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"Does belief in Panspermia ... count as intelligent design ?"

Using the same term, in this case "intelligent design," to mean two or more different things, is to cause confusion deliberately. Panspermia theory is clearly not what the Discovery Institute means by "Intelligent Design," so I wouldn't include it in this discussion.

There are at least two versions of Panspermia. One just pushes the abiogenic origin of life off earth and puts is somewhere else. Such a simple change of location for an event would not affect whether it was a purely physical event or there was supernatural intervention needed, so it would hardly matter to the present debate. Another also makes the same change of location for abiogenic origin of life, but also adds the twist of "space aliens" (little green men, etc.) going around deliberately seeding planets with life, like farmers seeding soil. But those green guys would have had to come from somewhere, etc., again, it just pushes the same questions off to another locale and circumstance, it doesn't change the fundamental dynamics of the question of whether or not there are links between the natural and supernatural world.

The panspermia meme comes up again and again on these threads wherever evolution comes up for a bashing. Is it on some Talking Points being handed out by one of the Creationist outfits? I don't get the big interest in it.

Hard to imagine what difference panspermia would make. If life is ubiquitous in the universe, it would still evolve the same way it does here on earth. Same universe, same rules. Methane has the same properties on Neptune as on earth, helium has the same properties on Arcturus as it does on our sun. I don't see what a change of venue buys.

A few thoughts come to mind.

Was the purpose of the article to act as a trial balloon to see how prof. G would fare in a lawsuit?

Is the purpose of any media-action by Discovery Institute related personnel simply an attempt to fire up discussions like this, as a strategy of "creating controversy," so that they can then turn around and use these very discussions as excuses in another attempt to push Creationism/ID into public school biology classes, under the guise of "teach the controversy?" I admit that's kind of paranoid to think, but I'm starting to wonder due to the repetitiveness of many of the arguments made every time this comes up.

The notion that the whole evolution/creationism thing neatly fits into liberal/conservative categories: It doesn't. William Jennings Bryan (noted Creationist) was a "progressive" Democrat, he was practically the Dennis Kucinich of his day on economic issues. Any such alignment is only incidental and temporary. Likewise, the labeling of academia with a broad brush. It is true that many academic fields have been ideologically "captured" by leftists. But this is least true in the sciences and other technical fields. Yes, there's PC everywhere, but the technical fields are still the most ideologically free. So it's simply inaccurate to try to make a "science professors are PC" argument out of this.

Blaming things some people do, on other people, who are dead: For example, blaming Darwin, by some "chain of ideas" for the Holocaust. Darwin was dead before Hitler was born, let alone before he became Chancellor of Germany. As Thomas Jefferson said, "the earth belongs to the living, not the dead." He meant that humans present in a time must be responsible for what they do and how they live. There is no "Darwin defense" for a genocidal maniac who ruled long after Darwin was gone. You might as well blame Peter the Great for what Stalin did. Sorry, that meme is nonsense.

There was an earlier reference to Lord Kelvin (William Thomson). Wikipedia offers this FWIW:

Thomson believed in an instant of Creation but he was no creationist in the modern sense.[27] He contended that the laws of thermodynamics operated from the birth of the universe and envisaged a dynamic process that saw the organisation and evolution of the solar system and other structures, followed by a gradual "heat death". He developed the view that the Earth had once been too hot to support life and contrasted this view with that of uniformitarianism, that conditions had remained constant since the indefinite past. He contended that "This earth, certainly a moderate number of millions of years ago, was a red-hot globe ... ."[28]

After the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, Thomson saw evidence of the relatively short habitable age of the Earth as tending to contradict an evolutionary explanation of biological diversity. He noted that the sun could not have possibly existed long enough to allow the slow incremental development by evolution — unless some energy source beyond what he or any other Victorian era person knew of was found. He was soon drawn into public disagreement with Darwin's supporters John Tyndall and T.H. Huxley. In his response to Huxley’s address to the Geological Society of London (1868) he presented his address "Of Geological Dynamics", (1869)[29] which, among his other writings, set back the scientific acceptance that the earth must be of very great age.

Thomson ultimately settled on an estimate that the Earth was 20-40 million years old. Shortly before his death however, Becquerel's discovery of radioactivity and Marie Curie's studies with uranium ores provided the insight into the 'energy source beyond' that would power the sun for the long time-span required by the theory of evolution. Though Thomson continued to defend his estimates, privately he admitted that they were most probably wrong.[citation needed]

So he favored a "middle-aged earth" (meaning, between a Biblical "young earth" and a modern geologically "old earth") because his understanding of the sources of heat for the sun were limited to things like coal and natural gas, because he lived most of his life before the discovery of radioactive decay.

Not enough coal to power the sun for long enough to support a 4.5 billion year old earth, is now still being brought up in 2007, as some sort of reason to hold up Thomson as a "Darwin critic"?? AFTER we know how nuclear fusion works? The mind reels.

Quotes attributed to Thomson Lord Kelvin:

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

Radio has no future.

So apparently Thomson Lord Kelvin got some things right and some wrong.

But my own favorite quote attributed to Thomson is this:

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of Science, whatever the matter may be.

This is an essential aspect of science: measurement and quantification. Lacking those, whatever good works you may be doing, it ain't science.

Where is the instrument that measures the supposed interaction between the supernatural and the natural?

Divining rod? Ouija board? Perhaps something made by Perkin-Elmer or Hewlett-Packard? Fluke meter? (Pun, sorry, and with apology to Daniel Dennett.) How do we measure and quantify the continuing influence of the supernatural in the natural world without such an instrument? Or, what statistical algorithm do we use, when analyzing DNA sequences, to find the parts that "couldn't have happened by evolution," and therefore had to have been added in by supernatural forces? What statistical test to we apply, to show which sequences are due to natural evolution and which are due to supernatural intervention?

sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomson%2C_1st_Baron_Kelvin
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Thomson%2C_1st_Baron_Kelvin