According to a popular blog, AITSE Consortium member “Robert Marks has built a career establishing his credibility as a foremost thinker and researcher on the topic of computational intelligence. He has amassed an enviable publication record and huge set of government research grants. No one can question his scientific bona fides. And now, with his Evolutionary Informatics Lab (www.evoinfo.org), he is going for broke to establish intelligent design as a scientific research program. Just as Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled evolutionist, so Robert Marks is making it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled [intelligent] design theorist.” And AITSE believes he does so with integrity.

Interestingly, according to another scientist (identity withheld), “The questions they [intelligent design or ID advocates] have raised and the answers they have provided have all been persistently rejected by the vast majority of the technical community…it seems that the only rational standard that can be applied in science education is the scientific consensus within the technical community that is actively publishing in a particular field…when such challenges [such as ID] have been uniformly rejected by the technical community, it is not at all “honesty” to keep bringing them up in a classroom as if they are still open issues.”

So, what is scientific integrity? Is it “respect for the hard-fought consensus” and “not expressing all sides in the educational venue” or does scientific integrity happen “when students honestly do their own work, industry and research institutions publish the complete story and scientists are free to consider the whole picture, even evidence that deviates from a consensus point of view…?”