New York Times
August 5, 2005

Design for Confusion

By Paul Krugman

I'd like to nominate Irving Kristol, the neoconservative former editor
of The Public Interest, as the father of "intelligent design." No, he
didn't play any role in developing the doctrine. But he is the father
of the political strategy that lies behind the intelligent design
movement -- a strategy that has been used with great success by the
economic right and has now been adopted by the religious right.

Back in 1978 Mr. Kristol urged corporations to make "philanthropic
contributions to scholars and institutions who are likely to advocate
preservation of a strong private sector." That was delicately worded,
but the clear implication was that corporations that didn't like the
results of academic research, however valid, should support people
willing to say something more to their liking.

Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote
supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim -- that tax cuts
have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they pay for
themselves -- has never been backed by evidence. He would later
concede, or perhaps boast, that he had a "cavalier attitude toward the
budget deficit."

"Political effectiveness was the priority," he wrote in 1995, "not the
accounting deficiencies of government."

Corporations followed his lead, pouring a steady stream of money into
think tanks that created a sort of parallel intellectual universe, a
+world of "scholars" whose careers are based on toeing an ideological
line, rather than on doing research that stands up to scrutiny by
their peers.

You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about
inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like
economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well when
deployed against the hard sciences.

The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on
global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many
people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This
impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks,
which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-
reviewed research, but aren't. And behind it all lies lavish financing
from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil.

There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is
that nonscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference
between research and advocacy -- if it's got numbers and charts in it,
doesn't that make it science?

Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-
said- she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge
to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth
was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ
on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the
intelligent design controversy come pretty close.

Finally, the self-policing nature of science -- scientific truth is
determined by peer review, not public opinion -- can be exploited by
skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists
agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're
elitists who think they're smarter than the rest of us.

Which brings us, finally, to intelligent design. Some of America's
most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom DeLay,
the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for the
Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't been
enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The theory of
evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the country isn't
ready -- yet -- to teach religious doctrine in public schools.

But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate
interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that
the scientific consensus has shaky foundations?

Creationists failed when they pretended to be engaged in science, not
religious indoctrination: "creation science" was too crude to fool
anyone. But intelligent design, which spreads doubt about evolution
without being too overtly religious, may succeed where creation
science failed.

The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or
global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract
significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it
has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a
controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory. That, together
with the political muscle of the religious right, may be enough to
start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

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