User:Filll/Biologic Institute

The Biologic Institute is a tax-exempt organization with offices in Redmond, Washington and laboratories in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. It is funded by the Discovery Institute and claims to be doing biological research. The main goal of the Biologic Institute is to produce experimental evidence of intelligent design.

Origin and Goals
The original Discovery Institute plan laid out in the Wedge Document, leaked in 1999, called for the current Biologic Institute Director, senior researcher and spokesman Douglas Axe, recipient of a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1990, to head up a research effort in support of intelligent design. However, the Discovery Institute did not get around to executing this part of the Wedge Strategy plan until 2005. The Biologic Institute was announced in mid-2005.

The Biologic Institute was incorporated in Washington State in October of 2005, as a charitable organization working on research on birth defects and genetic diseases. Axe told New Scientist that the purpose of the Biologic Institute "is to show that the design perspective can lead to better science", and opines that the Biologic Institute will "contribute substantially to the scientific case for intelligent design". In spite of the Discovery Institute funding, Axe and Discovery spokesperson Rob Crowther are adament that the Biologic Institute is a "separate entity".

Staff
The Biologic Institute has at least two other researchers in addition to Axe. Ann Gauger is a zoologist with a 1989 PhD from the University of Washington and a number of years of experience as a homeschool teacher. Brendan Dixon is a software developer and worked for Microsoft previously.

Axe, Gauger and Dixon were not among those who signed the original version of the Discovery Institute petition, "A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism", in 2001. However, the August 25, 2007 version of the "Darwin Dissent" petition includes the names of both Axe and Gauger. Gauger's affiliation on the August 25, 2007 version of the petition is not the Biologic Institute, but Gauger's alma mater, the University of Washington.

New Scientist investigation
New Scientist magazine sent a reporter to the Biologic Institute laboratories in late 2006 to investigate. The reporter, Celeste Biever, was given a fairly chilly reception and found few willing to speak to her about their research. Although the New Scientist article was somewhat negative, the Discovery Institute touted it as unequivocal evidence that the Biologic Institute is engaging in real research.

The only one of the four Biologic Institute directors willing to speak to New Scientist reporter Biever was George Weber, a retired member of the business faculty at Whitworth University, a private Christian college associated with the Presbyterian Church (USA) in Spokane, Washington. Weber is a member of the Spokane chapter of Reasons to Believe, a fundamentalist evangelical Christian creationist organization. Weber 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." After speaking to New Scientist, Weber left the board of the Biologic Institute. Axe explained in an email to Biever that this was because Weber "was found to have seriously misunderstood the purpose of Biologic and to have misrepresented it."

The Discovery Institute stated in October 2006 that intelligent design research is being conducted by the institute in secret to avoid the scrutiny of the scientific community. Nevertheless, Biever was able to discover that The Biologic Institute is working on "examining the origin of metabolic pathways in bacteria, the evolution of gene order in bacteria, and the evolution of protein folds" and computational biology.

New Scientist also wrote an editorial in the same issue as its 2006 report of the Biologic Institute activities, titled "It's still all about religion", worrying about the interpretations and spin that might be given to any research results that might come out of research funded by the Discovery Institute. Axe, Dixon and Gauger responded to the New Scientist article in a letter published January 13, 2007.

Reception
However, the scientific community remains skeptical and commentators note that no publications containing results which support intelligent design have yet appeared. Reason Magazine compared the research efforts at the Biologic Institute to those of "Big Tobacco". University of Minnesota biology professor PZ Myers likens the Biologic Institute's research program to cargo cults, with "Intelligent Design creationists pretend[ing] that they're doing science." Intelligent design supporters and other creationists disagree, of course.

Exterior links

 * Biologic Institute official website