NYTimes.com > Opinion

Design for ConfusionBy PAUL KRUGMAN
(also available on pkarchive.org)

Published: August 5, 2005

I'd like to nominate Irving Kristol, the neoconservative former
editor of The Public Interest, as the father of "intelligent
design." No, he didn't play any role in developing the doctrine. But
he is the father of the political strategy that lies behind the
intelligent design movement - a strategy that has been used with
great success by the economic right and has now been adopted by the
religious right.

Back in 1978 Mr. Kristol urged corporations to make "philanthropic
contributions to scholars and institutions who are likely to
advocate preservation of a strong private sector." That was
delicately worded, but the clear implication was that corporations
that didn't like the results of academic research, however valid,
should support people willing to say something more to their liking.

Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote
supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim - that tax
cuts have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they
pay for themselves - has never been backed by evidence. He would
later concede, or perhaps boast, that he had a "cavalier attitude
toward the budget deficit."

"Political effectiveness was the priority," he wrote in 1995, "not
the accounting deficiencies of government."

Corporations followed his lead, pouring a steady stream of money
into think tanks that created a sort of parallel intellectual
universe, a world of "scholars" whose careers are based on toeing an
ideological line, rather than on doing research that stands up to
scrutiny by their peers.

You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about
inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like
economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well
when deployed against the hard sciences.

The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research
on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus,
many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved.
This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think
tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like
peer-reviewed research, but aren't. And behind it all lies lavish
financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil.

There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is
that nonscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference
between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in
it, doesn't that make it science?

Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of
he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that
knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that
the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read,
"Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many
articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.

Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is
determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by
skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all
biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that
they're elitists who think they're smarter than the rest of us.

Which brings us, finally, to intelligent design. Some of America's
most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom
DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for
the Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't
been enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The
theory of evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the
country isn't ready - yet - to teach religious doctrine in public
schools.

But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate
interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that
the scientific consensus has shaky foundations?

Creationists failed when they pretended to be engaged in science,
not religious indoctrination: "creation science" was too crude to
fool anyone. But intelligent design, which spreads doubt about
evolution without being too overtly religious, may succeed where
creation science failed.

The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics
or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to
attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective.
All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there
really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory.
That, together with the political muscle of the religious right, may
be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from
the classroom. 

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com