Yes, it’s true. The Biologic Institute, the research arm of the Discovery Institute (the main pushers of Intelligent Design) has evolved. Or at least its web page has.
The Biologic Institute is an odd institution. Not just that its purpose is to bolster the case for ID (I’m happy for them to be doing that, as long they’re doing decent science). But they don’t want to talk about their work. Indeed, it appears that talking to the press can lead to removal from their board. They also aren’t keen on people talking about their results. Last year they had a conference, but didn’t want any of the delegates to talk about it.
It’s bizarre that one gets more information about the institute from Wikipedia than from their own pages. For some time, their web site has been some fancy graphics, and a note saying “Coming Soon…”. It has been like this for over a year (and the labs were set up in 2005!).
But now it’s all changed. They’ve expanded their pages. The Church Burnin’ Ebola Boys(1) will be pleased to know that the cheesy poofs(2) are still there. But now we have this:
Welcome
Welcome to Biologic Institute – a scientific research organization pioneering a fresh approach to studying, and thinking, about life.
Followed by a blog post:
Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
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1. Mr WordPress July 2nd, 2007 at 1:05 pm
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Their Microsoft programmer has finally taken time off from his research to, well, write one sentence, and set up a blog. I would have responded to their post but, unlike Mr. WordPress, I can’t log in. Lucky Mr. WordPress, I bet he knows all their secrets.
Unfortunately none of the researchers have had time to actually blog anything. One wonders what they’re doing. Are they hard at work in the lab, slaving over a hot(3) petri dish? Too busy writing manuscripts? Or have they all been Expelled?
(1) Don’t ask.
(2) Really don’t ask.
(3) Autoclaved. Otherwise life might evolve spontaneously in it.
Love it!
Did you ever see that hilarious blog from some of the people at WordPress called “Mrs WordPress”, initially based on all that “hello world” standard message? I laughed a lot — but unfortunately it didn’t last very long.
Finally the Biologic Institute published a post on their blog. The usual arguments (this time they choose ATP synthase instead of bacterial flagella):
*There is no junk here. The ATPase is made not of four amino acids but four thousand—more like an essay than a paragraph (much less a word). Could it have started out much smaller? Not much, in view of the two sections that have to be coupled for it to work. Like an essay, it might withstand trimming in some places, and some of the parts might be reworded if we knew the rules of composition for proteins. Typos can be tolerated to an extent, as with essays. But none of this explains how random single-letter changes can produce new essays, whether from scratch or from existing essays on other subjects. According to intuition, there’s only one way to get an essay.*