Discovery Institute
American non-profit public policy think tank based in Seattle, Washington
The Discovery Institute (DI) is a politically conservative think tank that advocates the pseudoscientific notion of intelligent design (ID). It was founded in 1991 in Seattle as a non-profit offshoot of the Hudson Institute.
Its "Teach the Controversy" campaign aims to permit the teaching of anti-evolution, intelligent-design arguments in United States public high school science courses in place of accepted scientific theories, positing that a scientific controversy exists over whether evolution is a reality, when in fact there is none.
History
The institute was cofounded in 1991 by Bruce Chapman and George Gilder as a non-profit educational foundation and think tank.
It was started as a branch organization of the Hudson Institute, an Indianapolis-based conservative think tank. It is named after the Royal Navy ship HMS Discovery in which George Vancouver explored Puget Sound in 1792. The organization was incorporated in 1991.
Discovery Institute Press
Discovery Institute Press is the institute's publishing arm and has published intelligent design books by its fellows including David Berlinski's Deniable Darwin & Other Essays (2010), Jonathan Wells' The Myth of Junk DNA (2011) and an edited volume titled Signature Of Controversy, which contains apologetics in defense of the institute's Center for Science and Culture director Stephen C. Meyer.
Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity
The Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity (PSSI), formally registered as PSSI International Inc., is a United States 501(c)(3) nonprofit anti-evolution organization, based in Clearwater, Florida, promoting the pseudoscience of intelligent design associated with the Discovery Institute. While in the past, the organization sponsored events promoting intelligent design and fundamentalist Christianity, it is currently largely inactive.
The public source identifies “Discovery Institute” as american non-profit public policy think tank based in Seattle, Washington. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Discovery, Institute and American.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q197662. VIAF identifies the subject as 128298354. The Library of Congress control number is nr99029911. Authority coordinates are 47.604, -122.333. 4 of 7 selected statements include explicit references; 4 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1991, 1792, 2010 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Discovery Institute” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.