Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
This is about the only place where you're going to really hear a positive case for intelligent design and where you're going to get the kind of scientific discernment that Nate was just talking about, a point of view that is not reflected in very many other outlets. You certainly aren't getting that from the general mainstream news media or the mainstream scientific Media.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. On today's episode, we're discussing the transformation of the center for Science and Culture's flagship news and commentary site, Evolution News. It's now turned into Science and Culture Today. With a fresh name, a vibrant redesign, and a broader vision, Science and Culture Today is poised to deepen awareness and engagement with the evidence for intelligent design.
I'm joined by two key architects of this relaunch. Nathan Jacobson, our director of media and brand and chief designer behind the new site, and Rob Crowther, Discovery Institute's Director of communications. Gents, welcome to Idea the Future.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Welcome. Glad to be here.
[00:01:12] Speaker C: Happy to be here.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Now, let's start with you, Rob. You were there when the site first launched back in December 2004. In fact, you're the one that pitched the idea to the fledgling SO center for Science and Culture team. Why did you think a weblog or blog, as they came to be known, would be a good idea for our purposes? And what was the original vision for Evolution News?
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Well, you have to remember that in the early 2000s, the Internet was still pretty new in a way, that people were still figuring out how it was going to work. And likewise, the Intelligent Design movement, the modernization of the Intelligent Design theory was. Was still pretty new, too.
Michael Behe's book had just come out in the late 90s.
Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution had come out in 2001. You had a couple of movies like Unlocking the Mystery of Life and the Privileged Planet, but you didn't have the hundreds of books we have now about intelligent design or the hundreds of, you know, journal articles or anything like that. So it was a new thing that people were super interested in, including the media. And we, we were getting lots of questions, and we were trying to figure out ways to communicate our messages as widely as possible.
And I had read some books about this blog by Hugh Hewitt, Smart Mobs by Nathan Mervold, the Fourth Turning by How and Strauss, and they all touched on these new communications measures that were happening on the Internet. And it seemed like a good idea for us to also have a blog and to be able to frame the story that we wanted to and explain intelligent design in our own words rather than have, you know, CNN or the New York Times put words in our mouth.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: Yeah. And of course, those outlets, you know, give us an idea of what, what the mainstream news coverage was like when it came to intelligent design or the evolution debate in general at this time. I mean, was it friendly, was it hostile? Was. Were they just missing huge chunks of the debate?
[00:03:16] Speaker A: Yes, in short, it was all of those things. Like I said, it was a. It was still kind of a new idea to most people. And that included the media. And there were a lot of media that were very open and interested and curious and, you know, tried to do a good job of reporting objectively. But there were also a lot of agenda driven media, a lot in the mainstream media that were predisposed to not necessarily have great idea thinking about intelligent design. It was a challenging idea. And this, this thought that it was going to somehow dethrone Darwin's theory seemed like a scary thing to a lot of scientists and scientists in media at the time. And so the coverage, you know, ranged from very average and curious and inquisitive to really, you know, agenda driven and people being really challenging and essentially trying to frame this in a way that would put down intelligent design and the scientists and the scholars that were promoting it.
[00:04:22] Speaker B: So it was going to be very important to have a clearinghouse for information, for making sure facts were right and things were corrected on the record.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: It was fact checking for sure. That was one of the primary things we wanted to do, was to be able to hold the media accountable when they published an article. We would examine that and then we would correct things or comment where, you know, and give applause where they did a good job, where there were reporters that did good jobs on those things.
And so we wanted to be able to say, hey, great job, this is how it's done, or challenge them and say, look, you're putting words in our mouth, or you're misdefining what intelligent design is, often conflating it with creationism or something like that.
So we wanted to do that kind of fact checking. And a blog seemed like the best way to go for that in 2004.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: Yeah, and I was looking back at some of the very first articles in December that year, going into the new year. And you were writing, John west was correcting misinformation from the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and elsewhere. And you also reported on an op ed by Stephen Meyer and John Angus Campbell in the San Francisco Chronicle, as they were defending Teach the controversy approach to science education.
I also noticed the name of their counterpart there was Robert Sapolsky, the famous Stanford neurologist. So that was interesting. But that's sort of what you were going for with the site in the early days, was correcting the record and getting the word up.
Now, Nate, over the years, Evolution News has evolved to use that word quite purposefully from a fact checking blog in those early days to a deep well of over 14,000 articles. And that's nearly 200 contributors, all under the careful editorial oversight of David Klinghoffer and Editor in chief John West.
Tell us how the site has changed over the years and what were some of the challenges in updating the website?
[00:06:29] Speaker C: Well, it is fun to go down the wayback machine rabbit hole looking at the site in each of its iterations over the years, because it is kind of a snapshot or several snapshots of the web at different periods of development. And the very first look and feel was quite archaic, very gray and boxy, just a, you know, image of its time in the early web. And I would say that the, you know, three redevelopments that happened over time, each one sort of reflected a moment in time.
One of the, you know, main things that happened is that there was a lot more content and so more categories got to be introduced, a lot more tagging to try to cover just a wide range of things that were being covered.
And one of the biggest challenges of this big redesign is that the one fundamental thing that we changed, or one of the fundamental things, was kind of moving away from that blog format which had served for so many years.
So we went from just the last seven articles that have been published on the front page to dozens and to videos and some of the eye to the future podcasts featured there. So a challenge in doing that is that for every page load of our homepage, you have to load that many more articles.
And we've been working a lot on the backend to try to make sure that it's efficiently caching and loading and pulling all those articles so that things still are speedy and responsive when you load the front page. So I really had a vision from the start that I wanted this to look like a full fledged news site, reflective of just how many topics were being covered, how much was fresh and new.
But that did introduce some challenges. Yeah, I would say the biggest challenge is the name change, because anytime you float an idea like that, it's a big change with inherent risk.
And so there was a little Bit of a PR campaign, reaching out to different people to get feedback on different ideas.
I knew that I wanted the new name to really feature science, and we had a couple other ideas in the hopper before John west actually suggested science and Culture. Just the most kind of obvious answer, which is a reflection of us being the center for Science and Culture.
So that was the name that immediately had the most positive reaction.
And I was very tentative and I guess worried that the name change would not go through, because I really felt like a name change was in order, that Evolution News was overly a niche that no longer reflected the kind of content on the site.
So I really wanted that name change and was very happy when we got consensus behind making that big change.
[00:09:58] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think we'll look back and consider that a masterstroke in our overall strategy of trying to reach people with the evidence for intelligent design. Yes, there's the negative argument about evolution and the news and coverage with that, but there's also the positive argument and case for intelligent design across all these scientific disciplines.
So that was great that the new name won the day.
And actually, you know, it is a rebrand, but it's also a bit of a reboot. In fact, editor David Klinghoffer calls the relaunch a back to the future move, realigning with the CSE's original goal of fusing science and culture.
Now, you've explained how the design of the new site embodies that vision. You also have a visual element to that, and that's the logo that you cultivated. It's inspired by the Mobius strip, which came around in the 19th century. Tell us what that is and how it captures the dual focus of the publication.
[00:10:58] Speaker C: Well, the Mobius strip is one of the most marvelous geometric shapes I'm aware of.
I previously worked for a company called Sendgrid, and their logo was a Mobius strip. And back in those days, I dove into, well, what is this geometric object and the significance of it?
So I had a little bit of a back backstory in researching the Mobius, But I also love showing my girls, my young girls, this simple to create thing that seems to have two sides, but only has one, because all it takes is taking a long strip of paper, twisting it and taping it together, and all of a sudden you have this marvelous shape that both sides are really the same side.
And I thought that was a fitting metaphor for the fact that science and culture are very much intermingled. And there is no real clear delineation between what is science and what is Culture. In fact, there's books that people have written and journals that people have produced, basically making this very point that science is culture.
But at the same time they're not exactly the same. And there are certainly things that we think of the arts or dance or a film that we would more naturally categorize in culture, but that also deal with scientific topics and require science to make.
So yeah, the Mobius trip, it just captures the fact that there's two different ideas or concepts, but also they're very much inter. Interwoven. The other metaphor that is in the logo itself is the ampersand.
And I don't know if it's in the screen right now, but you'll see it over my shoulder here. The ampersand is a little bit of a mascot for me because it expresses the idea of both and instead of either or.
And I have found that so many of the kind of intractable debates that we have in society are the result of insisting that something must be one thing or the other, or that we can only go in one direction and not try to hold things in tension or in balance. And the ampersand to me represents that both and approach which I think is also fitting for science and culture today.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: Yeah, sort of brings together the tensions and rewards from two different perspectives.
Now, one goal that characterizes this new site redesign is representing the wide breadth of scientific disciplines covered in the site's content. We're talking from A to Z, astronomy to zoology. And then there's the different categories of cultural analysis, faith, ethics, philosophy and the social sciences.
Tell us how the layout and navigation is designed to meet this need.
[00:14:05] Speaker C: Well, I really wanted to emphasize the fact that, you know, each of science in the abstract is really concrete sciences that each have their own methods and tools to study their subject matter.
And so in the past the science category was had subcategories that were different than they are now. I really wanted to reflect all of the sub disciplines within the sciences within that top level navigation.
So you'll now find physical sciences, earth sciences.
We even have formal sciences in the index. All life sciences, all the different kinds of sciences that are reflected and delved into on the site.
The culture navigation is a little bit more hairy to try to fit into those clear subcategories.
But we're trying to, you know, bring to the fore the ones that have the most content based upon our writers and authors interests.
And the index is really where you can delve into more deeply into the nooks and crannies of each of those big Umbrella Terms of Science and Culture.
And developing that index was a very time intensive project that is still unfinished because the just startling range of topics that our authors, our many authors in 14,000 articles have covered is very difficult to catalog sufficiently.
But it has been so fun as the person most in there to be running across just fascinating articles on all kinds of topics that and terms I was not even familiar with.
So I encourage anyone who wants just to browse into a particular area to visit that index page and to dive down.
You'll be rewarded, I believe.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: And that's really the beauty of the site. I've gone on there many times and just quickly searched for something and pulled something up. That's one way to use the site. But you can also just sit there and as you say, browse, explore. And I think we've taken a massive step in allowing users to be able to do that more efficiently. Now, Rob, the relaunch introduces some nifty features to enhance the user experience. Can you highlight just a few for us?
[00:16:44] Speaker A: That's probably a good question for our designer, Nate. But I can tell you the one thing that I was most excited about and which I've heard the most positive reaction to is the ability to listen to the articles.
People, you know, they like podcasts, they like listening, they like audio, they can listen while they're doing something else. And that's a really big step forward to have that feature.
And I know there are other things about the footnoting and some of the things with the tagging and the indexing that's pretty nifty, but that's more of a technical thing that Nate probably can explain better than I can.
[00:17:23] Speaker B: Sure, yeah. Nate, you want to add to that?
[00:17:25] Speaker C: Well, one of the nice things about this development process is that we initially had an earlier release date and for kind of logistical reasons it was pushed back, which gave me the luxury of adding to the wish list of features to add to the site. And fortunately, we have a very capable programmer here at Discovery Institute, Catherine West.
And so with each additional week we had, I thought, well, let's add another feature.
And so some of these features, like the inline footnotes, which I have wanted for a long, long time, and the related, which is harder to do than you might think, to have the related articles being able to pull from 14,000 articles into something that is related to the current article, I just kept on handing those over to Katherine and she's a real expert at making those things a reality.
I do think that the search feature is going to be something that people are also very grateful for.
Over the years we have gotten sort of a steady series of requests for. I need a more powerful search on the site to find exactly what I'm looking for. And so the ability to constrain by author, by date to have specific phrases that you're searching for.
For some of our real researchers and more serious readers of the site, I think that search will be very helpful to them.
[00:19:08] Speaker B: Yeah. And you've also taken user privacy into consideration with these new features, right?
[00:19:15] Speaker C: Yes. This is a bit of a crusade for me personally as a designer of the web. I lament the proliferation of cookie notices that are littering every website.
This comes out of regulations that have come out of the EU and California and they don't actually improve anybody's privacy.
And so what they've really done is to make the web a lot worse to put, you know, big to litter every website without really any upside.
But of course you do not want to mess with regulations. And so the way for us to deal with the situation was just to ensure that we aren't using any third party services that are tracking our users. And so by pursuing something that's a good anyways respecting our readers privacy, we can avoid that necessity.
There are some exceptions that are still quite tricky. So for example, if you include a YouTube video on your website, even though you're not tracking anybody, in theory or in principle, Google can use an IP address.
So we added notices for anybody who interacts with our YouTube videos to try to ensure that the privacy was respected.
[00:20:46] Speaker B: Yeah, well those are some great upgrades.
So Nate, the experience of building out this website sounds like it was very instructive to you. And for you, what's one standout thing that you either didn't know before or you didn't fully realize that kind of struck you as you were working through this project?
[00:21:07] Speaker C: Well, I think the sub discipline that I've had the most fun building out is anatomy.
We have so many articles detailing such little specific wonders within the human body.
Whether it's our sense of smell or the pressure sensors that are all throughout our body.
There's just such a multitude of wonders in the human body that as I'm going in and making sure articles are tagged correctly and have an image in the right place, it's just quite inspiring and yeah, awe inspiring to see the design throughout the human body.
So if I was to pick one, that would be perhaps the one that really stands out.
[00:22:00] Speaker B: Yeah, anatomy. Just one of the many categories you can click on in this new website. And also Nate, you summarized what this new relaunch offers in a recent post and I just want to quote you here. With original reporting and analysis, critical examination of the materialist and evolutionary paradigm, updates on intelligent design as an ongoing research project, reflections on religious, ethical and cultural questions, and an appreciation for a world of exquisitely designed creatures, and the awe inspiring music of the spheres, Science and Culture Today is as timely as ever.
And even before joining the ranks at Discovery Institute, you know that you use the website as a resource yourself. So how do you see this new site, how impacting the debate as it were, going forward?
[00:22:53] Speaker C: Well, there are so many things the site does well and there are many authors, contributors that might have their one thing that they want to make sure that readers take away from the site. I think for me, the most important kind of overall lesson from reading Science and Culture Today is the importance of scientific discernment.
We have so many places in our society that are cheerleaders for science.
And whether it's STEM in schools or, or my good friend who is really worried that his kids are going to hear that science is very important and good.
And of course that is all true. Science is the incredible human endeavor that has discovered so many truths and has blessed humankind in so many ways.
But science is a double edged sword. There's good and bad science and there are scientists are doing good science and shoddy science. And so my hope is that the way that the contributors and scientists and scholars at Science and Culture Today pursue their writing, that it demonstrates an approach to science that is appreciative of what can be learned and what can be accomplished. But that's also critical in evaluating the kinds of claims that are made. And so one of the things I've been doing very deliberately in that index I mentioned earlier is to be building out a area that is dedicated to topics in the area of scientific discernment and a kind of special niche within science called metascience that is devoted to improving the practice of science.
I'm not a scientist, I'm more philosophical in my bent and that I think kind of serves well in being able to have that critical eye as we cover the sciences.
So that is my hope of something very distinctive about science and culture today that we can contribute to the conversation.
[00:25:12] Speaker B: That's great. Yeah, scientific discernment, very, very important.
Now Rob, thinking back to why we started Evolution News in the first place back in 2004, same question for you. What role do you hope this new iteration of the site Science and Culture Today is going to play in the debate going forward, I think it's going.
[00:25:31] Speaker A: To play the very same role it's always played really much in the way we started with examining the news media and correcting things there. We were also correcting critics and skeptics and people that were making claims on our behalf. And so that's been a big part of it for, for all these years. But I think going forward, one of the most interesting things for me and for the general public is that it's, this is about the only place where you're going to really hear a positive case for intelligent design and where you're going to get the kind of scientific discernment that Nate was just talking about.
Point of view that is not reflected in very many other outlets. You certainly aren't getting that from the general mainstream news media or the mainstream scientific media.
There are hundreds of biology departments around the country and very few if any of them have the kind of point of view that we have. So, you know, science and Culture today is going to be almost an exclusive outlet. It's the one place where you can get this point of view, where you can learn about intelligent design and the scientific related issues.
I mean, in 2004 when we started, there was one. Exactly one scientific reviewed paper about intelligent design was by Stephen C. Meier from the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.
And now There are over 300 peer reviewed articles.
And I was just found out recently that there was one that we didn't know about which a lot of these articles we often knew the scientists and the scholars that were working on them and we helped shepherd those to publication. And you know, whether it was at plos One or somewhere else in mainstream journals, but we knew what was going on with those.
And we just discovered one recently where we didn't know the scientist and we weren't aware of the publication until we found it. And here's a pro ID paper in a, in a science journal that is reflecting the kind of views we have. So we're not as exclusive as we might want to be, sort of, but that's a good thing.
Our view is that, you know, we have this intelligent design in nature and we've been sharing that for 20 plus years and science and culture today will continue to share that and it'll be, you know, one of the few outlets where you can get that. So I think that's why we get a lot of traffic, a lot of interest from friends and skeptics alike. If you want to know about this, this is the place where you have to come@scienceandculture today.com yeah, a crucial resource to be sure.
[00:28:16] Speaker B: Well, Rob, Nate, thank you for stopping by today and helping us pull back the curtain on science and culture today. And for those who are listening or watching, the next step obviously is just going to the site, bookmarking it, spending time there, using it regularly as a resource. You'll find the redesign site at science and culture.com that's science and culture.com and if you happen to point your browser to evolutionnews.org we've got you covered there as well. It's going to point to the exact same place. So if you really love that name and just want to go to it that way, feel free. But science and culture.com is the site. And gentlemen, I appreciate your time.
[00:28:56] Speaker C: Time.
[00:28:58] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:28:58] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:28:59] Speaker B: Well, for ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:29:03] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
