Here is the e-mail I sent to New York Times reporter Laurie Goodstein after she interviewed me last Thursday for her predictable hatchet-job on intelligent design in Sunday’s Times. Decide for yourself whether her story accurately reflected all of the information she was given:

Laurie,

It was good to talk with you. In follow-up to our conversation, here is a link providing a list of the peer-reviewed and peer-edited scientific publications favoring intelligent design and/or fundamental critiques of the claims of neo-Darwinism: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2640&program=CSC.

To reiterate: We think that the debate over intelligent design will eventually be decided among scientists and scholars, and that’s why we put most of our resources into supporting the work of scholars on intelligent design and challenges to neo-Darwinism. That’s why we oppose efforts by school districts to mandate ID; we think such efforts politicize what should be a scientific controversy.

Furthermore, we think that our scholars have made great progress in the face of a lot of spurious attacks, and the evidence of that is the publication within the last year of articles in mainstream science journals supportive of ID or challenging neo-Darwinism—including Steve Meyer’s peer-reviewed article in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington; Michael Behe and David Snoke’s peer-reviewed article in the journal Protein Science; and Jonathan Wells’ technical article on centrioles in Rivisti di Biologia, one of the world’s oldest still-published biological journals. In addition, we’ve seen during the past year the publication of a scientific paper by Scott Minnich and Steve Meyer in a book of conference proceedings published by a major academic science and technical publisher in Great Britain, as well as an academic anthology on Debating Design, From Darwin to DNA co-edited by William Dembski and published by Cambridge University Press.

As I mentioned on the phone, our biggest concern about the future of intelligent design is the effort to deny freedom of speech to scientific critics of Darwin’s theory and supporters of ID. During the past year we have seen numerous college campuses try to adopt what are in effect evolution speech codes restricting what faculty can say about evolution. We’ve also seen effort to fire or otherwise intimidate scientific critics of Darwin—e.g., the failure to renew the contract of biologist Caroline Crocker at George Mason University after she favorably discussed ID in one of her classes; the current effort to deny a doctorate in science education to Brian Leonard at Ohio State University; and the effort to attack attack tenure-track astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State and microbiologist Scott Minnich at the University of Idaho. If the Darwinists are so certain that the evidence is on their side, why are they increasingly resorting to intimidation and harassment to preserve their monopoly? If they really think ID is going nowhere, why are they spending so much time trying to refute it?

I’ve also attached a couple of documents about Kansas. One documents the fact that the definition of science in Kansas is consistent with the definition used in virtually every other state; the other provides the actual wording of the science standards relating to evolution—and clearly shows that the standards do not deal with intelligent design, only scientific criticisms of Darwin’s theory.

Cordially,

John