Bill Gates: 1 mil $ to Fight Science

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is funding the anti-biological science Discovery Institute in Seattle. The institute is basically a pseudo-academic think tank covering dangerous, delusional right wing nonsense with a sugary coat of reasonable-sounding language. A soft but alarming piece from today's Seattle PI:

These successes follow a path laid in a 1999 Discovery manifesto known as the Wedge Document, which sought "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies" in favor of a "broadly theistic understanding of nature."

Detractors dismiss Discovery as a fundamentalist front and intelligent design as a clever rhetorical detour around the 1987 Supreme Court ruling banning creationism from curricula. ...

A closer look shows a multidimensional organization, financed by missionary and mainstream groups -- the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1 million a year, including $50,000 of Chapman's $141,000 annual salary -- and asserting itself on issues as varied as local transportation and foreign affairs.