Gates Foundation gives Millions to Discovery Insitute

In the August, 2004 Scientific American there is an article entitled:
Questions That Plague Physics, where SA asks Lawrence Krauss a number
of questions and he responds.

All the questions are quite interesting, but especially pertinent to ASA
are the questions about creationism/anti-evolution. He is from Ohio
(Chair of CaseWestern Reserve Physics Dept) and was and is involved with
the controversy in the schools there.

Some excerpts follow:

SA: The big public issue you've been identified with is fighting against
creationist teachings in the schools....Was that fun?

Krauss: It was the least fun of anything I have ever done.... This
becomes so tiresome that you just want to say, "Forget about it, go on."
 But then you realize that is exactly what Philip Johnson, this lawyer
who first proposed the intelligent design strategy, proposed when he
said something like, "We 'll just keep going and going and going until
we outlast the evolutionists."

SA: Do scientists trap themselves when they try to be "fair" and "give
equal time" in their debates with anti-Darwinists?

Krauss: Yes. Because science isn't fair. It's testable. In science, we
prove things by empirical methods, and we toss out things that have been
disproved as wrong. Period. This is how we make progress.
I'm not against teaching faith-based ideas in religious classes; I'm
just against teaching them as if they were science. And it deeply
disturbs me when someone like Bill Gates, whose philanthropy I other
wise admire, helps finance one of the major promoters of intelligent
design by giving money to a largely conservative think tank called the
Discovery Institute. Yes they got a recent grant from the Gates
Foundation. It's true that the almost $10 million grant, which is the
second they received from Gates, doesn't support intelligent design ,
but it does add credibility to a group whose goals and activities are,
based on my experiences with them, intellectually suspect...

A media relations officer of the Discovery Institute is said by SA that
the Discovery Inst decided not to respond to Dr. Krauss's comments.

More material worth reading is found in the article, but I copied what I
thought to be the most interesting material. You might wish to read the
whole article if you see the August SA, or wait a couple of months when
it will come on line.

Al Koop
Received on Fri Jul 16 15:25:19 2004