Intelligent Design

Is altruism merely a matter of brain physiology- just the happy result of eons of evolution? Is the brain–an elegant piece of meat– the sufficient cause of the mind and of the ideas that the mind generates? Does the brain secrete altruism, just like the liver secretes bile?

Many neuroscientists believe that it does. In a recent Washington Post article entitled If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural, reporter Shankar Vedantam reveals some recent scientific studies of the relationship between the brain and altruism. Vedantam writes:

Not so fast, say disabilities advocates Andrew J. Imparato and Anne C. Sommers of the American Association of People With Disabilities. In their Washington Post article, “Haunting Echoes of Eugenics,” the two authors describe, among other things, the terrible campaign to eliminate persons with Down syndrome before they ever arrive.

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Action Item:
Help Guillermo Gonzalez in his fight for academic freedom. Contact ISU President Gregory L. Geoffroy at (515) 294-2042 or email him at president@iastate.edu and let him know that you support academic freedom for Dr. Gonzalez to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

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Guillermo Gonzalez, the pro-intelligent design astronomer recently denied tenure by Iowa State University (ISU), ranks the highest in his department according to a key measure of the scientific impact of his work calculated using the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), a widely used database tracking published scientific research in astronomy.

How frequently a scientist’s work is cited by other scientists is an important indicator of the impact the scientist is having on the scientific community. The Smithsonian/NASA data system allows one to compute a “normalized” citation count that corrects for inflated citation rates caused by articles with multiple authors. In the normalized citation count, an article published by a scientist with many co-authors is weighted less than an article authored by the scientist alone.

Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Iowa State University (ISU).

Born in Havana, he and his family fled from Cuba to the United States in 1967, where he earned a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Washington in 1993. Author of nearly 70 peer-reviewed scientific papers and co-author of a major college-level astronomy textbook, Dr. Gonzalez’s work led to the discovery of two new planets, and his research has been featured in Science, Nature, and on the cover of Scientific American.

Dr. Gonzalez’s Scientific Research

In late 1995, Dr. Gonzalez began working on a series of projects examining stars with planets to see what sorts of properties they exhibited. This has been a major part of Dr. Gonzalez’s scientific research, and he has published twelve articles in peer-reviewed science journals on the subject and continues to research new planets and systems. Dr. Gonzalez’s research in this area led his research team to the discovery of what is known as the Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ), a term Dr. Gonzalez coined.

The powers-that-be at ISU seem to be a little vexed by the attention they’re getting for denying tenure to astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez. Yesterday they released a statement regarding Dr. Gonzalez’s case, “Facts regarding the status of tenure case at Iowa State,” an unusual move on their part.

Showtime Networks will air filmmaker Randy Olson’s fanciful evolution film Flock of Dodos, apparently not realizing that key parts of the film are so wildly inaccurate that they amount to a hoax. In response, Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman has sent a letter requesting air time to respond to the film’s various false claims.

Flock of Dodos makes a number of false assertions about scientists and institutions researching the theory of intelligent design, and has drawn fire from scientists and scholars for its misrepresentations and outright inventions. Discovery’s Center for Science & Culture (CSC) has launched a webpage, www.hoaxofdodos.com, detailing the false facts in the film.

Discovery Institute sent a letter last week to Showtime Networks Chairman and CEO Matthew C. Blank outlining just a few of the film’s numerous errors.

So what is the Darwinist Amen-chorus saying about Iowa State University’s refusal to grant tenure to ID-proponent Guillermo Gonzalez? Predictably, they are in denial. According to them, intelligent design proponents may be evil and deserve to be wiped off the face of the earth, but of course Darwinists aren’t engaging in persecution when they deny them jobs, harass them, and vilify them. They are merely engaging in normal academic behavior!

This seems to be the point of Darwinist Ed Brayton’s escape-from-reality blog complaining about what he calls the “ID Persecution Complex.” In truth, however, it’s not ID proponents who suffer from a failure to accept reality, it’s the Darwinists. Darwinists like Brayton exhibit symptoms of what might be called Darwinist Denial Syndrome: When confronted with evidence of discrimination against an ID proponent, they deny, deny, deny.

One of the more frequent questions people ask about intelligent design is whether any scientists actually support ID theory. There are many notable biologists, biochemists, physicists, and astronomers who support intelligent design, and their work continues to develop the young scientific theory. Here are just a few of them:

“At Last, the Truth About Love” is the subtitle of Robert Wright’s recent essay “Why Darwinism isn’t Depressing” published on the New York Times Op-Ed page. Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Moral Animal, notes that neuroscience and evolution have left some people, well, downhearted.

He notes:

One commentator recently acknowledged the ascendance of the Darwinian paradigm with a sigh: “Evolution doesn’t really lead to anything outside itself.”