In the weeks before the battle over first amendment rights ramped up in Dover, the Discovery Institute folks said they didn?t support intelligent design mandates in science curricula, saying that such cases will only be politically divisive. Now, lawyers representing the school board are apparently happy to hear it. The York Daily Record, which has nicely covered some of the dismay experienced by a small town under the media heat lamp and now listed as the Number One Island of Ignorance by one group, talked with Casey Luskin, Discovery Institute program officer and Robert Crowther II, the Institute?s communications director.

They?re not participating in the actual proceedings, but were happy to weigh in to the court of public opinion by giving the YDR reporter some mixed messages. Both sides are wrong, they contend. They criticized Kenneth R. Miller, Brown University biology professor and Monday?s witness for three things: characterizing ID as a concept that focuses on what evolution doesn?t explain; suggesting that ID requires a supernatural being; and claiming that ID is not a testable theory.

Dustbining the first and last of those criticisms, Luskin himself cites Michael Behe?s 2004 article in Protein Science about how proteins and protein interactions could not evolve. Behe actually does test a theory here, but that theory is evolution, with the ultimate goal of showing what evolution doesn?t explain. As for the supernatural, Richard Thompson, an attorney for the Thomas More Law Center said he was relieved that the Discovery Institute pulled their backing. As he is trying to make a case that inserting ID into scientific curriculum is not about religion, he is glad to be distanced from an organization he says has made a lot of comments that bring religion into the debate. So the institute criticizes Miller for bringing religion into the debate and Thompson criticizes the Institute for bringing religion into the debate. Who gets that potato next?