Science and Culture Today | Page 1452 | Discovering Design in Nature

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.

You’d think that after the Jayson Blair scandal, the New York Times would be exceptionally careful about questions of journalistic ethics. Why, then, is the Times allowing a reporter who regularly covers the evolution controversy on its news pages to ALSO write opinion articles on the same subject?

Cornelia Dean has written a number of news stories for the Times about the the controversy over evolution, including one about the Kansas science standards and another one last weekend about the Catholic church and evolution.

But the day after Dean’s news piece appeared about Catholics and evolution, a commentary by her promoting evolution appeared on the op-ed page of the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania! In this op-ed, Dean advised evolutionists about how they can win the public debate over evolution:

Over the past month, Darwinists have been waging a vicious campaign of defamation against Ohio State University science education doctoral candidate Bryan Leonard. (For more information about Leonard’s situation, see here.) Mr. Leonard’s doctoral dissertation defense has been put in limbo after certain Darwinist professors alleged that his research was “unethical” because it involved teaching students about scientific criticisms of Darwin’s theory, an approach called for in Ohio’s official science standards!

Darwinists have variously claimed that members of Leonard’s doctoral committee were improperly selected, that Leonard engaged in “unethical” research, or that he taught his students intelligent design. According to members of Leonard’s dissertation committee, however, all of these charges are false. Two members of the committee have just issued a detailed public statement correcting the record about Leonard’s dissertation. Discovery Institute has posted the statement on its website as a public service, here.

Science magazine has published an article about what it is calling a “mea culpa” by Eugenie Scott of the NCSE for spreading false information about California parent Larry Caldwell. (For background on Scott’s defamation of Caldwell, see here.)

Today’s New York Times has a fascinating page-one article about Catholic Cardinal Christoph Schönborn’s recent op-ed declaring that Darwinism is incompatible with Roman Catholic doctrine as well as the findings of human reason. As we’ve come to expect from the major media, this “news” article contains errors of fact as well as editorializing by reporters Cornelia Dean and Laurie Goodstein, but it is nevertheless informative — and for a piece by the major media, relatively balanced. The article quotes both Bruce Chapman and Mark Ryland from Discovery Institute. The main thrust of the story is summarized early on in the following paragraphs:

AP education reporter Ben Feller has a wire story about the debate over how to teach evolution. I was pleased to see that Feller actually got our position correct, and let us describe our policy in our own words. This is what he got from a recent interview with Discovery president Bruce Chapman: “The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that represents many scholars who support intelligent design, is not seeking to require schools to teach the theory. Nor is it out to diminish the teaching of evolution, said Bruce Chapman, the institute’s president.“We want the scientific evidence for and against Darwin’s theory taught. That’s it,” Chapman said. And he has a better definition of intelligent design than we usually Read More ›

Now that the dust has settled from the very successful national premiere of The Privileged Planet, I can post a few of the photos (taken by expert photographer Brian Gage who also designed all the materials for The Privileged Planet premiere, not to mention the book cover and the DVD cover as well.) The event itself went very well and it appeared that everyone of the 220 guests in attendance had a thoroughly enjoyable evening.

Blogger Ed Brayton is fulminating over my comments about those who wrongly conflate intelligent design theory with religion. Brayton responds with proof-texts supposedly showing that key ID supporters think ID makes religious claims after all. Mr. Brayton doth protest too much. First of all, if he had read the article I referenced in my blog post about why ID is not creationism, he would have known that I never deny that ID can have metaphysical implications. As I wrote in that article:

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.”