File this under: Darwin conspirazoid’s paper disowned by respectable journal.
Of course it had to happen eventually.
I remember reading Barbara “ID is coming to GET you” Forrest’s 2009 attack-from-nowhere on Beckwith (philosophy and church-state studies*).
Phrase “tinfoil hat” haunted me all that day, for whatever reason.
It’s one thing, of course, to publish a potboiler like her Trojan Horse, entertaining the Darwin faithful with dark tales of the big ID conspiracy. I mean, the faithful would vastly prefer space aliens, but the aliens haven’t been by lately.
And so what? Well, here’s what: A respectable journal, Synthese, has a habit of making every fifth issue a special, with outside editors. Unfortunately for the folks at Synthese, they left a recent issue (Vol 178, No22010) in the hands of the Darwin lobby, with NCSE employee Glenn Branch as co-editor.
Oopser: One of their gems was Barbara Forrest’s “The non-epistemology of intelligent design: its implications for public policy”, where Forrest once again whacks Beckwith with her magical Darwinbroom.
This might have been a mistake on her part, for two reasons. First, Beckwith is a gentleman and a scholar, but not a wimp. And second he is not, as Forrest assumes, an ID sympathizer. So he isn’t someone to whom the elementary principles of justice do not apply.
Anyway, he complained. The journal editors let him publish a 23-page rebuttal that mostly defends scholarly integrity, including his own, against the tangled Forrest of insinuations. It’s a zinger.
Better still, the editors have done “something unprecedented” – they have issued a disclaimer and, in Beckwith’s words, “distanced themselves from her literary misconduct”.
Good for them: I take a somewhat populist view: The public supports and respects scholarship when it means high intellectual combat.
But when it is the intellectual equivalent of machine politics (as it becomes when it gets lost in the Forrest), it’s not clear why support or respect is warranted.
So I see Beckwith as backstopping a form of corruption, and am thankful for it.
I guess someone who wasn’t an ID sympathizer had to be buzzed by Darwin’s broomstick before anyone could call these people for what they are.
Here are some brief excerpts from Beckwith’s rebuttal:
I was surprised that a philosopher of my modest accomplishments should be the subject of an entire article in such an esteemed journal.Mymoment of honor, however, was short lived once I began reading it. I soon discovered that Ms. Forrest’s interest in me goes far beyond my academic work, but into my entire career and then some, including my friendships, my civic associations, the locations of my speaking engagements, my Church, and the political histories of groups and organizations that people with whom I disagree and many of whom I have never met and do not know once belonged.
[ … ]
… Forrest’s assessment of my work is a professional embarrassment. So much so that the editors of this journal—not to be confused with the editors of the “special issue” in which Forrest’s article appears—have done something unprecedented: they have included in the front of the issue a disclaimer (Branch and Fetzer 2011, p. 170). They have distanced themselves from her literary misconduct, her article’s personal attacks and bizarre tangents into my religious pilgrimage that surround and embed her case against my work.
[ … ]
… it strikes me as odd that Forrest claims that I ama n ID advocate because I present “ID exactly as ID leaders do—their arguments are his arguments, restated without hedge or criticism” (Forrest 2011, p. 346). Not only does such a statement ignore my recent writings, explicitly critical of ID, that were available to Forrest many months before her article was to appear in print (Beckwith 2009c, 2009–2010, Beckwith 2010c), but it also ignores the academic responsibility I had in writing a graduate thesis in law on a matter of fundamental freedoms. In such writing, one is obligated to present the view under analysis with fairness and charity, especially when the nature, and not the veracity, of that view is the only thing relevant to the question one is trying to answer.
[ … ]
Her mistakes are so plentiful and egregious that it is almost impossible to know where to begin, and when to end. But, as I noted in my introductory comments, I simply cannot cover all of these mistakes. Readers can check out her article for themselves.
I’d like to hope this little contretemps will do some good, but if my experience is any guide, you’ll still be hearing that shrill cackle overhead for some years to come.
It just won’t be directed at Beckwith.
* Originally, I had mistakenly written that he was a law prof.