 Okay, so maybe this CSC is a little light on biologists of note, and a little heavy on religion and lawyers, but they are a think tank after all, it's not as though they were a research lab. But in 2005, thanks to grants from the CSC, a research lab was born, with strong ties to the Discovery Institute. They call it Biologic Institute, I call it the God Lab, P. Z. Myers calls it Cargo Cult Science. A journalist from the New Scientist, a magazine for science people, showed up at the front door in late 2006, in an attempt to interview the researchers there. After getting a chilly reception, including actually having the door slammed in her face, she was finally granted an audience with one of the directors, George Weber, a retired business professor at a private Christian college. He stated that, we are the first ones doing what we might call lab science in intelligent design, and the objective is to challenge the scientific community on naturalism. He also states that Biologic Institute is a branch of Discovery Institute. A few days after this interview, Weber left the board. In an email, the lab's senior researcher and spokesperson, Doug Axe, told the new scientists that Weber was found to have seriously misunderstood the purpose of Biologic and to have misrepresented it. Apparently he spoke out of turn and was expelled for it. Doug Axe and Galger and Brendan Dixon seemed to be the core of the Biologic's nine current faculty. Of the nine faculty, only three have PhDs in Biological Science, and three were in the movie expelled as poor victims of scientific establishment. So how productive is this research institution, operating on a budget of half a million dollars a year? Since 2005, they have produced two papers. That's one paper per two years between nine faculty. What have they discovered? They wrote a software program that models the evolution of Chinese Han characters as some sort of analogy to protein folding. And Sternberg wrote a philosophical paper on gene function relationships. Both papers appear in online only journals, meaning you can't pick up a copy of these articles written on paper. The software program appears to be in a journal with an acceptance rate of 60%. Basically you pay $1,300 and you get your article published. The other is in a philosophy and mathematical modeling of bioinformatics journal. And yet on their website they list over 30 publications. But wait a minute, some of their publications predate the inception of the institute by six years. What they've done is claim credit for the faculty's previous work at other institutions, work that has nothing to do with intelligent design. To address the questions of who, what, where, and show me the money, let's ask the important question of why. Simple. They aren't interested in convincing the scientific world of their position. They don't need legitimate research results. They could care less if they discover any therapies or diagnostics. They are only interested in the illusion, the skin deep impression of real research, real scientists who have a dissenting opinion of the almost universally accepted views of evolution and common descent. You need look no further than the infamous wedge document, authored by Philip Johnson at the inception of the Discovery Institute. If you haven't read it I have a link on the right to the original document, in which a strategy is laid out to bypass the First Amendment protections against state supported religion. And before I get a comment that a separation of church and state is not mentioned in the Constitution, read the Supreme Court decision of 1878. In the wedge document, Doug Axe has given the task of creating a research institution for the express purpose of giving scientific legitimacy to the movement. Paul Qian, the marine biologist, is given the task of taking on the entire paleontology community and the purpose of the organization is clearly spelled out to be religious. I don't understand how anyone could believe that this institution is anything other than a religious apologetics organization attempting to disguise itself to bypass constitutional protections. And they are succeeding because the American people don't know the difference between a point mutation and a point guard. You guys with lab coats have a disagreement? How is the average person supposed to make a choice? Teach the controversy? That sounds eminently reasonable. The Discovery Institute is preying, pun intended, on poor scientific competence of the American people and picking their battles where local government is dominated by fundamentalists and evangelicals. It's sad and a little scary and unless people wake up and realize what is being done science education in the US is in real jeopardy. I want to leave you with an entertaining story that made me laugh. Anne Galger, one of the faculty of the Biological Institute reported on her work at the Wister retrospective symposium. She discussed leaky growth in microbial colonies at high densities leading to horizontal transfer of genetic information and announced that under such condition she had actually found a novel variant that seemed to lead to enhanced colony growth. Gunther Wagner said, so a beneficial mutation happened right in your lab, at which point the moderator halted questioning. Thanks for watching.