Granville Sewell

Evolution activist and marine biologist Wesley Elsberry hypocritically charges mathematician and ID advocate Granville Sewell with “self-plagiarism” and “deliberate gaming of the [academic publication] system.” What’s hypocritical about the charge? Well, recently in the journal Synthese, Elsberry himself self-plagiarized his own prior work. I don’t care if Wesley Elsberry “plagiarizes” himself, if that’s even the right the word for reworking or repurposing your own writing for different audiences. But as I argued earlier here, it is hypocritical for Elsberry to attack Sewell for doing exactly the same thing that Elsberry himself has done. Now, in his own defense, Elsberry has replied to me. In the context of the Darwin debate, when someone closes a rebuttal by calling your arguments “an Read More ›

Mathematician and intelligent design supporter Granville Sewell has posted an article, entitled “How Evolution Will Be Taught Someday,” where he makes some interesting predictions about the future state of teaching science. He asks whether intelligent design will be taught and says, “probably not in my lifetime.” In Sewell’s view, “in the not-too-distant future, biology texts will refer to evolution as an amazing, mysterious ‘natural’ process, which scientists do not now understand, but hope to understand some day.” Sewell continues to explain that this result would not be opposed by Discovery Institute, which is not trying to push ID into schools: But for most ID proponents, this will be a quite satisfactory outcome, certainly a huge improvement over the current sad Read More ›