Wednesday, August 09, 2006
The ID Embrace: Is it the Kiss of Death?
Intelligent design activists have always impressed RSR as just the sort of people who would have succumbed to the tulip mania in Holland just as the market was about to collapse.
In the 1630s, during the height of the mania, people were willing to pay upwards of $76,000 for a single tulip bulb. When the fever finally broke, you couldn't give them away.
The smart money always gets out just before the crash, letting late "investors" -- like our ID friends -- take the losses.
One of the ID movement's leading lights, George Gilder, a founder of the Discovery Institute, has proven himself a serial late investor.
Gilder cut his teeth back in the 70s -- just as millions of women were entering the workforce and demanding equal rights with men -- by opposing day care and identifying himself as "America's number-one antifeminist".
Gilder followed that bravura performance by hyping tech stocks on the eve of the dot.com meltdown causing many subscribers to his Gilder Technology Report to suffer catastrophic losses.
Now that the intelligent design movement has come out against global warming, it kind of makes you wonder, is the American public on the verge, finally, of coming to grips with the dangers of climate change?
We don't know the answer to that, but Business Week has published a report suggesting once again that intelligent design theorists -- now officially global warming doubters -- have displayed an absolutely uncanny knack for embracing causes just as they go out of fashion:
In the 1630s, during the height of the mania, people were willing to pay upwards of $76,000 for a single tulip bulb. When the fever finally broke, you couldn't give them away.
The smart money always gets out just before the crash, letting late "investors" -- like our ID friends -- take the losses.
One of the ID movement's leading lights, George Gilder, a founder of the Discovery Institute, has proven himself a serial late investor.
Gilder cut his teeth back in the 70s -- just as millions of women were entering the workforce and demanding equal rights with men -- by opposing day care and identifying himself as "America's number-one antifeminist".
Gilder followed that bravura performance by hyping tech stocks on the eve of the dot.com meltdown causing many subscribers to his Gilder Technology Report to suffer catastrophic losses.
Now that the intelligent design movement has come out against global warming, it kind of makes you wonder, is the American public on the verge, finally, of coming to grips with the dangers of climate change?
We don't know the answer to that, but Business Week has published a report suggesting once again that intelligent design theorists -- now officially global warming doubters -- have displayed an absolutely uncanny knack for embracing causes just as they go out of fashion:
You know a cultural movement is real when the money men get on board. In just the past year a broad swath of financiers -- venture capitalists, hedge funds, investment banks, public pension funds, and even stodgy insurers -- have begun sinking billions of dollars into producers of ethanol, fuel cell superbatteries, microscopic bugs that turn glucose into plastic, environmentally friendly pesticides, anything that might tap into the green craze. Saving the planet, protecting America, doing God's work, cynically exploiting a feel-good trend -- call it what you will. Wall Street sees money to be made.
