Intelligent Design isn’t science, it’s simply a public-relations strategy to force religion into public high schools. Duh. But the ID folks will swear on a stack of Bibles that it has nothing to do with religion, it’s just a natural product of the scientific process. Which makes it remarkably dumb to actually write a strategy document detailing how ID is used to sneak religion into public life — these things have a way of leaking out into the public. 
But they did, and it did, and the result is the famous Wedge Document.
Now the story can be told of how the Wedge Document was secretly copied and released onto the internets. Turns out it was the heroic clandestine efforts of Matthew Duss and Tim Rhodes, who are clearly worthy of a Nobel or a MacArthur or some kind of prize. (I doubt they’re eligible for the Templeton Prize.) Pharyngula has the story, as well as a pdf version of the Wedge Document itself, complete with the Discovery Institute address and email at the bottom, not to mention some sort of weird Masonic pyramid logo. Priceless.
Damn you Sean Carroll, I was just preparing to post about this! I love the weird front-page imagery. I see a whole new Da Vinci Code movement based around it. What a bunch of idiots.
I love one of their “20 year goals” to make ID the dominant scientific theory in a number of sciences including cosmology.
My guess is that if you peel back this movement, at the core are a bunch of wealthy business owners who want to pay subminimum wage and not extend benefits to their workers, don’t want their products subjected to any liability, and want their taxes lowered even further. And all because that’s how GOD wants it.
It almost makes me hope there is a GOD and that each person will be held accountable for his/her actions.
Elliot
If one begins to wonder about the underlying nuttery of these people, look no further than yesterday’s efforts by blogger DaveScot, assigned by Dembski to cover Dembski’s ID blog. Here is the essential substance of it.
The post was entitled “Framing the ID Debate Around Science” and said:
I will remind everyone again – please frame your arguments around science. If the ID movement doesn’t get the issue framed around science it’s going down and I do not like losing. The plain conclusion of scientific evidence supports descent with modification from a common ancestor. You are certainly welcome to have other opinions based on faith in something other than science but I’d ask that you go to a religious website with them if you must talk about it.
You certainly don’t have to agree here with descent with modification from a common ancestor but I’m going to start clamping down on anyone positively arguing against it. It’s simply counter-productive to our goals and reinforces the idea that ID is religion because nothing but religion argues against descent with modification from a common ancestor. What we are fighting is the idea that the modification was unguided. ID can fight that without ever leaving the battleground of plain scientific conclusions. If we try to argue against anything else we’re are (sic) going to lose. Plain and simple. No buts about it. There’s only one gaping vulnerability in the commonly accepted evolutionary narrative we can exploit successfully and that’s the bit about it being unplanned.
As a physics teacher who wants to do his part in combatting this nonsense, I’m planning to make the history of the universe part of the curriculum. I think it will help if students get a better idea about the time scales we are looking at, the basic ingredients of the universe, etc. Weinberg’s “The First Three Minutes” is going to tell me much of what I want to know about the (very) early history of the universe, but I’m wondering if anyone could recommend something more current — a review paper perhaps? I’d like to know more about inflation and would be happy with something technical.
Gavin
Lots of experts around to give you perhaps better ideas. Two very accessible books about (not necessarily very early) cosmology, with an emphasis on observations, are
After the First Three Minutes : The Story of Our Universe, by T. Padmanabhan
Alpha and Omega : The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe, by Charles Seife
I am intersted to hear what the real experts have to say though…
Hi Gavin– For inflation, the best popular-level treatment is (unsurprisingly) Alan Guth’s The Inflationary Universe. There is also my Cosmology Primer, which has links to other sites.
At the undergrad-textbook level, there are two quite good books: Andrew Liddle’s An Introduction to Modern Cosmology and Barbara Ryden’s Introduction to Cosmology. For recent review articles, try astro-ph/0401547 by me and Mark, http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0601168 by Lahav and Liddle, or astro-ph/9901113 by Turner and Tyson.