Unfashionable genes

Science | Darwinists lash out as ID scientist makes an important inroad | Mark Bergin

SEATTLE -- Last month the Intelligent Design (ID) team pushed a run across the plate, and its Darwinist opponents promptly promised not to let it happen again.

The ID breakthrough came when a paper titled "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories" by Stephen Meyer appeared in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. A peer-reviewed journal, Proceedings only prints articles approved by scientists at mainstream institutions—and until now the Darwinian establishment has excluded from such journals all ID articles.

Mr. Meyer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, argues in the paper that Darwinian mechanisms cannot explain the production of new information needed for novel genes and proposes ID as a better explanation. The ID movement already has produced peer-reviewed books: William Dembski's The Design Inference and Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box. But publication of Mr. Meyer's paper means that Darwinians will no longer be able to dismiss the ID movement by saying that such articles cannot pass muster.