Please give me the details on DI funding cancer research. I look at their financial reports and I see none.
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See the video. They are funding James Tour’s work here.
Is James Tour doing cancer research? Don’t you do cancer research? Is Tour’s research promising?
Yes it is promising. See this article on one of the studies by Tour funded by the DI.
See this one too:
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Would I be correct in surmising that ID 3.0 amounts to the encouragement/funding of scientific ventures that involve a more pre-planned, and less trial-and-error, approach to scientific progress?
If so, it is hard to see how that progresses ID’s central thesis:
The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
[Source: DI, here]
Is ID 3.0 replacing this thesis? Or is it a tactical means to attempt to ‘soften up’ science sufficiently to the idea of ‘design’ simpliciter, such that when the thesis is reemphasised at a later date, it seems less jarring?
Thanking the DI and mentioning the drug that helped your sister, which the DI had nothing to do with, was bizarre in this context. What point were you trying to make?
Is targeting specific cells some sort of nod to creationism?
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The side effects are often because life evolved by duplications and divergence, but not enough divergence to allow good targeting.
I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the people to whom your sister and you owe real thanks are all “evolutionists.”
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That raises the question of why they could not have “done good scientific work from a design-perspective” at the same time as they engaged in public posturing and fighting the culture wars?
In fact, those two endeavors would have worked together quite nicely to forward their goal. Their lack of good scientific work seriously impeded their efforts in fighting the culture war.
The obvious answer is that there is little good scientific work to be done in support of a hypothesis that is false.
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That presentation was very impressive. Pointing out the logical fallacy of positing information to explain information is smart.
As I explained above, the drug that saved my sister-in-law’s life was targeted to specific cells. However, I believe it took decades of research - I had looked up how long it had been under development to reach her just when there were no other options. I was just appreciating that another targeted approach may be available, and one that may not have the side effects.
No.
In assessing the DI’s commitment to ID 3.0, I would point to two facts, and ask one question:
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The fact that the only documentation they have for ID 3.0 is a video is, I think, telling. If this was a major realignment of the DI’s focus and thinking, I’d expect far more written documentation in terms of exploratory papers, position papers, etc. If it’s just a video, that seems to suggest more in the way of opportunistic rebranding than a fundamental change in focus.
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Their recent publication of Behe’s Darwin’s Mousetrap (and its regurgitation of old defenses Behe makes of his claims) does not appear indicative of a willingness to forego ID 1.0 and/or 2.0.
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Finally, I would ask what proportion of the DI’s budget is being dedicated to supporting these design-friendly scientific efforts? If it’s only a small fraction, then I’d suggest that ID 3.0 is merely a distraction or sideshow.
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It’s possible that @Patrick or @Glenn_Branch knows how to get this information from tax forms.
It could be in stealth mode?
That sounds right. They aren’t abandoning or repudiating their prior work. They just aren’t expanding it, perhaps.
Generally tax forms don’t become publicly available for a year or two afterwards – so I doubt if they’d show up in them just yet. I’m thinking more about keeping an eye out for when the relevant tax forms do eventually turn up.
Putting up a video with “Intelligent Design 3.0” in the title would appear to be the exact opposite of being stealthy. 
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So…ID 3.0 has been around for a while now…
According to this, their last IRS form (form 990) was for “Fiscal year ending Dec 2018”) and was filed “Feb 14, 2020”. Given that the video is dated April 2019, I’m not sure if it covers their ID 3.0 activity. The website isn’t allowing me to download the 2018 form: “Our systems have detected unusual traffic coming from your internet connection.” – maybe someone else will have better luck.
Addendum:
It turns out that, by pushing another button, I can get the html version of the returns (I had been trying to get the pdf version above), here. It does list a grant to Rice University for $300k (slightly less than what they spent on the Biologic Institute), which is 5% of their total expenses ($6.3M) or 4% of their total revenues ($8.2M). This means that ID 3.0 is hardly a major focus of the DI, at least financially.
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It’s all ‘Scientific Creationism’ repackaged…
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Form 990s are the forms that every non-profits has to file and are made public. Note that churches don’t have to file Form 990s.
The only thing I see as outrageous in DI’s 2018 Form 990 is the $252,000 that DI paid to employee Stephen Meyers. A quarter of a million dollars for an employee who has accomplished nothing of benefit to mankind. Contrast this with the $197,300 salary for the Director of the National Institute of Health Dr. Francis Collins.
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Which would you prefer the money to be spent on – keeping Meyer in a cushy lifestyle, or on yet more promotion of far-right causes – 'cause chances are the DI’s donors aren’t going to be donating to the ACLU, Amnesty International, etc. 
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Okay I watched about forty minutes of that Stephen Meyer video above, and my goodness, this is not good. Just not intellectually rigorous. Echoing a long recent thread, there’s a TON of “Darwinism” this and “modern synthesis” that, as though the last 60 years haven’t happened. There’s an egregious misrepresentation of “junk DNA” as anything not protein-coding, which, no. Even a long bit on the flagellum and TTSS, ignoring the more important arguments that flagella with fewer parts exist .
He also shouts out Douglas Axe’s research on the probability of specific proteins, from which conclusions have been wildly extrapolated, way beyond what is reasonable from that work. Conclusions that ignore basic facts like “evolution doesn’t have a target” and “there are often many biochemical ways to do a specific thing”.
He also talks about “orphan genes” without mentioning that we have a really good idea of where many come from (e.g. noncoding RNAs that acquire start codons).
Aside from the frequent statements that exciting actual research is forthcoming, this talk could have been given in 2010 or 2000 (or, putting aside references to books published later, 1990). It’s no different from any one of a dozen other ID talks I’ve watched. If this is an indication of future directions, it’s going to be more of the same old.
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ID 0.0 = Scientific creationism
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