 Our final presentation is from Christine Shelska. Chris has an MCS in communication studies and is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary. Chris research involves the philosophy of science as well as a study of rhetorical strategies, which today she'll apply in discussing the efforts to date by the Discovery Institute to promote intelligent design. I also found out after I invited her to give her talk that she was also a recipient of one of the Cirlia Ramicks scholarships to come here, so we appreciate that very much. So please welcome Chris as she gives her talk, Assessing Intelligent Design from Acute Mechanics Communications Perspective. Good morning, and thank you for attending my presentation. Before I begin, I'd like to thank Amy for the grant. I really appreciate that. I'll begin my discussion by defining what I mean by intelligent design. Then I'll discuss how conceiving of the Discovery Institute as a think tank opens up possibilities for examining the methods by which they secure public engagement. Finally, I'll make a few brief comments on actor network theory and how it can be used as a method to examine scientific controversies, even those that have been manufactured. So what is intelligent design? Intelligent design or ID is a term that describes a belief about the origin and development of life. The organization most strongly associated with articulating and advancing the creationist version of ID is the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank founded in 1990 and based in Seattle, Washington. The organization attempts to position ID as science and a theoretical alternative to evolution, as well as a challenge to the scientific method itself. The mainstream scientific community almost unanimously rejects ID as valid scientific theory for many reasons, but primarily because it invokes a supernatural agent to support its claims. Intelligent design theory is basically creation science rebranded. In 1987, in Edwards vs. Aguillard, Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist ruled that teaching creationism in public schools violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution because it promotes a sectarian religious view. It was during this case that creationist Dean Kenyon testified that biomolecular systems require intelligent design. In 1989, the term Intelligent Design enjoyed its publication debut in the second edition of a high school creationist biology textbook entitled of Pandas and People, which Kenyon coauthored. Philosopher Barbara Forrest's research revealed that the text was hastily rewritten after the trial using a word processor search and replace technique. An unfortunate mixing of the terms creation scientists and design proponents gave rise to the now infamous term, see design proponentsists. In Kitts Miller vs. Dover, Dr. Forrest's testimony about the textbook error played a substantial role in revealing ID's creationist roots. And Judge John E. Jones III concluded that teaching ID as science is unconstitutional. Nevertheless, the so-called controversy refuses to go away. Historians and philosophers of science and increasingly scientists themselves have identified ID claims as non-scientific. And the National Center for Science Education has tirelessly counseled the U.S. judicial community to try to keep ID out of public school science classrooms. But while scientific arguments against ID have shielded science and to a lesser degree public education from religious intervention, the deployment of the idea that ID is a scientific theory into the public arena has proven remarkably successful. How has this been accomplished? In Nonsense on Stilts, How to Tell Science from Bunk, Massimo Pigliucci identified a gap in the critical literature on the role of think tanks in shaping social understandings of science. Pigliucci defined a think tank as a private group, usually but not always privately funded, producing arguments and data aimed at influencing specific sectors of public policy and identified the Discovery Institute as a think tank whose primary mode of securing public engagement is spin doctrine. Advocacy think tanks like the Discovery Institute began to emerge around 1970 and are distinct from their predecessors, academic and contract think tanks for their reliance on marketing strategies rather than scientific evidence to support their claims. Some advocacy think tanks play an enormous role in shaping public opinion, wielding an imbalance of persuasive power with the capacity if not the intent to destabilize democracy. The model they have adopted from their predecessors, academic and contract think tanks is beginning to come under critical scrutiny. Think tanks enjoy privileged tax status and they are not obligated to report the sources of their funding. Academic and scientific societies, lobbyists and journalists are held accountable to scholarly, legal and ethical standards but the same is not true of think tanks. While they maintain formal independence, the research agenda of advocacy think tanks is frequently shaped by the ideology of their funders. This has opened up possibilities for them to serve as political outsourcers, constructing ideological claims and anchoring them with target audiences to advance political and corporate interests. This strategy was used successfully to propagate denials about the links between smoking and cancer and continues to be used to deny the anthropogenic drivers of climate change. Conceptualized as an advocacy think tank, the Discovery Institute can be understood as promoting ideological claims about religion but their Center for Science and Culture project acts as an academic think tank to establish their claims to scientificity and obscure their religious motives. In particular, an internal document leaked in 1999 entitled The Wedge outlines the Discovery Institute's 20-year strategy to overthrow materialism and its cultural legacies by positioning intelligent design as the dominant scientific perspective and having it permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life. The Wedge strategy can be understood as a public relations plan that has been successfully implemented to secure public engagement by deploying religious claims as scientific knowledge. Apti-Network Theory, or ANT, is a useful framework for assessing how claims come to be understood as scientific knowledge. Despite its name, ANT is more accurately understood as a method that invites multiple theoretical insights to describe social phenomena. ANT developed from Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, which understands science as a social practice. ANT grants both human and non-human actors agency and looks at how knowledge emerges as a consequence of their interactions. Networks overlap or consolidate to form larger networks such as governments and institutions. They are not single entities and they have no center. This makes them unstable and potentially vulnerable to confrontation and resistance. Although the goal is network stability, networks must constantly reconfigure to respond to outside challenges. ANT borrows the term black box from Cybernetics to describe a knowledge network that has been collectively stabilized when its validity is no longer questioned, when it is accepted as a fact that is available to advance further knowledge. For example, the microscope has a history, a network of actors that contributed to its emergence as a tool to advance science. But nobody bothers to question the knowledge behind the microscope when they use one. Nobody questions the theory of optics or magnification. It is simply taken for granted that the thing we'll do is expected, make little things look bigger. So the microscope is said to be black boxed. Before black boxes get closed or when they are reopened, controversy arises. This is what ANT researchers are interested in. How controversies flare up and get settled. How relationships form between actors to stabilize and protect the network from confrontation and resistance. ANT relies on the concept of translation, which means to make two worlds equivalent. For example, problematization occurs when an unexpected observation or dissenting claim challenges the scientific theory. At this point, actors are persuaded to adopt roles that will advance translation. Scientists are asked to take on their roles as scientists by taking seriously and evaluating challenges to the theory. Enrollment occurs when alliances are formed between actors to take up a statement and enact it so that it becomes a fact. Transforming a statement to a fact is a rhetorical process. It involves bringing scientific texts such as peer-reviewed journal articles into the network and using citations to other works to support or challenge the statement. Statements become facts when they are collectively stabilized, when they become part of the shared understanding of how things get done in a scientific research program. From the ANT perspective, a statement becomes a fact not because it is true and does not concern itself with determining the truth value of claims. A statement becomes a fact because it is used as such by other actors. When translation is successful, the knowledge network is said to be stabilized. Like our microscope, its history goes unnoticed and it gets used as a resource to further the development of other black boxes. To conclude, the purpose of adopting an ANT perspective to analyze a discovery institute is to broaden the discussion by identifying issues left unexamined when an idea is treated as a religion or challenged as a scientific theory. From this perspective, a useful way to conceive of the discovery institute's network is to understand their activities as ongoing attempts to prevent evolution from becoming black boxed, stabilized and widely accepted. Successful translation of evolution into the broader societal network has been disrupted and its validity challenged using a variety of persuasive tactics. For example, a statement can become a fact by generating and stimulating interest around a problem for which the statement becomes a solution. The discovery institute has successfully manufactured a controversy about evolution where none exists by framing materialism as a force of destruction, the thrust behind a nihilistic atheist agenda, devoid of morality and a threat to western civilization. They've also manufactured the solution to invoke an intelligent designer as a scientific explanation. And they're continually developing the rhetoric to accompany the solution, co-opting secular language to construct religious claims as scientific. A recent strategy involved complaining that the peer review process is undemocratic and demanding accommodations for supernatural claims to inform science in the name of academic freedom because they are skeptical about evolution. Another persuasive tactic involves appealing to the interests of more powerful allies, joining their network and leveraging their collective power like the discovery institute has done with other organizations on the religious right. Yet another tactic involves identifying relevant actors from other networks and drawing them in. Quote mining, for example, is a way of drawing credible actors into the ID network against their will. To wrap up, conceptualizing the discovery institute as an advocacy think tank appends the ant method by opening up the possibility of evaluating and critiquing their strategies from a communications perspective rather than attempting to destabilize their claims to scientificity. This approach focuses on the marketing strategies they use to secure public engagement and highlights the wedge strategy as a public relations plan designed to shape opinion with the potential to destabilize democracy and the intent to establish theocracy. Thank you. Thank you, Chris, and we do have a couple... We have time for a couple questions. Anybody have some questions? Any intelligently designed questions out there? Any evolved questions? They seem satisfied. Well, thank you so much, Chris. Thank you.