Scientific Freedom

A couple of letters to the editor caught my attention this last weekend, one in the Salt Lake Tribune and another in The Advocate in Baton Rouge, LA.

The Salt Lake Tribune letter is interesting because the writer takes the Tribune to task for the editor’s unwillingness to have the paper’s editorial pages engage in a dialogue.

In the wake of a libel lawsuit, NCSE, Inc. Director Eugenie Scott has a published a letter retracting her prior false statements concerning California parent Larry Caldwell. The letter is published in California Wild, the magazine of the California Academy of Sciences — and the same magazine that published her earlier article containing her false assertions about Caldwell. (Available online, here.) Caldwell’s letter in response to Scott was also published in California Wild.

John West has previously blogged about Scott’s defamatory article and attacks on Caldwell (here, here, and here). As Caldwell noted in a press release from last month:

It’s a shame it took a lawsuit to get Scott, the author of the article, to retract some of the more outrageous factual misstatements in her article.

Just in time for the anniversary of the Scopes trial, the folks over at Panda’s Thumb are continuing their unseemly crusade against Ohio State doctoral candidate Bryan Leonard. Even though these Darwinian fundamentalists don’t support academic freedom for teachers and scientists who are skeptical of Darwin, you’d think they might draw the line at going after students. Apparently, however, their bigotry and intolerance knows no bounds. Unhappy that Leonard’s dissertation committee has effectively refuted the misinformation spread by Panda’s Thumb and others, blogger Richard Hoppe has responded with even more smears. Here are replies to some of the new disinformation put out by Hoppe:

My letter responding to George Will’s “A Debate That Does Not End” appears in the July 18 print edition of Newsweek. George Will says the theory of intelligent design isn’t falsifiable—isn’t “a testable hypothesis.” Actually, particular design arguments are falsifiable. Design theorist Michael Behe, for instance, argues that we can detect design in the bacterial flagellum because the tiny motor needs all of its parts to function at all. That’s a problem for Darwinian evolution, which builds novel form one tiny functional mutation at a time. How to falsify Behe’s argument? Provide a detailed evolutionary pathway from simple ancestor to present motor. The flagellum might still be designed, but Behe’s argument that such design is detectable would have been falsified. Read More ›

Last week a colleague of Guillermo Gonzalez’s had a decidedly nasty letter published in the Ames Tribune. Rather than address any of the scientific arguments raised by Gonzalez and co-author Jay Richards in their book The Privileged Planet, this letter writer instead pens an ad hominem diatribe full of misinformation and falsehoods.

The Ames Tribune has published Gonzalez’s response. While the letter tries to make out all ID supporters as ultra right-wing zealots — even to the point of comparing ID scientists to the Taliban — Gonzalez points out:

CSC senior fellow William Dembski’s blog about an article in The New Scientist’s recent issue on intelligent design paints the perfect picture of the exact problem ID proponents and Darwinian skeptics face with almost all media.

Reporters sometimes wonder why

CSC fellows don’t immediately stop whatever they’re doing and spend hours answering their questions and trying to explain our side of the issue to them when they call.

The World Summit on Evolution just happened earlier this month with less fanfare than one might expect in these days of overhyping Darwin’s legacy. It seems that about 200 biologists gathered in Chuck’s old stomping grounds in the Galapagos to compare notes on neo-Darwinian evolution and breathe some life back into the aging concept.

One blogging attendee explained why it had to be kept so hush-hush:

“Arrival details were kept under wraps, said one organizer, lest the Creationist community get wind of the fact that so many evolutionary luminaries would be on the same plane to the island.”

Today’s Boston Globe carries an inane editorial attacking intelligent design that demonstrates how a little learning (in this case, very little) can be a dangerous thing. The Globe editorialist no doubt thought he was valiantly defending good science, but instead he simply exposes how uninformed he is.

The editorial starts by dismissing Dr. Stephen Meyer’s peer-reviewed journal article from the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. According to the Globe:

The long-awaited screening of The Privileged Planet documentary at the Smithsonian takes place this evening in Washington, D.C. Stay tuned for some first-hand reporting of the event later tonight and on Friday from Rob Crowther.

In the meantime, I want to express my heartfelt appreciation to all of the Darwinists who provided free publicity for the screening by denouncing a film they had never even seen. (If they had seen the film, they would have known that it doesn’t deal with biological evolution. See Rob Crowther and Bruce Chapman’s prior posts, here and here, respectively.)

After tonight’s screening, I’m sure we can look forward to still more encores from the pro-Darwin chorus. Keeping in mind that the most vocal critics to this point have neither read the book nor seen the movie, Discovery’s Seth Cooper decided to help out by drafting a few form letters critics can send to newspaper editors tomorrow :

CSC Senior Fellow David Berlinski has just sent me an open letter to the Amazing Randi. Randi you may remember led the Darwinist charge of the bright brigade to try and coerce the Smithsonian into deep sixing The Privileged Planet. And Randi was serious because he offered a $20,000 bribe to keep the film from playing. Berlinski, however, has decided to screen the film in Paris. But here’s the thing, Randi. I was sort of planning to screen the film right here in my apartment in Paris. I’ve got a little screening room I call The Smithsonian right between the bathroom and the kitchen, I sort of figured I’d invite some friends over, open a couple cans of suds, sort Read More ›