When Darwinist propaganda dominates academia and media, how can Christian students develop countercultural convictions and, like Günter Bechly, the courage to defend them?

Washington Post columnist and former Bush administration speechwriter Michael Gerson says 20th-century evangelicals “made a crucial error in picking evolution as a main point of contention with modernity.” Gerson quotes William Jennings Bryan from a century ago: “The contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to the death. If evolution wins … Christianity goes.”

German paleontologist Günter Bechly, former curator of the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History, is a world expert on fossilized dragonflies. He has discovered more than 170 new species, and eight species, two genera, and one family of organisms have been named after him. To prepare for an exhibit celebrating Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, Bechly read intelligent design books—and became an ID proponent. He is now a fellow at the Discovery Institute and a senior research scientist at Biologic Institute. He now lives in Austria, but I interviewed him in Seattle, Wash.

Ann Gauger received her bachelor’s degree from MIT, did a postdoc at Harvard University, and received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington’s department of zoology. Her scientific writing has appeared in Nature, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and other scientific publications. These establishment credentials are helpful because she’s also involved with the Discovery Institute, the world leader in developing and explaining intelligent design theory, which many establishment scientists despise. Here are edited excerpts of our interview.

Researchers are shocked by the unexpected results of a large new genetic study that appears in the journal Human Evolution. The findings indicate that either most animal species and humans originated at approximately the same time, or some major population crash wiped out most of the original species.

A German paleontologist recently announced the discovery of a new species of dragonfly with ties to intelligent design, a providential discovery he highlighted by naming the insect for one of ID’s longtime champions.

My friend S.I. was the canary in the coal mine of evolutionary theory. So distraught was she in high school to learn she came from nothing and was going to nothing that she verged on suicidal. She became a Christian in the nick of time.