From its nondescript office suites here, the institute has provided a home for the dissident thinkers, pumping $3.6 million in fellowships of $5,000 to $60,000 per year to 50 researchers since the science center's founding in 1996. Among the fruits are 50 books on intelligent design, many published by religious presses like InterVarsity or Crossway, and two documentaries that were broadcast briefly on public television. But even as the institute spearheads the intellectual development of intelligent design, it has staked out safer turf in the public policy sphere, urging states and school boards to simply include criticism in evolution lessons rather than actually teach intelligent design.

Since the presidential election last fall, the movement has made inroads, and evolution has emerged as one of the country's fiercest cultural battlefronts. Discovery leaders have been at the heart of the highest-profile developments: helping a Roman Catholic cardinal place an opinion article in The New York Times in which he sought to distance the church from evolution; showing its film promoting design and purpose in the universe at the Smithsonian; and lobbying the Kansas Board of Education in May to require criticism of evolution.

These successes follow a path laid in a 1999 Discovery manifesto known as the Wedge Document, which sought "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies" in favor of a "broadly theistic understanding of nature."

Detractors dismiss Discovery as a fundamentalist front and intelligent design as a clever rhetorical detour around the 1987 Supreme Court ruling banning creationism from curricula. But the institute's approach is more nuanced, scholarly and politically adept than its Bible-based predecessors in the centurylong battle over biology.

A closer look shows a multidimensional organization, financed by missionary and mainstream groups — the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1 million a year, including $50,000 of Chapman's $141,000 annual salary — and asserting itself on questions on issues as varied as local transportation and foreign affairs.

But even as intelligent design has helped raise Discovery's profile, the institute is starting to suffer from its success. Lately, it has tried to distance itself from lawsuits and legislation that seek to force schools to add intelligent design to curricula, placing it in the awkward spot of trying to promote intelligent design as a robust frontier for scientists but not yet ripe for students.

The group is also fending off attacks from the left. Concerned about the criticism, Discovery's Cascadia project, which focuses on regional transportation, created its own Web site to ensure an individual identity.

Founded in 1990 as a branch of the Hudson Institute, based in Indianapolis, the institute was named for the H.M.S. Discovery, which explored Puget Sound in 1792. Chapman had been a liberal Republican on the Seattle City Council and candidate for governor but moved to the right in the Reagan administration, where he served as director of the Census Bureau and worked for Edwin Meese III.