Science and Culture Today | Page 1357 | Discovering Design in Nature

Returning to Newsweek after a five year stint as a science writer for the Wall Street Journal, Sharon Begley posted a blog piece yesterday about Darwinist biology professor Richard Colling. Colling teaches at a small Nazarene university in Illinois and, according to Begley, has come under fire by church leaders because he is a theistic evolutionist and authored a book called Random Designer.

Anger over his work had been building for two years. When classes resumed in late August, things finally came to a head. Colling is prohibited from teaching the general biology class, a version of which he had taught since 1991, and college president John Bowling has banned professors from assigning his book.

Two years? Robert Marks’ evolutionary informatics website was barely online two months when Baylor admins gave it the heave-ho. Granted, private religious institutions–unlike state universities–have the right to enforce doctrinal beliefs as part of their First Amendment freedom. Of course, if Colling’s university–like Baylor University–has claimed that it guarantees academic freedom, then that is another matter. If Colling’s academic freedom has been hindered then that needs to be corrected. We support academic freedom, obviously, for Darwinists as well as Darwinist-skeptics.

Begley’s blog is a bit unclear as to just who is attacking Colling. It sounds more as if the attacks have come from church leaders as opposed to university administrators.

At least one local Nazarene church called for Colling to be fired and threatened to withhold financial support from the college.

Clearly, Colling has not been fired.

One has to be careful about accepting the accuracy of news articles that describe scientific papers, so bear that in mind in my mention of a new paper by “scientists” at UCLA and NYU. Their actual paper in Nature Neuroscience (unavailable online so far) is reported in a joint Chicago Tribune/Los Angeles Times article today . It claims that people’s political convictions derive from (you guessed it), differences in biology. “..(A) specific region of the brain’s cortex is more sensitive in people who consider themselves liberals than in self-declared conservatives,” they advise us.Read the rest on Discovery Blog.

This past spring, anti-ID faculty at Southern Methodist University (SMU) refused to engage in a debate over intelligent design. Now that Discovery Institute’s activities on the SMU campus are over, some of these faculty are sponsoring a course entitled “The Scientific Method – Critical and Creative Thinking (Debunking Pseudoscience).” The course has a clear bias against ID, as the course website has a page devoted to ID titled “(Un)Intelligent Design,” which states, “You don’t have to teach both sides of a debate if one side is a load of crap.” They remain true to their promise to offer a one-sided and biased presentation: Their listing of course readings on ID lacks a single article that is friendly towards ID! The Read More ›

Dr. Jeffrey Shallit, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo and a Darwinist, has a few unkind words for Tom Bethell on his blog Recursivity. Mr. Bethell’s sin, it seems, is that he pointed out the rather obvious differences between creationism and intelligent design. Creationism is the belief that the Book of Genesis is literally, scientifically true — that the earth was created in six days, etc. Intelligent design is the opinion that some aspects of biology, such as the genetic code and the molecular nanotechnology inside cells, are most reasonably explained as the product of intelligent agency. The difference between these viewpoints continues to elude Dr. Shallit. Consequently, Dr. Shallit calls Mr. Bethell a “blathering buffoon.”

Maybe Expelled’s producers should rent some billboards in Waco.

Baylor University continues to come under fire for its suppression of Professor Robert Marks’ Evolutionary Informatics Lab. Clearly, Marks’ site was removed because it was implicated with ID (not because of any Baylor policy) and there are plenty of labs and groups (some belonging to Marks himself) that have not faced similar discrimination. It seems obvious that his site is being singled out — regardless of what Baylor says.

The story was on the front page of today’s Waco Tribune Herald and reported that:

. . . at an Aug. 9 meeting, attended by Beckenhauer, Gilmore, Marks, Kelley, provost Randall O’Brien and engineering department chair Kwang Lee that “a disclaimer would be put on the Web site and that it would then go back online as the provost had promised at the close of the meeting.”

It also quoted Marks’ attorney John Gilmore as saying:

(The disclaimer) might not have satisfied the absolutists who don’t want anyone at Baylor to think, even on their own time, about I.D. and its related issues. . . . Baylor has an obligation to defend Bob Marks’ position. Unfortunately, they’ve been taking the position of his persecutors. . . . It’s viewpoint discrimination.

The story is somewhat similar to that of noted astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez who suffered academic persecution at the hands of Iowa State University earlier this year. Like Gonzalez, Marks is an especially accomplished scientist and scholar. Among Marks’ numerous professional accomplishments are 120 peer-reviewed journal papers, 140 conference papers, and three patents. Just check this out.

The Great Derb, John Derbyshire, has spoken. And again he’s muddled things badly. This time he’s got himself all in a twist over a response by Tom Bethell to his letter responding to a recent column by Bethell about last spring’s ID debate at AEI. (whew!)

He still can’t understand the obvious differences between creationism and intelligent design, continually conflating the two and looking like an ill-informed crank. And the meandering rantings don’t help.

Derbyshire insists on equating intelligent design and creationism because a judge agrees. “Intelligent Design is creationism. This has been proved to courtroom standards of evidence.” He would be well served to read Traipsing Into Evolution.

Even thoughtful Darwinists understand that ID and creationism are simply two different things. Leonard Susskind, hardly a creationist or IDist, writes in his book The Cosmic Landscape:

“The fact is materialism is stalled. It neither has any useful hypotheses for the human mind or spiritual experiences nor comes close to developing any. Just beyond lies a great realm that cannot even be entered via materialism, let alone explored.” (xiv)

Canadian neuroscientist Mario Beauregard notes at the beginning of his book The Spiritual Brain, co-authored with journalist Denyse O’Leary, that he belongs to a small minority of nonmaterialist neuroscientists. He is upfront about the fact that he “went into neuroscience in part because [he] knew experientially that such things [religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences (RSME)] can indeed happen.” Driven by his curiosity about what is happening to the brain during RSME, Beauregard and his colleague studied the spiritual experiences of Carmelite nuns, coming to the conclusion that it is more likely that these mystics are directly experiencing a reality outside of themselves.

This Just In: People are smarter than monkeys. Film at 11.

MSNBC loves to promote the view that humans evolved from anthropoid ancestors (see here or here for a couple examples). Now MSNBC has created an online exhibit (and accompanying article) entitled “Before and After Humans” that not only promotes standard views of humans evolution, but also supports transhumanism: the view that humans will evolve into a new, higher species. MSNBC’s “possible futur[e]” for the human species goes something like this: Within one million years, global gene mixing eliminates the races and the “Unihumans” develop a global “monoculture.” That sounds reasonable enough. Next some global catastrophe kills off large portions of humanity, and the “Survivalistians” must adapt to extreme conditions, evolving “night-vision” and “radiation-shielding skin.” If that sounds a little weird, Read More ›