Discovery Institute Fellow Tells the Truth: "Intelligent Design … is not a theory."
Syndicated conservative radio shlockmeister and newly minted Discovery Institute fellow Michael Medved tells the truth about intelligent design in a Jerusalem Post interview:
[Post:] Speaking of your desire for this kind of particularity, you are a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute that studies and believes in Intelligent Design. How do you, as an Orthodox Jew, reconcile with this kind of generality - with the view of their being a hierarchy with a chief "designer" - while believing in and praying to a very specific God?
[Medved:] The important thing about Intelligent Design is that it is not a theory - which is something I think they need to make more clear. Nor is Intelligent Design an explanation. Intelligent Design is a challenge. It's a challenge to evolution. It does not replace evolution with something else.
[Post:] The question is not whether it replaces evolution, but whether it replaces God.
[Medved:] No, you see, Intelligent Design doesn't tell you what is true; it tells you what is not true. It tells you that it cannot be that this whole process was random.
Medved is off message--he clearly needs to call back to Discovery Institute headquarters for his proper marching orders. Why? Because in public, the Discovery Institute does want to argue that intelligent design is a theory in the same way that evolutionary biology is a theory. Of course, the Discovery Institute's real motives were revealed in the notorious "Wedge Strategy" document.
Medved also shows a profound misunderstanding of natural selection. The mutations are random, but natural selection is not random-it is the process by which favorable mutations are preserved and deleterious ones are weeded out. Cumulative selection is a fundamentally nonrandom process.
Go here for a slightly revised version of my remarks during a recent debate on intelligent design in Las Vegas pitting Michael Shermer and me against the Discovery Institute's Stephen Meyer and George Gilder.
Hat tip to my colleague Dave Weigel & R.Hampton.
