Science and Culture Today | Page 1377 | Discovering Design in Nature

Today’s Des Moines Register has an article highlighting the growing controversy over the denial of tenure to gifted astronomer Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State University (ISU). The story is remarkably fair and accurate as far as it goes, and it reveals that the approval rate for tenure applications in Gonzalez’s department over the past ten years has approached 70%! So much for the claim that tenure at ISU is particularly hard to get. Unfortunately, what the article doesn’t do is give any information about Dr. Gonzalez’s outstanding scholarly record—such as the fact that his work has been recognized in Science, Nature, Scientific American, and many other top science publications; or the fact that he is co-author of a major Read More ›

A blogger named “Angry Astronomer,” an undergraduate at the University of Kansas, has exemplified how anti-ID intolerance is passed on to the next-generation. The “angry” Jon Voisey assumes that Guillermo Gonzalez does not deserve tenure because Dr. Gonzalez displays “dishonesty” in “extension activity” simply because Gonzalez supports intelligent design. Mr. Voisey has no evidence of dishonesty on the part of Dr. Gonzalez, but simply assumes that supporting intelligent design necessarily implies dishonesty. In Mr. Voisey’s vision of academia, ID proponents need not apply. We should feel for college undergraduates like this who have been led down the path of intolerance by University of Kansas professors who model knee-jerk prejudice against proponents of intelligent design**. The “angry astronomer” then cites Discovery Read More ›

Editor’s Update: Discovery Institute has just issued a press release about Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez’s denial of tenure. Iowa State University has denied tenure to astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, co-author of The Privileged Planet, which presents powerful scientific evidence for the intelligent design of the universe. You can read about the situation in today’s Ames Tribune here. This is a very sad day for academic freedom. Dr. Gonzalez is a superb scholar and a fine human being. His research has been featured in Scientific American, Science, Nature, and many other science journals. Iowa State’s decision to deny him tenure is a travesty, and the university should be held to account for its action. This deserves to be an even bigger story than Read More ›

So just why was gifted astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State University denied tenure? Certainly not because he hasn’t fulfilled his university’s tenure standards for excellence in research. According to his own department’s standards, to be promoted to associate professor (with tenure), excellence sufficient to lead to a national or international reputation is required and would ordinarily be shown by the publication of approximately fifteen papers of good quality in refereed journals. So how many refereed articles has Gonzalez published? Ten? Twelve? Fifteen? Twenty? Actually, he has published 68 articles in refereed journals, thus exceeding his own department’s normal standard for research excellence by 350%! (Unfortunately, the Ames Tribune story about the denial of tenure to Gonzalez wrongly reports that Read More ›

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:

Darwinists lack two traits desirable for scientists: decorum and a developed sense of irony. University of Minnesota Associate Professor of Biology and star Darwinist science blogger P.Z. Myers provides evidence for this observation in a recent scatological tirade on Pharyngula, the popular Darwinist science blog that is read daily by thousands of young scientists and aspiring scientists.

German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig Tackles Giraffe Evolution Last year, German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig critiqued evolutionary accounts of the infamously complex long neck of the giraffe. He recounts how various Darwinists had claimed things like “the evolution of the long-necked giraffe can be reconstructed through fossils,” but Lönnig concluded that “the fossil evidence for the gradual evolution of the long-necked giraffe is — as expected — completely lacking.” Lönnig has now written part 2 of his refutation of this evolutionary tall tale, where he now shifts the focus away from paleontology and on to giraffe anatomy, diet, behavior, and zoology, tackling evolutionary hypotheses about giraffe origins. Part 2 can be read at “The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe: What Do We Read More ›

“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.”

I recently discussed how Wikipedia has inaccurate information on intelligent design, or constantly rebuts (fallaciously) the claims of ID proponents. This post looks at merely two sentences out of the long Wikipedia entry on intelligent design and finds inaccuracy, misrepresentation, bias, and hypocrisy. These two sentences come from Wikipedia’s discussion of polls and intelligent design. Wikipedia presently states: According to a 2005 Harris poll, ten percent of adults in the United States view human beings as “so complex that they required a powerful force or intelligent being to help create them”.[17] Although some polls commissioned by the Discovery Institute show more support, these polls have been criticized as suffering from considerable flaws, such as having a low response rate (248 Read More ›

Most people — including most professional biologists — think that one either accepts the neo-Darwinian theory of the universal common ancestry of life via undirected natural causes, or else one is a “creationist,” meaning someone who advocates multiple independent starting points for life, all of them specially created.