Yesterday, a researcher on a visit to our Seattle offices, part of a trip to the U.S. from abroad, reminded us of an important truth that Americans easily forget: The world is a big place. For the vast majority of people out there, the debate about intelligent design is a brand-new subject.

Living in the United States, we’re accustomed to evolution being thoroughly politicized, in the sense that the media encourage everyone to divide into armed camps: evolutionists versus Darwin skeptics. In both the U.S. media and academia, there’s a kind of social panic for many about being classed with the dreaded “creationists.”

But that panic is largely unknown in other countries. The world is wide open to scientific arguments for design in nature. The big launch of ID in Brazil is a case in point, as biologist Jonathan Wells made clear the other day with a report on his recent visit there. In the coming year, we’ll be debuting a Spanish language edition of Evolution News, and Discovery Institute Press will publish a new work by a major European scientist detailing his own explorations of the design hypothesis. More on that soon. The Centre for Intelligent Design and our friend Dr. Alastair Noble do a wonderful job of sharing ideas in the United Kingdom, where the venerable Royal Society, in London, has been the scene of notable ferment.

What about the rest of the globe? As 2017 comes to a close, we ask you to help us extend our reach internationally. This will be an important theme for us in 2018. Please, go here and contribute as generously as you can to support Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture. If you donate now, a fellow contributor has committed to match your gift by 50 percent. In other words, if you give $200, you’ll actually be giving $300. Thank you!

Our work has long been international in scope. Summer Seminar students come from just about everywhere around the globe, and have brought ID home with them where they are pursuing careers in science and other academic fields. It’s all about planting seeds — and watering them, which we do through mentoring, publishing, and more. Our books and videos, from Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, and other prominent ID scholars, are translated into a very diverse range of languages. Dr. Wells alone is a potent international ambassador. His work is published in Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Chinese (Mainland and Taiwan), Japanese, Polish, Danish, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, French, and German, with Korean and Portuguese currently in progress.

The story of paleontologist Günter Bechly in Germany demonstrates the power of ID to find its way and change minds and hearts. It was reading books by our Fellows that turned him around. When Wikipedia editors deleted Dr. Bechly from the online encyclopedia for his support of ID, our coverage of that was picked up as far afield as the so-called New York Times of Israel, the secular, liberal newspaper Haaretz.

Yesterday a correspondent sent along an article from the current issue of a prominent biology journal, BioEssays, in which a Russian geneticist seeks to revive the idea of junk DNA against the evidence of ENCODE. Professor Eugene Sverdlov of the Institute of Molecular Genetics in Moscow starts by citing and quoting an article from Evolution News, and goes on to argue with us. We’d like to take up the topic with him here another time, but the point is: With your help, we really get around.

I could go on and on. I’ve seen an international map of ID scientists and scholars, many of them still confidential, that a colleague put together, and it is very impressive.

All this has convinced us of the urgent need to go even further in introducing the rest of planet Earth to the evidence for ID. Remember, it’s not like the U.S. where many have already made up their minds based on irrelevant sociological factors and are (in the case of Darwinists) hardened against considering counterarguments. The world is an extremely fertile field for our efforts, and yours!

Frankly, all that’s needed now are the resources that you can bring. The world is waiting and you can help us export intelligent design everywhere. Please take a moment now to give what you can!

Photo: Günter Bechly in a scene from “A German Scientist Speaks Out about Intelligent Design,” via Discovery Institute.