Dembski on Templeton and ID Research

In the wake of yesterday’s NY Times article that included the Templeton Foundation saying that when they demanded that ID advocates produce actual research that could confirm ID and offered to fund that, they didn’t come up with any, William Dembski responded with this post on his blog. He makes the following claim:

I know for a fact that Discovery Institute tried to interest the Templeton Foundation in funding fundamental research on ID that would be publishable in places like PNAS and Journal of Molecular Biology (research that got funded without Templeton support and now has been published in these journals), and the Templeton Foundation cut off discussion before a proposal was even on the table.

Needless to say, this caused many of us to wonder what research he was referring to that allegedly supported ID and was published without Templeton’s help. In a comment on that thread asking that very question, Dembski said that he was referring to the work of Douglas Axe. They’ve been beating this drum for years and making outlandish claims about the meaning of his work that simply do not stand up to scrutiny. In particular, Dembski has continually exaggerated Axe’s work on perturbation in enzymes far beyond what it says, to the point of claiming it means the opposite of what it really means. Matt Inlay documented this distortion very well in this article from the Panda’s Thumb. Here’s Dembski’s claim about Axe’s work on perturbation:

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