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On reporters and deception: Some thoughts

Re the dustup about Celeste Biever pretending to be Maria from Cornell while investigating IDEA clubs:

Now, I hope I am not opening a big can of worms here but I naturally approach it from the perspective of a journalist of nearly 35 years pounding beats….

I don’t think it wrong in principle for a reporter to go undercover.

A lot depends on two things: whether the public interest is at stake and whether key information could be obtained otherwise.

(I am assuming, of course, that no laws are broken, no one is thoughtlessly harmed, and no private business that should remain private is heedlessly exposed.)

At the Discovery Institute’s blog, John West quotes from the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists:

Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public.

which helpfully highlights the issue. Incidentally, the original adds “Use of such methods should be explained as part of the story” – another important consideration. Readers have a right to know how the information was obtained.

Undercover media investigations have often served the public interest by exposing rackets, corruptions, shoddy practices, and deceptions, in situations where it was really true that the information could not be obtained in any other way.

So here is where the issue gets tricky, in my view: Celeste Biever’s editors may very well honestly believe that Read More ›

Illustra Media: “Case for a Creator Documentary”

Access Research Network (ARN) reports: The Case for a Creator DVD Available

It was in a high school science classroom that Lee Strobel became an atheist. A lecture on the Miller-Urey experiment convinced him that the origin of life, and all life for that matter, could be explained by purely naturalistic processes. Only the hard, empirical evidence of science could be trusted—and it appeared to point to a universe created by purely naturalist processes: time, chance, and Darwinian evolution.

Although science led Strobel away from a belief in a Creator, it was science that led him back. The atheistic worldview deeply influenced Strobel’s academic years and early career as an award-winning journalist for the Chicago Tribune. Then, in 1980, his wife’s conversion to Christianity led him on an intensive search for the truth about God and our beginnings. Not surprisingly, it began with science.

The Case for a Creator is the third in a series of top quality, block-buster documentaries on Intelligent Design by Illustra Media that started with Unlocking the Mystery of Life and The Privileged Planet. Based on Strobel’s popular book by the same title, the documentary leads you through one man’s journey to grapple with the scientific evidence regarding one of life’s greatest questions: How did we get here? Along the way he interviews many of the leading scientists and scholars for the intelligent design theory including Stephen C. Meyer, Michael Behe, Jay Richards, Jonathan Wells, Robin Collins, William Lane Craig, Guillermo Gonzalez, and Scott Minnich. The major topic areas of the documentary cover the fossil evidence, cosmology, astronomy, physics, biological machines and biological information. The bonus material includes additional interviews with the scientists, and special units on the origin of life and the machinery of life.

As with previous Illustra Media documentaries, this one is chock full of stunning graphics, amazing animations, and a theater-worthy soundtrack. The focus of this documentary is the scientific and philosophical evidence for design and a theistic worldview, and is suitable for use in public schools, especially when shown to balance the atheistic Darwinian worldview found in many educational scientific documentaries on the topic.

Read More ›

Reporter caught telling lies in attempt to infiltrate Cornell IDEA club

Reporter Celeste Biever of New Scientist was caught apparently telling lies in an attempt to infiltrate the Cornell IDEA club according to club president Hannah Maxson. In the IDEA club’s letter of protest to Biever’s employer, Maxson wrote:

it appears that your reporter acted unethically and lied to us about her identity and falsely claimed she was a Cornell student in an unnecessary ruse to obtain information from us

Read More ›

No Free Lunch in physics

In his 2003 paper, “How far are we from a quantum theory of gravity?” especially p. 49. Lee Smolin invokes the no free lunch theorem to argue that in searching for the minimum of a complicated but unknown potential there is no chance of doing better than a random search unless the search algorithm has built into it some very definite information about the function itself. The paper is widely available online (e.g., http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0303/0303185.pdf). There’s not much difference here between Smolin’s argument against string theory and ID arguments against natural selection. I have yet to read the new books by Woit and Smolin, but I’m told it is astonishing how closely the controversies over string theory reflect the controversies of Read More ›

[off topic] Balmy North Pole

A news brief in Scientific American (subscriber only, no link) alerted me to the following article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060601091313.htm Summarized: Core sediments retrieved by three icebreakers recently analyzed reveal the following: -North Pole’s temperature 55 million years ago: 23C/73F (today it is -20C/-4F) -Concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere 55mya was 2000 ppm (today it is 380 ppm) -Global average temperature 55mya under above conditions was 5C/9F degrees C higher than today (in Sciam News Brief only, Science Daily says tropics remained liveable). Obviously, the earth recovered, if it was even “harmed”. I post this because so-called global warming is blamed on human activities by the worst kind of consensus pseudoscience (Darwinian evolution is consensus pseudoscience as well) and is projected Read More ›

Chris Mooney — Valiant defender of scientific truth

Yes, this is the same Chris Mooney who attacks ID and has written THE REPUBLICAN WAR ON SCIENCE: Chris Mooney ’99 recently spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on behalf of the Campus Freethought Alliance (CFA). Mooney, who is copresident and a founding member of the Yale College Society for Humanists, Atheists and Agnostics, addressed the issue of discrimination against those who don’t believe in God. Mooney interned with the CFA over the summer, where he helped draft the organization’s “Bill of Rights for Unbelievers.” Source: http://www.yale.edu/opa/ybc/campusnotes.html.

“The Fundamentalist Attack on Science: A Problem That Won’t Just Disappear”

Are we talking religious fundamentalists or Darwinian fundamentalists? The Fundamentalist Attack on Science: A Problem That Won’t Just Disappear Morris, Stephen (2006) The Fundamentalist Attack on Science: A Problem That Won’t Just Disappear. In [PSA 2006] Philosophy of Science Assoc. 20th Biennial Mtg (Vancouver): PSA 2006 Contributed Papers. Full text available as: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002954/01/IDPSA.doc.

Thinkquotes of the day: Why there is an intelligent design controversy

The operations of a higher level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing its particulars forming the lower level. You cannot derive a vocabulary from phonetics; you cannot derive the grammar of a language from its vocabulary; a correct use of grammar does not account for good style; and a good style does not provide the content of a piece of prose. . . . it is impossible to represent the organizing principles of a higher level by the laws governing its isolated particulars. — Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, Read More ›

Phil Skell’s first post – thanking Prof. Davison and Joseph and greetings to all

Thanks to Prof. Davison and Joseph for stirring the embers left from the conflagration generated a year ago with the publication of my two essays in The Scientist, and for calling my attention to the renewed discussion.   I invite the new participants to do what, thus far, none of the earlier critics have yet done, to set forth a published paper containing experimental results, in which there is a clear heuristic connection to Darwinian Principles that served to guide that experimental work to its goal.   Conclusions from my earlier writing:   Darwinian evolution – whatever its other virtues – does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology. This becomes especially clear when we compare it with a Read More ›

Philip Skell Revisited

We at Uncommon Descent have in the past talked about NAS scientist Philip Skell’s observation that evolutionary biology contributes little if anything to experimental biology. Just recently Professor Skell placed a phone call to Professor John A. Davison and they had a long conversation the details of which were not disclosed to me. John invited Philip to participate here at Uncommon Descent and I’d like to take this opportunity to say that all of us here would like to echo John’s invitation. Professor Skell, if you’re reading this, we’d love to hear from you.

To read Professor Skell’s article and response in The Scientist read on… Read More ›

Here’s Something To Think About/Compute

Isn’t it interesting what they’re finding out these days? This is just in from PhysOrg.com.

Many researchers who create these models shun the computer metaphor,” O’Reilly said. “My work comes out of a tradition that says people’s brains are nothing like computers, and now all of a sudden as we look at them, in fact, in a certain respect they are like computers.”

Digital computers operate by turning electrical signals into binary “on and off states” and flexibly manipulating these states by using switches. O’Reilly found the same operating principles in the brain.

Read More ›

Biologist finds term “Darwinian evolutionist” offensive: O’Leary tries to sort it out

An evolutionary biologist in the audience at the University of Toronto ID meet last Saturday wrote a most interesting post to the Post-Darwinist, saying, among other  things, I was the person who objected to your use of the term “Darwinist.” The word is loaded with all kinds of implications. To those of us who work on evolution it means a person who believes in natural selection as the most important thing in evolutionary biology. This would include people like Richard Dawkins and others who are often referred to as Ultra-Darwinians. Many of us are not Darwinists in that sense and we would never refer to ourselves as “Darwinists” unless we were specificially referring to our acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural Read More ›

Science And Engineering

Scientist says: Science is the discovery of how things in the natural world work. Engineering is the practical application of scientific discovery. Engineer says: Engineering is the practical application of scientific discovery. Scientific discovery is simply reverse engineering. So you see, it’s really all engineering. You either take something that already exists and reverse engineer it (that’s science) or you take the knowledge gained from reverse engineering and create something that doesn’t already exist with it.

The Encoding of Instinct

The article on voles reminds me of an ongoing and more general mystery. How are instincts encoded in DNA? It’s a given that a bird egg contains all sorts of instructions about how to go about building nests, flying, preening, perching, predator avoidance, song, what to eat and how to find it, what not to eat, and etcetera. I’ve raised many birds from eggs and very young hatchlings and without exception they all appear to be conceived with a built-in operating and maintenance manual for their bodies that distinguishes them from other bird species and are identical with others of their own species. They do this with no exposure whatsoever to other members of their species and indeed without exposure Read More ›