The Discovery Institute is working hard to prove that the Intelligent Design creationism movement isn’t dead. So, they have a post listing all their great accomplishments since the Dover decision. There have been lawsuits and movies!

The cause of academic freedom has also seen significant victories. In one case, as we reported here, “[T]he University of Kentucky paid $125,000 to settle a lawsuit by astronomer Martin Gaskell who was wrongfully denied employment because he was perceived to be skeptical towards Darwinian evolution.” Two other Darwin skeptics received settlements for discrimination. Applied Mathematics Letters retracted mathematician Granville Sewell’s article critical of neo-Darwinism; a lawsuit followed, leading to a public apology and $10,000 payment to Sewell. After the California Science Center (CSC) cancelled the showing of an intelligent design film, Darwin’s Dilemma, the American Freedom Alliance sued. The CSC paid $110,000 to avoid going to trial over the evidence that they discriminated. And the film Expelled drew over 1.1 million viewers to movie theaters to learn about discrimination against scientific dissenters from Darwinism.

They have lawyers! And people pay money to settle their nuisance suits! What a triumph for Intelligent Design science creationism.

They also have people writing books, and can scrape up a few people to give them positive reviews.

Public outreach on intelligent design is also doing very well post-Dover. In 2009, Stephen Meyer published Signature in the Cell, which received praise from famed atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, who named it “Book of the Year” in the respected Times Literary Supplement of London.

In 2013, Meyer published Darwin’s Doubt which made the New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists. That book was endorsed by scientists including Harvard geneticist George Church and Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin. UC Berkeley paleontologist Charles Marshall gave Darwin’s Doubt a serious review in the top journal Science and participated in a radio debate with Meyer.

I’ve read both of Meyer’s books; they are delusional exercises by a long-winded narcissist. It’s lovely for them that Thomas Nagel liked it, but then Nagel’s gone full loopy creationist. McMenamin is a crank. They keep touting the fact that it was reviewed in Science, but they never tell you what the review said. Hint: it’s not a positive review.

Finally and most importantly, science supporting ID continues to move forward. Several areas of research have seen groundbreaking progress, including work by the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (using computer models to test Darwinian evolution) and Biologic Institute (exploring evidence for ID in biology). To date, there are more than eighty peer-reviewed articles supportive of intelligent design, with over fifty of them published post-Dover.

Virtually none of this “work” is getting published in serious science journals; it’s all going into cheesy dumpsters of bad science like the Journal of Cosmology, or their own house organ, Bio-Complexity. Eighty articles is nothing, especially when you are claiming to be founding a whole new discipline and approach to analysis. Eighty articles, when you’ve got a whole propaganda mill dedicated to pushing your ideas, is an abysmal failure.

Also, when you look closely at their list of ID creationism science articles, they are exposed as puff pieces, empty musings, and noise published by hacks.

But the Discovery Institute always looks on the bright side.

Given how quickly ID scholarship is moving forward in so many areas — science, public policy, and culture — we can only anticipate how much stronger ID will be twenty years after Dover.

Have you ever read The Wedge Document? In the late 1990s, the Discovery Institute proposed to get 100 academic articles published in the scientific literature. Now, a decade and a half later, they are bragging about 80…and most of them are transparently garbage.

Nope, sorry guys, “Intelligent Design” is a spent force. The only reason it’s still coasting along is because the evangelical/fundamentalist creationists still like to use it as a pseudo-secular cover when proposing their laws, to get around that pesky separation of church and state thing. But even there, the real blow that the Dover trial dealt to them was in exposing that ID creationism was terrible at providing that excuse. Barbara Forrest smacked ’em hard.

Creationism is still around and still causing trouble, but the success story there is old school young earth creationism, and that’s not a good thing for anyone. Still, it must hurt the fellows at the Discovery Institute when they look at Answers in Genesis and see that all their sneaky dissembling was for nothing.