The Discovery Institute is a fundamentally dishonest organization. It is funded by conservative (often radically so) Christians with the explicit mission to chip away at "materialist science", particularly evolution. A few years ago, an alert copy center clerk exposed the Discovery Institute's plan to use mass publicity, lawyers and lobbyists to promote "design theory" as a pseudoscience to get the public to insist that supernaturalism (specifically, the Christian God) be accepted as a valid scientific explanation. This document is called "The Wedge" - google it for yourselves. While the Discovery Institute goes to great pains to never mention "God" in the materials they create for schools and for general distribution, their internally agreed motive as stated in the Wedge is: "To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and hurnan beings are created by God."
The Discovery Institute wields science in EXACTLY the same way that Big Tobacco wielded science back when they were trying to convince people that smoking isn't dangerous. Big Tobacco, by their own admission in internal memos, built a strategy to market doubt in science. And the Discovery Institute, by their own admission, is doing exactly the same: marketing doubt in science to further the fundamentalist Christian agenda of their financial backers.
So the question is: why is the Washington Post giving commentary space to an organization devoted to lying to the American public? Why is Sally Quinn promoting the agenda of a bunch of lawyers and lobbyists who are working fervently to make our children more ignorant of our natural world and more distrustful of our natural sciences? Yes, it is appropriate to give people of different beliefs an opportunity to speak. But the Discovery Institute's mission is fundamentally one of deception - to use vast advertising dollars and a mantle of pseudoscience to sneak Genesis back into the classroom. Why are the Washington Post and Sally Quinn assisting in this deception?
https://www.onfaith.co/onfaith/2011/02/22/how-evolutionary-theorys-other-discoverer-could-heal-the-darwin-divide/2258
"Darwin was the first to use data from nature to convince people that evolution is true, and his idea of natural selection was truly novel. It testifies to his genius that the concept of natural theology, accepted by most educated Westerners before 1859, was vanquished within only a few years by a single five-hundred-page book. On the Origin of Species turned the mysteries of life's diversity from mythology into genuine science." -- Jerry Coyne
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