Anyone think they can take him on?

[Guest guest]

Paul Krugman is an Economics Professor at Princeton University.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/05/opinion/05krugman.html?

 

Op-Ed Columnist

Design for Confusion

 

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: August 5, 2005

 

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 (AT) nytimes (DOT) com