth has been steady over time — but we have seen slight upticks and downticks in that growth based upon public events, such as the publication of major ID books, or major ID media events like Expelled, or the advent of YouTube.
Modern ID Started in the 1980s
I mark the initiation of the modern ID movement in the mid 1980s, with the publication of The Mystery of Life’s Origin, which was the first book to propose an “intelligent cause” based upon scientific data alone — by authors who later became important members of the ID community. At that time ID was a newborn, consisting of a small community of scientists and scholars.
But then ID’s growth began to pick up speed around 1990 when Phillip Johnson published Darwin on Trial. This book received attention both inside the Christian community and within the mainstream scientific community, and as a result attracted the attention of quite a few academics.
One of the academics who discovered ID through Johnson’s work was Michael Behe. In 1996, Behe published Darwin’s Black Box which had a major impact on the scientific community and was reviewed in many major scientific journals. Many students and academics — including myself when I read it in the summer of 1997 — were first introduced to the concept of “intelligent design” through Behe’s book.
ID grew at a roughly constant pace until around 2005, after the Dover ruling. When the Dover ruling came out in December 2005. That did not kill ID, but it slowed the pace of ID’s growth for a few years. This decrease was 100 percent because the Dover ruling inspired critics to try to oust ID proponents from the academy. In the years following Dover (say, 2006 to 2013) we saw an intense spike in the persecution and harassment of ID-friendly academics. I know this because I lived through it — it was my job as a newly minted attorney to assist with many of these cases, usually behind the scenes, defending scientists from discrimination.
I have long called this period the “post-Dover purge.” We could also call it the “Dover growth slowing.” But the season was temporary, and after a few years ID’s growth picked up again.
Specifically, ID’s growth began to increase again post-Dover in 2008 when Ben Stein and others released a documentary film called Expelled. It was likely seen by more than a million people in theaters. Expelled told the stories of prominent scientists who faced persecution because of their ID sympathies. I lived through this too and worked on most of the cases featured in that film. Many scientists reached out to Discovery through this film. Then, in 2009, Stephen Meyer published his first major book Signature in the Cell. This book too attracted attention, and that increased in 2013 when his sequel Darwin’s Doubt hit the New York Times best-seller list. In the 2010s, YouTube changed the Internet. Discovery Institute and other ID folks worked hard to put out good content on the Internet and as a result more and more students and scientists found us. Our Summer Seminars started in 2007, and all of this has led to much long-term growth in ID.
Where ID Is Today
ID never went away, and contra Howell, it never faced some grand or even slow decline. Quite the opposite, by many metrics ID has grown over the years. In this series I’ve documented how ID is regularly producing novel arguments and new ideas, has a vibrant and successful science research program, and in fact is in resurgence. I don’t want to speculate on the motives behind Howell’s inaccurate and incomplete history-telling and why he missed these events and innovations. But here’s the TL/DR (too long, didn’t read) version of what’s really happening in ID, in six bullet points:
- Scientific Evidence: As I reviewed back in August, in this area things are going extremely strong. From protein science to genomics to design detection to molecular biology to systematics to paleontology to many other fields, evidence has consistently poured in confirming ID’s predictions over the past couple of decades. I won’t belabor this — you can read about it here.
- Scientific Research: In 2016, we marked the advent of the ID 3.0 research initiative. We currently have over thirty active research projects and have published over 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers from ID’s research program. Over 100 of those papers were published in just the past 5 or 6 years. Last year alone our research community published over 25 peer-reviewed pro-ID scientific papers. It’s very exciting.
- Students: In 2007, we launched our Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design. The goal was to train students and inspire some of them to pursue graduate studies and ultimately careers in ID research. This program has been a spectacular success. We have graduated over 1,100 students from our ID Seminars, hundreds of whom have earned PhDs and other graduate degrees. A significant subset of these students have become faculty with their own research labs. They are now contributing to ID research.
- Scientists: We haveso many scientists reaching out to join our network that my team of staff scientists at Discovery Institute have to do multiple zooms every week just to keep up with the intake. Keeping track of all the new scientists and students who want to join our movement has become so unwieldy that we had to create a large database tool just to ensure we don’t miss people. Our ranks are growing all the time.
- Media: Media events drive growth — but they are not the growth in themselves. When Stephen Meyer did all the PragerU videos in 2021 (with millions of views), or when he appeared on the Joe Rogan show in 2023, or when other major ID interviews appear on YouTube, these happened because ID had already grown in stature, but they in turn drove further growth. Then, in May of this year, we had arguably the biggest ID-related media event since Expelled: the release of The Story of Everything (which is now streaming on Amazon Prime). We’ve had many students and scientists reaching out to us in the wake of the film — another uptick in growth. Again, I know this because my team of scientists have been working very hard over the past few months to get to know many of these scientists and scholars who have reached out to us recently. We’re in another growth phase.
- Books: The ID community has published over 300 books since its inception, including over 50 books published since 2021 alone. You can see many of them here. These books are developing new arguments about the design of the human body, of the earth, the mind, animal behavior, the design needed at the origin of the universe, and methods of design detection.
Missing the Long, Steady Growth
All of this points to Howell’s fundamental mistake: he measures ID’s success the wrong way, by looking at media-driven attention, and ignores the actual steady growth that has happened before, after, and during media frenzies the years.
This long tail of steady growth is in large part driven by people being convinced by ID arguments and deciding for themselves that “now is the time” to connect with ID. Much of this happens thanks to the consistent release of scientifically sound and persuasive ID articles, scientific papers, books, and videos. It also happens because students attend our Summer Seminars and then get involved. Yes, media events do sometimes drive attention, but they also happen only because of ID has been making steady scientific progress over time. And when it comes to the scientific evidence, things are going great!
According to a common slogan among left-wing Seattle activists, “silence is violence.” There’s an element of truth in that. Sometimes what you don’t say is more important than what you do say. Howell’s near-complete lack of interest in investigating or telling the real history of the growth and success of the ID research program post-Dover is undoubtedly his book’s biggest omission.
Now, If you’ve read this series, you have a general sense of where ID has been, is today, and where it’s going. Hopefully this will give you a “fuller” appreciation of ID’s actual history that you might otherwise miss if you read Howell’s book.
The Lessons Learned: The hare is exciting, but often you can learn more by studying the tortoise. Or to put it another way, Google searches driven by lawsuits and media frenzies are a poor metric of growth because they don’t reflect long-term trends of an idea. But everyone probably knew that already. So a more useful lesson here is probably that if one wants to understand intelligent design, look at its long-term trends and steady growth over time. Whether measured by numbers of scientists, scholars, and students involved; numbers of research projects and peer-reviewed papers; numbers of books and new ideas; or even landmark cultural events like movies in mainstream theaters or major media appearances, we can see that ID remains not just relevant, but it’s active, growing, and making a major measurable impact upon science and society. This is where ID is today, and we hope you’ll join us on this exciting, ongoing journey.