The Intelligent Design creationists keep trying the same old tactics of making their case with phony PR, but I don’t think it’s working so well anymore. For example, take a look at this op-ed from Richard Buggs of “‘Truth’ in Science”; he makes a futile attempt to throw out some of the usual creationist talking points, like these:

But, whatever the limitations of Darwinism, isn’t the intelligent design alternative an “intellectual dead end”? No. If true, ID is a profound insight into the natural world and a motivator to scientific inquiry. The pioneers of modern science, who were convinced that nature is designed, consequently held that it could be understood by human intellects. This confidence helped to drive the scientific revolution. More recently, proponents of ID predicted that some “junk” DNA must have a function well before this view became mainstream among Darwinists.

It’s rather pathetic. Buggs doesn’t even seem to understand how science works, and he makes vague claims that don’t make sense, and specific claims that are simply wrong.

• We aren’t Darwinists any more. This isn’t 1859, OK?

• The existence of Spiderman would also profoundly affect how we think about biology, evolution, physics, etc., if true. That final clause makes the whole idea non-scientific, if we recognized that Spiderman is a fictional character…what needs to be done is to support the initial premise. IDists want us to assume that major premise and act as if what follows from that invention is science.

• The point about “confidence” in a designer driving the scientific revolution doesn’t make any sense. Does he think people who don’t believe in a designer just throw up their hands and give up because that means the world is unknowable?

• The idea that large swathes of the genome have no adaptive utility is non-Darwinian. Functional roles were assumed by biologists first, certain stretches of non-coding DNA were known to be essential, and in general, IDists should avoid talking about junk DNA altogether, because all they do is reveal that they don’t understand the concept.

Now read the comments on Buggs article. It’s heartening: the readers slam the poor guy unmercifully. That’s what I like to see, every false claim made by an ID flak getting swarmed and ripped apart by an informed citizenry.

Jim Lippard continues to present his reports on creationist finances, and this time he shows the Discovery Institute’s balance sheet. They brought in $3.5 million in 2004, almost all of it in the form of donations.

That sounds like a lot of money, but to put it in perspective, you could take a look at a representative university’s operating budget. The small liberal arts university I’m at, with about 2000 students, brings in about $11 million per year in tuition, and I believe that charitable donations were on the order of $1 million per year. In that absolute sense, the Discovery Institute is small potatoes. The difference is, though, that a university actually provides services by highly trained staff, and most of its income is plowed right back into doing real work. The DI uses its income almost entirely for PR.

Keep that in mind when you hear them talking about gearing up to do actual research: they don’t have the infrastructure or the people in place to do that much science, and they certainly don’t have the income to make much real progress. Maybe if they fired a bunch of flacks and philosophers, they’d have enough to fund one solid lab, if they could piggy-back on existing facilities somewhere.

Of course, they do have more than enough money to make a bigger public relations splash than a small university.