About the Contributors

Michael J. Behe

_{Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture}

Michael J. Behe is Professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. Behe’s current research involves delineation of design and natural selection in protein structures. In his career he has authored over 40 technical papers and three books, Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA that Challenges Evolution, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, and The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, which argue that living system at the molecular level are best explained as being the result of deliberate intelligent design.

David Berlinski

_{Writer, Thinker, Raconteur, and Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute}

David Berlinski received his PhD in philosophy from Princeton University and was later a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Dr. Berlinski has authored works on systems analysis, differential topology, theoretical biology, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics, as well as three novels. He has also taught philosophy, mathematics and English at such universities as Stanford, Rutgers, the City University of New York and the Universite de Paris. In addition, he has held research fellowships at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria and the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France.

Walter Bradley

Walter L. Bradley (1943-2025) received his B.S. degree in Engineering Science (Physics) in 1965 and his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering in 1968, both from the University of Texas (Austin). He subsequently taught at the Colorado School of Mines, Texas A&M University as Full Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and for 10 years at Baylor University as a Distinguished Professor. His research area has been Materials Science and Engineering, with a focus on the mechanical properties of plastics and polymeric (plastic) composite materials, fracture and life prediction. He has received more than $7 million in research funding and published more than 150 refereed technical papers and book chapters. He was honored by the American Society for Materials and the Society of Plastics Engineers as Educator of the Year. His most recent work focused on converting agricultural waste into functional fillers for engineering plastics to provide new economic opportunities for poor farmers in developing countries.

Paul Chien

Paul K. Chien, PhD, is professor emeritus at the University of San Francisco, where he was formerly chairman of the Department of Biology. He also has taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, consulted for the California Institute of Technology’s Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory, and served as a scanning electron microscopy analyst for the Biology Department of Santa Clara University, California. Chien has published with colleagues from several institutions throughout China. He received his PhD in biology from the University of California at Irvine.

William A. Dembski

_{Founding and Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture, Distinguished Fellow, Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence}

A mathematician and philosopher, Bill Dembski is the author/editor of more than 25 books as well as the writer of peer-reviewed articles spanning mathematics, engineering, biology, philosophy, and theology. With doctorates in mathematics (University of Chicago) and philosophy (University of Illinois at Chicago), Bill is an active researcher in the field of intelligent design. But he is also a tech entrepreneur who builds educational software and websites, exploring how education can help to advance human freedom with the aid of technology.

David K. DeWolf

_{Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture}

David K. DeWolf is a Professor of Law at Gonzaga School of Law in Spokane, Washington and a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. A graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School, Professor DeWolf has clerked for the Honorable Stephen Bistline of the Idaho Supreme Court. He has written a briefing book for public school administrators, Teaching the Controversy: Darwinism, Design and the Public School Curriculum.

Phillip E. Johnson

_{Former Program Advisor, Center for Science and Culture}

Phillip E. Johnson taught law for more than thirty years at the University of California — Berkeley where he was professor emeritus until his passing in 2019. He was recognized as a leading spokesman for the intelligent design movement, and was the author of many books, including Darwin on Trial, Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds.

Michael Newton Keas

_{Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture}

After earning a Ph.D. in the history of science from the University of Oklahoma, Mike Keas won research grants from such organizations as the National Science Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. He experienced some of the last historic moments behind the Berlin Wall as a Fulbright scholar in East Germany. Keas serves as lecturer in the history and philosophy of science at Biola University. He has written numerous articles, including “Systematizing the Theoretical Virtues” in the top-tier philosophy journal Synthese. This essay analyzes twelve traits of reputable theories, and has generated dialogue across many fields. With a quarter-century of experience teaching science and its history to college students, Keas is qualified to lay out the facts to show how far the conventional wisdom about science and religion departs from reality. He has done so in the ISI book Unbelievable: 7 Myths about the History and Future of Science and Religion.

Paul Nelson

_{Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture}

Paul A. Nelson is currently a Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture and Adjunct Professor in the Master of Arts Program in Science & Religion at Biola University. He is a philosopher of biology who has been involved in the intelligent design debate internationally for three decades. His grandfather, Byron C. Nelson (1893-1972), a theologian and author, was an influential mid-20th century dissenter from Darwinian evolution. After Paul received his BA in philosophy with a minor in evolutionary biology from the University of Pittsburgh, he entered the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD (1998) in the philosophy of biology and evolutionary theory.

Jonathan Wells

_{Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture}

A molecular and cell biologist, Jonathan Wells (1942-2024) was author of the path-breaking book Icons of Evolution: Why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong (2000), which exposed serious inaccuracies in how evolution has been taught in contemporary science textbooks. A Senior Fellow with the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute, Wells was also a proponent of the scientific theory of intelligent design.

Other Contributors

Celeste Condit

Celeste Condit (Ph.D., rhetorical studies, University of Iowa) is a research professor in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia. She is the author of The Meanings of the Gene (1999). Condit has published widely in publications ranging from the Quarterly Journal of Speech to the American Journal of Human Genetics to Health Communication. She has received the Douglas Ehninger Award for distinguished rhetorical scholarship from the National Communication Association as well as a Golden Anniversary Monograph Award.

Mark DeForrest

Mark DeForrest (J.D., Gonzaga University) is an attorney residing in Spokane, Washington. He is currently employed as a legal writing and research instructor at Gonzaga. DeForrest has published several articles in venues as diverse as the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Seattle Times, Gonzaga Law Review, Across Borders, and Utah Law Review.

David Depew

David Depew is professor of communication studies and rhetoric of inquiry at the University of Iowa. He is associated with Iowa’s internationally known Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI), an interdisciplinary research and teaching unit dedicated to applying rhetorical criticism and theorizing to scholarly and public controversies that involve claims to disciplinary knowledge. With Bruce H. Weber, he is coauthor of Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (1995). DePew and Weber also co-edited Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered.

Steve Fuller

Steve Fuller (Ph.D., history and philosophy of science, University of Pittsburgh) is professor of sociology at the University of Warwick, U.K. He is best known for his research program of “social epistemology,” the subject of a journal he founded in 1987. His latest books include The Governance of Science: Ideology and the Future of the Open Society (2000) and Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (2000).

Eugene Garver

Eugene Garver (Ph.D., philosophy, University of Chicago) is Regents Professor of Philosophy at St. John’s University, where he has been teaching since 1985. He is the author of Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (1987) and Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (1994). He recently co-edited Pluralism in Theory and Practice: Richard McKeon and American Philosophy (2000) and was guest editor of a special issue of Argumentation called “Reasoning: Perspectives from the New Philosophy and History of Science.”

Donald Kennedy

Donald Kennedy (Ph.D., biology, Harvard University) served for a year as provost and for twelve years as president emeritus of Stanford University. During that time, he also continued his work on health and environmental policy issues as a member of the Board of Directors of the Health Effects Institute (a nonprofit research organization devoted to mobile source emissions), Clean Sites, Inc. (a similar organization devoted to toxic waste cleanup), and the California Nature Conservancy. Kennedy is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Brig Klyce

Brig Klyce studied English at Princeton University and received a Bachelor Architecture degree from the University of Tennessee in 1975. He began his study of panspermia as an avocation in 1981. After twenty years in the industrial laundry business, in 1995 he launched Acorn Enterprises LLC, a research and publishing company focused on panspermia. He maintains a website about the strong version of panspermia, which he hopes to rename “cosmic ancestry,” at http://www.panspermia.org.

Malcolm Lancaster

Malcolm Lancaster is a retired professor of clinical medicine from the University of Texas at San Antonio.

John Lyne

John Lyne (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) is professor and chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is also a resident fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science and a member of the graduate faculty in Bioethics and Health Law. Lyne’s work has appeared in such journals as the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Social Epistemology, Journal of Medical Humanities, and Cultural Studies. He has coauthored a book with Henry F. Howe on sociobiology and evolutionary theory and was series editor-in-chief for the Rhetoric of the Human Sciences book series for the University of Wisconsin Press.

Gordon C. Mills

Gordon C. Mills (Ph.D., biochemistry, University of Michigan) spent thirty-five years on the medical school teaching and research faculty at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston. For the past twelve years, he has applied his research training and experience to developing a theistic view of evolution and the origin of life that he refers to as a “Design Theory of Progressive Creation.” Mills’s work has been published in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Origins and Design, and Christian Scholar’s Review.

Warren A. Nord

Warren A. Nord (Ph.D., philosophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) has taught the philosophy of religion at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and been director of the university’s program in the Humanities and Human Values since 1979. Nord is the author of more than thirty articles and two books, Religion and American Education: Rethinking a National Dilemma, and (with Charles C. Haynes) Taking Religion Seriously Across the Curriculum.

Massimo Pigliucci

Massimo Pigliucci (Doctorate in Genetics, University of Ferrara, Italy; Ph.D., botany, University of Connecticut) is an associate professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he teaches ecology and evolutionary biology. He has published fifty technical papers and two books on evolutionary biology (Phenotypic Evolution, with Carl Schlichting, and Phenotypic Plasticity: Beyond Nature vs. Nurture). Pigliucci has been awarded several times the Oak Ridge National Labs award for excellence in research and has won the prestigious Dobzhansky Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution, of which he is now vice president. As a skeptic, he has published in national magazines such as Free Inquiry, Skeptic, Skeptical Inquirer, Philosophy Now, and Secular Nation.

Alvin Plantinga

Alvin Plantinga (Ph.D., philosophy, Yale) is a founding member and past president of the Society of Christian Philosophers. He is the author of God and Other Minds, The Nature of Necessity, Warrant: The Current Debate, Warrant and Proper Function, and Warranted Christian Belief.

William Provine

William Provine is professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and in the Department of History at Cornell University; he is also the Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has held a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1988, he won Cornell’s Clark Distinguished Teaching Award.

Marcus Ross

Marcus Ross (M.S., paleontology, South Dakota School of Mines; Ph.D. candidate, University of Delaware) is a doctoral student in paleontology at the University of Delaware. In the summer of 2000, Ross traveled to southern China to study the famous Cambrian fossils near Chengjiang. He recently presented a poster at the Geological Society of America outlining a novel method for measuring increases in biological complexity as they arise the in fossil record.

Michael Ruse

Michael Ruse (Ph.D., philosophy of biology, University of Bristol) is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Killam Fellowship. He has written or edited several books, including Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship between Science and Religion, and Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction? Ruse is the founding editor of Biology and Philosophy. He is the series editor of the Philosophy and Biology series for Cambridge University Press.

Bruce Weber

Bruce Weber (Ph.D., chemistry, University of California, San Diego) is Professor of Biochemistry Emeritus at California State University–Fullerton and Robert H. Woodworth Professor of Science and Natural Philosophy at Bennington College. He is an elected Fellow of the Linnean Society (London). He is coauthor, with David Depew, of Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (1995). He is also director of the Los Angeles Basin California State University Minority International Research Training Program.

Chandra Wickramasinghe

Chandra Wickramasinghe (Sc.D., University of Cambridge) is professor at Cardiff University of Wales. Jointly with Sir Fred Hoyle, he was awarded the International Dag Hammarskjold Gold Medal for Science in 1986, and in 1992 he was decorated by the president of Sri Lanka with the titular honor of Vidya Jyothi. He was awarded the International Sahabdeen Prize for Science in 1996. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.