Scholarship Hits the Fan: Designer Science Is Gone

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NYU Press as of yesterday had still not taken down the compromised anti-ID book Designer Science, by C. W. Howell, from its online catalogue. But as of today, it’s gone. All that remains is the forlorn message, “Book not found…”

That’s good. The hardback is still on Amazon, though, which offers it for Prime delivery and says, “Only 5 left in stock (more on the way).” There really shouldn’t be any more copies on the way if they still contain the fabricated quote from Michael Behe. However, as an alert reader points out, the e-book seems to be gone. It’s also gone from Barnes and Noble.

Department of Corrections

Also in the context of needed corrections, the dreamy review of Designer Science at Christianity Today by science historian Edward J. Larson has been amended: a note at the bottom now says: “Correction (August 25, 2026): The Discovery Institute did not push the Dover school board to adopt ID-friendly policies, as an earlier version of this story stated.”

That’s good too, though the review’s headline — “The Flickering Flame of Intelligent Design” — can only be supported by the most credulous reading of Dr. Howell’s very incomplete and misleading History of Intelligent Design in America. Yet the headline remains.

The fake Behe quote is the book’s most startling fault, but far from its only one. As Casey Luskin demonstrated in 6,000+ words of detail this morning, this supposed “full-length history of ID” omits “a large volume of ID literature” in its quest to depict ID as frozen in place since 2005.

I want to highlight a couple of points from Dr. Luskin. First, the fault is not Howell’s alone: “The blame here falls on Howell but also on all the academic reviewers who approved his book, a true system-wide scholarly breakdown.”

Behind Dr. Howell stand other scholars, like Edward J. Larson, or like philosopher Francis Beckwith at Baylor University, whom Dr. Howell thanks in the Acknowledgments for reading the book twice over and giving him “two dozen pages of notes and recommendations.”

Not one recommendation, apparently, pushed Howell to double-check the clearly dubious quote from Michael Behe or to update his account of ID history to include everything that Luskin documents and that was all a matter of a quick internet search if Howell, Larson, or Beckwith had bothered.

A State of Crisis

There is a bigger picture here. The book publishing industry is in “chaos,” as the Wall Street Journal reported this past weekend, with AI-generated books turning up everywhere, forcing editors and agents into the role of “police.”

That doesn’t seem to be the problem with Howell: the passage with the fabricated quote appears verbatim in his 2021 PhD dissertation (p. 167), on which the NYU Press book is based. That was about a year before AI exploded on the scene. But what about the scholars, including the well-known Ronald Numbers, who approved his Duke University dissertation? The lack of scrutiny and skepticism by professional academics reflects a crisis of its own.

The Winsomeness Squad

Luskin also has a telling point about being “fair”:

[S]ome friends in the ID community urged me to be “nice” to Howell in my response because they thought he was trying to be fair in his book. I want to be nice, but I also want to be truthful. I want to be fair to Howell, but I also want to be fair to my colleagues in the ID community who have worked hard developing and publishing new ID arguments over the past 20 years. Why does Howell largely ignore what they’ve done, only to claim they have been entirely unproductive over that period of time?

Urged him to be “nice”? That sounds like the Winsomeness Squad from the world of theistic evolution. If ID scientists want to turn the other cheek in such a context, while their work is unfairly dismissed, they’re free to do it. But it’s not for Dr. Luskin to turn their cheek for them.

Luskin’s series so far (here and here, but there’s much more to come) is like a step toward writing the true history of ID that Howell’s book could have been if he and his academic enablers had chosen to be fair.

Not Going Anywhere

A final comment on Luskin’s apt choice of words yesterday: Designer Science “Makes Fake Behe Quote a Linchpin of Its Case Against Intelligent Design.” What’s a linchpin? Literally, it’s “A locking pin inserted in the end of a shaft, as in an axle, to prevent a wheel from slipping off.” (American Heritage Dictionary)

He could have called the quote a “centerpiece” or something like that. But you can remove a centerpiece from a dining room table. Without the decoration, the table may look less festive but the food is all still there and the meal can go on.

Not so with a linchpin: take that out, as NYU Press has pledged to do, and the wheel comes off the wagon. The wagon is crippled. It’s not going anywhere.