Anika Smith

Michael Shermer and Paul Nelson will meet for their third debate over intelligent design and evolution (they’ve interacted previously at the University of Alabama and Penn State) this Thursday, April 26, at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California. The debate will be held in the University Union’s Chumash Auditorium and begins at 8 pm (doors open at 7:30). The event is free to Cal Poly students; $10 at the door for the general public.

Nothing is quite so refreshing in times of censorship as a good satire. Fortunately, the ID Arts blog recently highlighted “Confession,” a brief story by James Hoskins published in Number One Magazine, the literary journal at University of Missouri, where Hoskins is a student.

We’ve already pointed out how fiction passes for good science at SMU. Apparently, ridicule and disrespect pass for tolerance, as well.

The SMU physics department went to the trouble of housing this fun little site, where they’ve even compiled a list of news articles referring to the event and pithy responses to ID proponents (i.e., they’ve resorted to calling us “IDiots”).

This morning’s Dallas Morning News features a bold op-ed by Bruce Chapman and John West calling for critics at SMU to employ the method of Charles Darwin himself: engage in the discussion.

The article, “Are the Darwinists afraid to debate us,” is a response to the SMU science professors who called on their university to ban the conference from campus.

Rather than “ludicrously comparing ID proponents to faith healers or even Holocaust-deniers,” as one columnist did last week, Chapman and West suggest that critics of intelligent design “engage ID scholars in a serious discussion.” They pointedly ask, “what is so frightening about allowing it [the evidence for design] to be heard at SMU?”

Logan Gage has an insightful article on the forgotten history of eugenics in World Net Daily today. He reminds us that: Eugenics was supposedly the “science” of human breeding. It was promoted by luminaries of biology at Harvard, Princeton and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It was, in short, the consensus view of the cultural and academic elite. How did things get so twisted? Click here to read more.

Late last week, Discovery Institute sent the letter below from Bruce Chapman to the chairs of the three departments at SMU which were calling for the Darwin vs. Design conference to be removed from campus, inviting them to a debate about intelligent design. It seems that The Dallas Morning News agrees with us that open discussion belongs at a university. On Saturday the DMN ran a brief editorial short on the SMU controversy:

But if there’s any place where an idea like this can be examined and debated, you’d think that a university . . . would be it. But a group of SMU professors got the vapors and demanded that the university bar the Discovery Institute from campus. SMU’s administration correctly told the prissy profs that the group had every right to be on campus.

The length some Darwinists have gone to in their efforts to deny that Haeckel’s embryo drawings were fraudulently used in modern biology textbooks has made for some interesting reading over the years. That these efforts were often used to paint intelligent design scientists such as Jonathan Wells as liars is even more outrageous. Where is the evidence for these claims? Or, as Casey Luskin puts it in a new article, “What Do Modern Textbooks Really Say about Haeckel’s Embryos?“

First Darwinists at SMU demanded that the school keep the debate over Darwin off-campus, arguing for the Darwin vs. Design conference to be cancelled and denied use of campus facilities. Now their attempts at censorship have sparked more controversy than they intended, as evidenced by a response printed in the SMU Daily Campus:

I was amused to read that some of the science department faculty at SMU had protested the proposed Intelligent Design Conference.

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For as long as Darwinian biologist and Brown University professor Kenneth R. Miller has attacked intelligent design (ID), design proponents have refuted him. While there are occasions where Miller has wisely dropped his refuted objections, more often he will keep trotting out the same stale arguments. His tendency to hold onto his misconceptions means design theorists have to continually point out how he misrepresents their arguments. Several of these responses to Miller are worth revisiting, and because we’ve recently had some new rebuttals to Miller, we’ve now put together a list of links to some of the best:

DALLAS–Darwinists at Southern Methodist University issued a demand this week that the university withdraw permission for a scientific conference about intelligent design to be held on campus.

Discovery Institute and the SMU Christian Legal Society obtained permission to rent McFarlin Auditorium for a two-day conference on “Darwin vs. Design,” featuring presentations by the nation’s leading intelligent design scientists. The Departments of Anthropology, Biological Sciences, and Geological Sciences reacted with a letter objecting to the university’s agreement to host the conference. The Institute described the letter as an effort to censor scientists and stifle debate.