Anika Smith

As we noted earlier, Mike Behe has a response to another critic, Dr. Ian Musgrave of University of Adelaide, who wrote “An Open Letter to Dr. Michael Behe.” Read Behe’s response to Musgrave at his Amazon blog using the links below. Behe has also responded to a number of other critics at that site, including Ken Miller, Sean Carroll and Nick Matzke. Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4Part 5

When John E. Jones decided in 2005 to “traipse into” the controversial area of evolution and science education, deciding the scientific merit of intelligent design as a federal court judge in Dover, PA, he may have only dreamed of the day when he would see himself on the silver screen. As the author of the 139-page verdict in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, Jones gained national notoriety (and much acclaim from certain fashionable quarters) for ruling that intelligent design is not science but religion. That more than 90% of the section on intelligent design was copied nearly verbatim from the ACLU didn’t diminish his standing as a “great thinker” in the mainstream press. Neither did the fact that the Judge Read More ›

Proving once again that he’s not one to take things lying down, Michael Behe is posting a new series of responses over at his Amazon blog. This response is different from the others he’s been posting. As Behe explains In his introductory post from Friday, available here: This series of posts (besides this intro, there will be five posts over the next week) will be different. Here I will address a post on the blog The Panda’s Thumb by a man named Ian Musgrave. Musgrave, a professor at the University of Adelaide, wrote “An Open Letter to Dr. Michael Behe”, in which he questioned my earlier reply to a woman named Abbie Smith, who is a graduate student working on Read More ›

Michael Behe has a new blog series up responding to Nick Matzke’s review of his book in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, in three parts:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

As Behe notes, this review of Edge of Evolution is a real doozy, “a tediously disdainful review of The Edge of Evolution which revisits the blunders of previous reviews while adding new ones.”

It’s only when we get to Part 3 of his response that Behe reveals the identity of the reviewer to be none other than Nick Matzke, formerly of the NCSE. Behe thinks this is worth mentioning:

Former editor of Seattle Weekly Knute Berger saw the merit in Bruce Chapman’s recent blog post, Thank You, Dr. Watson, though, as he put it, I don’t agree with Chapman often, but he’s absolutely right that such thinking continues in scientific (and I would add corporate) circles. Despite our collective horror about the Holocaust — the extreme Nazi expression of eugenics — there is a general unwillingness to own up to the sorry legacy of eugenics in America and Europe, where hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly sterilized, lobotomized, and institutionalized to “sanitize” society of the poor, disabled, gay, mentally ill, etc. A general sense of amnesia or an attitude that nothing we did was as bad as what Read More ›

Sometimes you run across something so head-shakingly wrong that you have to ask yourself, where did they come up with that? Take this editorial today in the Arizona Daily Wildcat for example. Upon hearing the basis for the new movie “Expelled,” student columnist Taylor Kessinger actually calls for more academic persecution to rain down upon ID proponents:

On the other hand, does science discriminate against proponents of intelligent design? Well, sure, but only in the same sense that a university discriminates against bad students or the stock market discriminates against people who make poor financial decisions.

If anything, the problem is that there isn’t enough discrimination against this idea. (emphasis added)

It’s worth remembering that the struggle for academic freedom is not limited to professors being denied tenure or government scientists facing persecution. It extends to college and high school classrooms, affecting students as well as teachers. Now the people behind “Expelled” have launched a new feature at their website to expose the depth and breadth of this campaign to deny academic freedom to Darwin-doubters: Ever sat in class and had your professor straight up challenge your intelligence for suggesting even the possibility of an intelligent design in the universe? Tired of being labeled merely for questioning aspects of the Darwinian theory of evolution?? Ever been scoffed at or ridiculed in front of your peers? Well, here’s your opportunity to tell Read More ›

By Pete Chadwell

This week’s Human Events features a piece by Logan Gage which addresses, among other things, Hillary Clinton’s unsurprising take on evolution: Following liberal science writer Chris Mooney’s successful book “The Republican War on Science,” Clinton repeatedly lumps these issues together using the “war” metaphor. “Mrs. Clinton has used the phrase ‘war on science’ frequently on the campaign trail, and it has reliably drawn applause from Democratic audiences,” according to The New York Times. Her website declares she will “end the Bush Administration’s war on science.” But who is really politicizing science? In February 2008, comedian, economist, and actor Ben Stein will release a feature-length documentary film titled “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” It chronicles the many scientists who have been harassed Read More ›

Michael Behe has just published another response to attacks on his book, The Edge of Evolution, this one addressing an exchange that he and Sean Carroll had in letters published in Science. Carroll had published a review in Science which Behe responded to here, as readers will recall. Science also published part of a letter Behe wrote, which Carroll then responded to. The back-and-forth between these two is well worth reading. For more on Behe’s responses to his critics, visit his Amazon blog.