Melott replies: I agree with James Adamski that the title of my piece is a cheap shot. A cheap shot is exactly appropriate with respect to ID. I agree that I wrote an opinion piece, not a scientific refutation: See the references. It is also true that Michael Behe, Michael Denton, and others are careful to restrict their attacks to evolution. This is part of the “Big Tent” strategy to unify old-Earth, young-Earth, and other kinds of creationists while splitting the scientific community. Phillip Johnson, another IDist, is careful in his presentations not to offend young-Earthers: He maintains that the issue of Earth’s age isn’t important. What is most revealing, letters to the editor seen here and in Ohio have shown considerable blending of ID rhetoric with issues that impact geology and cosmology.

In his book No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), William Dembski has invented a “conservation of information” law. This is unsupported new physics that is not treated as a hypothesis. He reports that the theory of inflation is explanatory but does not possess “independent evidence for its existence.” The past several years have seen well-publicized experimental data confirming the extreme flatness of cosmological space and a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of density perturbations, both key predictions of inflation. There are also data that suggest the universe may be entering a new inflationary expansion. Dembski is either ignorant or has selectively deleted parts of existing physics. The preceding are but two examples of the “blast zone,” drawn from ID’s leading “design theorist.”

Adamski and Claud Lacy both fall prey to the fairness fallacy; Lacy even mentions newspapers as a positive counterexample. One of the reasons the formulation of public policy encounters such terrible problems is that newspapers present “both sides” on matters of evidence as if they were matters of opinion, even when the evidence is strongly one-sided. This practice gives the public the impression of a serious scientific controversy. A fair representation of the views of working biological researchers should contain 2 or 3 ID advocates for about 10 000 presentations opposing it. Thus, having two essays opposed to ID creationism, with none supporting it, as seen in the June issue of Physics Today, is entirely appropriate.