Science and Culture Today | Page 1454 | Discovering Design in Nature

If you’re a graduate student who dares to question Darwinian evolution good luck on defending your dissertation. OSU graduate student, Bryan Leonard, is suffering a vicious attack from Darwinist who seem bent on keeping him from earning his doctoral degree, precisely because he does not adhere to a strictly Darwinian viewpoint. (see here for more details) Fortunately there are some who see these attacks for what they are — threats on academic freedom. Charles Mitchell at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has posted his insightful take on the situation: “First, to my knowledge at least, Leonard’s Ph.D. is not actually on evolution or intelligent design or anything else. It’s about pedagogy, period. Its concern is not scientific analysis Read More ›

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 ›

This past weekend PBS program Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly aired a story about the Kansas board of education’s recent hearings on evolution. The producers tried to cover the whole debate and allowed many of the different points of view to be included. In that regard the program was better than most news stories on the issue.

A: As many as they can build! Apparently having such websites at a multitude of universities, and having all manner of self-elected guardians of Darwin’s holy theory put up such websites, and having every biology professor and graduate student blogging the value of Darwinism isn’t doing much to convince people to believe in the fact of Darwinian evolution. The brights at the National Acadamies are throwing more money into marketing, instead of into new product development. The answer they arrived at is that there aren’t enough websites to convince people, so make more. Here’s a new one. Wired magazine briefly reported this in an obvious attempt to solidify its claim as the hip new mouthpiece of the Darwinian elite. Getting Read More ›

The NCSE has posted a rant against The Privileged Planet by William H Jefferys from University of Texas at Austin. Fortunately, I don’t have to waste time responding to this anti-intellectual diatribe because physicist David Heddle has already responded with a detailed rebuttal, noting that of all The Privileged Planet reviews out there’s he’s never seen “one as comprehensively bad and unthinking as William H Jefferys’s.” If you’re wondering who is Heddle to be trash talking a “scientist” from a state University, well first he has his very own Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. And hey, he has actually put it to work conducting postdoctoral research at the University of Maryland and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And, oh Read More ›

Today’s Washington Post has a handful of letters about the dust-up at the Smithsonian over the screening of The Privileged Planet later this month, both good and bad. First the good.

The Washington Post today publishes an editorial prepared by Anne Applebaum (“Dissing Darwin“) that uses the term “intelligent creator” three times to describe the concept of intelligent design. The writer knows better, but apparently believes that if she can lodge the word “creator” (as in “creationist”) in people’s minds, it will reside there forever. The key to understanding such writing: the proponents of intelligent design must never be allowed to speak for themselves or define their own ideas. Instead they must only be spoken about and accept definitions of their terms that are offered by their foes. The editorial also twice describes the film The Privileged Planet as “religious”, though the writer admits it doesn’t mention the word God. (It Read More ›

Telic Thoughts and Post-Darwinist are among the many blogs talking about The Privileged Planet premiere at the Smithsonian that has so outraged Darwinian bloggers. (For all the real juicy details see our previous blog here.)

Discovery Institute advocates teaching students the controversy over Neo-Darwinism. The rebuttal is simplicity itself: “Medievalists! Naughty Luddites! Are you going teach the strengths and weaknesses of gravity? Heliocentrism? Evolution is … A … FACT!”

The Washington Post has a story related to the showing of the film “The Privileged Planet” June 23 at the National Museum of Natural History. It will be interesting to see how the story is covered given the hysterical tone in evidence on certain ultra-Darwinian blogs in recent days. Once invitations got out and the New York Times ran a story over Memorial Day weekend (with its unfortunately misleading headline tying the film to the evolution debate, which is not its subject), the Museum apparently was flooded with calls and emails from angry Darwinists demanding that the event be cancelled. None of these would-be film-burners has seen the film, or read the book, of course.

RELATED DOCUMENTS:
PDF of recommended invitations provided by SI to DI
PDF of invitation sent out by DI
PDF of e-mail from SI saying The Privileged Planet had been reviewed and approved
PDF of letter received from Smithsonian by Dsicovery June 1

The Museum did not buckle, but it surely bent.

The event has not been cancelled. However a “Director’s Message” referencing supposed “consultation with the Secretary” (!) was circulated on the web Wednesday, and it purported to come from the Museum Director, Cristian Samper. The trouble is, Lucy Dorrick (director of development and special events) of the Smithsonian, who called us back when we telephoned Director Samper, knew nothing about it and seemed surprised to hear our report of it. She asked in turn if we had received a different, shorter message from her, on the museum’s behalf. We had not. She obligingly sent a copy to us and we sent her a copy of the questionable “Director’s Message.”

Addressed to Mark Ryland, Vice President of Discovery Institute and director of the institute’s Washington, DC office, the letter sent today to Discovery says,