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Today the Dover Intelligent Design case came to a close — Ars has some great coverage — but I wanted to explore the notion of why and how the Intelligent Design controversy ever took place to begin with.

Fundamentally, it all has to do with the way news works. The other day, boingboing.net had a great article which explained to the layperson how news is created. (Journalists and others who "create" news largely know how this operates already.) For the most part, the creation of news is done one of two ways. The first way is that a journalist goes out, cultivates, and then writes a story. The second way is via press releases. This is true for business news, science news, almost any kind of news you can think of.

For instance, most of the news that a publication like New Scientist covers is actually rehashing of press releases that can be found on eurekalert.org. So when someone mentions that an "original article" can be found [insert New Scientist/BBC/news source link here] — this is actually not correct. The original link — unless it's a story a journalist went out and found on their own — can be found on eurekalert, or another, similar press release website.

In the realm of science, press releases serve two purposes. The inform the public (and publishers) of various scientific breakthroughs at academic institutions, or they can be the tool of a company like Sangamo BioSciences to let the world know about a scientific breakthrough that their company has created. I wrote about such a story yesterday in Nobel Intent — in general I don't care where breakthroughs come from, a breakthrough is a breakthrough regardless of whether it's accomplished by a non-profit university or a for-profit company. Motivations might be different for each, but a breakthrough is a breakthrough.

In any event, in a case like the Intelligent Design case in Dover, PA, their campaign was largely based on the idea of "teaching the controversy." The Controversy, of course, is an entirely fictitious creation: there is no controversy within the realm of science. There is, however, a controversy when it comes to melding science and faith, especially amongst Bible literalist circles. The Discovery Institute (and the Thomas Moore Law Center) successfully conflated this idea in the public eye. In fact, they created it specifically for this purpose. (Much the same way that "Cyber Monday" is a term fabricated by retail associations whose goal it is to drive holiday sales.) Made-up terms have quite a lot of influence on the public, particularly when they are picked up by the mainstream media and reported as Truth.

In the case of Intelligent Design, there is no controversy, except that which the Discovery Institute — a conservative Christian think-tank — created. And then released into the wild in the form of press releases which could then be picked up by the mainstream media and eventually make its way into the minds of mainstream America. The campaign was largely successful: reporters have been reporting the Intelligent Design case in Dover, PA by telling both sides of the story in an effort to appear fair and balanced, not taking into account that one side of the story (the alleged controversy) is completely made up to begin with. As a result, fringe beliefs are given the same equal time as real scientific theories in the eyes of the public, introducing fear, uncertainty, and doubt into mainstream thought. The responsible thing to do would is to call ID what it is: a creation by a fringe group for the express purpose of bringing creationism back into the classroom under the a-religious guise of "intelligent design."

Unfortunately by exploiting the convoluted way that "news" is created, ID proponents under the auspices of the Discovery Institute were able to shoehorn a non-existent controversy into the hearts and minds of the American public with the help of the mainstream press — who should largely know better. Unfortunately, political correctness and efforts to deliver "fair and balanced" reporting only exacerbated the (non-)situation in the first place.

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