As Casey Luskin wrote here earlier today, C. W. Howell’s book Designer Science tries to tie intelligent design to larger trends of “extreme” science skepticism that have bothered many in the science community. Howell seeks to link those to the political right:
[I]ntelligent design both planted the seeds and nurtured the growth of extreme skepticism in the world of U.S. conservatism, a trend that has continued to grow ever since, sprouting in contemporary anti-vaccine movements and climate change denialism, among other things.
Our Science and Culture contributor Professor Robert Shedinger at Luther College is emphatically not on the political right — the opposite. He tried to get in touch with Howell before it was too late. He tells me:
Back when Howell was writing his book, I reached out to him offering to be a resource or sounding board since I regularly interact with the ID community and Discovery Institute. He responded, thanking me for being in touch, but I never heard from him after that. He clearly had his own ideas about ID and didn’t want to interact with someone sympathetic to it. Too bad. Maybe I could have saved him some trouble.
Dr. Shedinger, in Dr. Howell’s own field of religious studies, could indeed have saved him some trouble by looking at his scholarship more carefully than Howell’s own academic reviewers seem to have done — but also by complicating the trite, simplistic stereotype that Howell wanted to pursue about “extreme skepticism in the world of U.S. conservatism.” Luskin calls it Howell’s “news hook.” Howell was not going to let doubts about it rock his preferred narrative.
A shame. Howell’s book has been pulled by its academic publisher, New York University Press, over a fabricated quote. But there’s a lot more wrong with the book than just that, as Dr. Luskin is busy documenting.