A critic of evolution, Berlinski is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, a Seattle-based nonthink-tank that is hub of the intelligent design movement. Berlinski shares the movement's disbelief in the evidence for evolution, but does not openly avow intelligent design and describes his relationship with the idea as: "warm but distant. It's the same attitude that I display in public toward my ex-wives." Berlinski is a scathing critic of "Darwinism", yet, "Unlike his colleagues at the Discovery Institute, [he] refuses to theorize about the origin of life."
Though the Discovery Institute portrays Berlinski as a scholarly writer and mathematician, Mark Perakh, a critic of the intelligent design movement, contends that Berlinski's writings are not scientific, but popular, and that Berlinski "has no known record of his own contribution to the development of mathematics or of any other science."
Berlinski, along with fellow Discovery Institute associates Michael Behe and William A. Dembski, tutored Ann Coulter on science and evolution for her book
The Church of Liberalism.
Berlinski was a longtime friend of the late Marcel-Paul Schützenberger (1920—1996), with whom he collaborated on an unfinished and unpublished mathematical polemic that he described as being "devoted to the Darwinian theory of evolution." Berlinski dedicated
The Advent of the Algorithm to Schutzenberger.
In his 1996 article,
The Deniable Darwin, published in
Commentary magazine, Berlinski says he denies evolution due to the appearance "at once" of an astonishing number of novel biological structures in the Cambrian explosion, the lack of major transitional fossils transitional sequences, the lack of recent significant evolution in sharks, the evolution of the eye, and the purported failure of evolutionary biology to explain a range of phenomena ranging from the sexual cannibalism of redback spiders to why women are not born with a tail. In responding to Berlinski's arguments, marine biologist Wesley R. Elsberry comments: "I personally like my 'at onces' to refer to events significantly shorter than ten million years." Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education described Berlinski's arguments in
The Deniable Darwin as:
Berlinski appeared in the 2008 film No Intelligence Allowed, in which he told interviewer Ben Stein that"Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism but I think it's certainly a necessary one." He also says
It'd be nice to see the scientific establishment lose some of its prestige and power...Above all, it'd be nice to have a real spirit of self-criticism penetrating the sciences.