Which Discovery Institute Senior Fellows affirm common descent?

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I know that Michael Behe accepts common descent because he argues for it in The Edge of Evolution. So I’ve been wondering how many of his “fellow Fellows” at the Discovery Institute agree with him in affirming common descent.

Looking through the list of Senior Fellows at Fellows | Discovery Institute led me to attempt categorizing them by what I could recall of their positions. My limited knowledge of their writings and lectures yielded these classifications of their positions on common descent but I ran out of momentum quite quickly:

Affirmers of Common Descent:

Michael Behe

Dissenters from Common Descent:

Gunter Bechly
Doug Axe
Michael Denton (?)

I assume most of the others belong to the dissenters list but I just don’t recall specifics—and mostly I would like to know if Michael Behe is the odd duck. [Yeah. That one’s too easy. Sorry.]

Of course, it is fascinating how many Christians I know who love the Discovery Institute have no idea that their favorite Senior Fellows there reject a young earth and accept evolutionary processes as explanations of biological diversity. Several have adamantly insisted that Michael Behe rejects Common Descent. So it got me to wondering if other Fellows share Behe’s position.

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It’s often hard to tell, as many of them are coy. My understanding is that Denton accepts common descent in the ordinary way, and that Bechly is a saltationist, which implies that he too accepts common descent. The only one who’s clearly YEC is Nelson, but there may be others.

Of course views can, er, evolve, so each of these is a snapshot that may hold true only for a particular period. And Bechly may not consider his notion to be common descent, even though he posits an unbroken series of ancestors and descendants reaching back to the first cells.

Another snapshot in time, in which Bechly explicitly endorses common descent:

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Wow. The more I read Denton and Bechly, the more confused I get. (Duh. I guess that kind of comes with reading ID literature in general.)

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Up next: A list of vegans who habitually eat meat.

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