flail away, flail away, flail away

The Discovery Institute, which already broke from the ID movement by distancing itself from the Dover debacle, now presents a fractured front on the fallout.

"Dover is a disaster in a sense, as a public-relations matter," said Bruce Chapman, a former Seattle city councilman and founder of the Discovery Institute, the country's primary supporter of intelligent design. "It has given a rhetorical weapon to the Darwinists to say a judge has settled this," he said.

Never mind the Darwinists; how about conservative talking heads?

"Let's make no mistake," Limbaugh said on his radio show. "The people pushing intelligent design believe in the biblical version of creation. Intelligent design is a way, I think, to sneak it into the curriculum and make it less offensive to the liberals."

Stephen Meyer, though, searches for the positive spin:

"The ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] sued to keep a few students in Pennsylvania from hearing about intelligent design, and as a result, they made sure everyone in the world heard about it," Meyer said. "And that has not hurt us."

Disco's attempts to shy away from the aggressive tactics of the Thomas More Law Center, which waged the losing battle at Dover, won't succeed for a reason captured late in the article:

"It's a very narrow path," said Brian Ogilvie, who teaches the history of science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is writing a book on the history of various intelligent-design arguments.

When intelligent-design proponents speak to Christian audiences, "there's no question about who the designer is," Ogilvie said. "They've adopted the strategy of saying one thing to the faithful and another one to the scientific community."

Staying on message is hard enough when individuals in the organization are of different minds--and even tougher when the message mutates.



Discovery Institute blog here. "Orinoco Flow" lyrics here.

(added) PZ Myers strategizes.