2007

An alert mind keeps in reserve and in good trim all that’s needed to destroy its dogmas and opinions. It is always prepared to attack its “feelings” and to refute its “reasons.” — Paul Valery, Analects Next month, on Thursday, October 4, Michael Ruse and I are going to have a sort of un-debate. Each of us will be asked to spell out what would change our minds about the other’s position. More to the point, what would persuade us to adopt the opposing stance on evolution or ID? What evidence, what arguments, what whatever, would change Michael Ruse’s view of intelligent design? Conversely, what would turn me into a card-carrying Darwinian? Go here for information about the debate location Read More ›

She’s a tough-minded and plainspoken philosopher, and no fan of ID. In her eyes, it’s creationism in thin disguise.

But Mary Midgley is also no fan of Richard Dawkins:

Some of the claims of the supporters of versions of natural selection, she holds, might more properly belong in the Religious Education curriculum alongside Creationism and Intelligent Design.

There is an ancient legend about a man named Faust, who sold his soul for temporal selfish gain and self-aggrandizement. Although the immediate but ephemeral rewards were intoxicating, the ultimate consequences were hideous.

The legend of Faust has inspired much art, music, and theater over the centuries. The reason is obvious: There is a fundamental truth and lesson to be learned.
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 by Denyse O’Leary  The latest Baylor explanation of why Prof. Robert Marks’ evolutionary informatics website was taken down is that he wasn’t doing “approved research.” There is no precedent for this notion of “approved research” at Baylor — which is most likely why the Baylor administration did not cite it earlier. They have just thought the idea up and are taking it out for a spin. This is the latest in a variety of explanations. The original one turned on anonymous complaints. Another cited proprietary “Baylor branding.” Till now, none cited a doctrine of “approval.” Actually, if the Baylor administration were being honest, only one good explanation would be necessary. The story wouldn’t keep changing. The “approved research” slogan may Read More ›

The Baylor University student newspaper, the Lariat, finally has a piece about the academic discrimination case involving Prof. Robert Marks and his Evolutionary Informatics Lab (EIL). The story introduces an interesting new twist: now the problem with the EIL site is that it doesn’t contain “approved research.” And who is supposed to approve Prof. Marks’s research? His dean, Benjamin Kelley, who has admitted that he doesn’t understand it? And by what criteria does or doesn’t such research get approved? How about this criterion: If it’s about intelligent design and promises to lower the university’s prestige and undercut departmental funding, it does not constitute “approved research.” The Baylor administration seems to have no clue what a can of worms they are opening here. In effect, they no longer have a research university. Just as Baylor has a Tenure Review Committee (which denied Frank Beckwith tenure), will Baylor now institute a Research Review Committee (run by faculty and administrators who don’t do research, and whose first act will be to confirm and applaud the removal of Prof. Marks’s lab)?

New intelligent design conflict hits BU | By Claire St. Amant
The Baylor Lariat | Sept. 11, 2007
www.baylor.edu/Lariat/news.php?action=story&story=46756

City editor
Baylor has received the national spotlight once again for another controversy involving intelligent design research. Dr. Robert Marks, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering, posted what university officials are calling “unapproved research” on his personal Web site hosted by Baylor’s server. The research, which concerns informatic computing and the evolutionary process, was conducted as part of Marks’ Evolutionary Informatics Lab. Baylor shut down the site in early August, shortly before a scheduled meeting to discuss the issue with Marks; his attorney, John Gilmore; Baylor General Counsel Charles Beckenhauer; Provost Dr. Randall O’Brien; and dean of engineering Benjamin Kelley — whom Gilmore credited with shutting down the site. President John Lilley did not attend.

“(Kelley) did not give my client the benefit of a meeting or a phone call,” Gilmore said.

Baylor officials say the site was removed from the server because Marks didn’t follow either of the approved processes for posting research, and the subject matter is immaterial.

“There is a whole process every professor must go through to publish academic research,” John Barry, vice president for marketing and communications, said. “He just needs to go through the proper channels.”

Barry said when publishing research on Baylor Web sites, professors can either have the backing of their department, school or dean, or decide to work independently of the university and identify it as such. Marks was working independently of the university. . . . Read More ›

Here’s the Syracuse University student paper weighing in on the Baylor Academic Freedom Crisis — one wonders when the Baylor student paper, The Lariat, is going to have something to say about this.

Baylor forces professor to shut down site
By: Nicole Loring | Posted: 9/10/07
Source: The Daily Orange (Syracuse University Student Paper)

Just before the 2007-2008 academic year began, Baylor University shut down a personal Web site, dedicated to the theory of intelligent design, of distinguished professor Robert J. Marks II.

A Baptist university in Texas, Baylor is now entrenched in a legal battle with the electrical and chemical engineering professor, who claims his academic freedom was violated when his Web site was shut down without his knowledge.

The site in question, Evolutionary Informatics, cites its mission as “investigating how information makes evolution possible.” The site featured links to Marks’ personal publications and presentations on intelligent design.

Attorney John Gilmore, who is representing Marks, said it all began when the professor gave a podcast interview with the Discovery Institute,

Now and then someone has written to me to claim that it’s just not true that mid-twentieth century physicists disliked the Big Bang because of the religious implications of the idea of a beginning to the universe. A contact, however, quotes Simon Singh’s Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe:

The British physicist William Bonner, for example, suggested that the Big Bang theory was part of a conspiracy aimed at shoring up Christianity: ‘The underlying motive is, of course, to bring in God as creator. It seems like the opportunity Christian theology has been waiting for ever since science began to depose religion from the minds of rational men in the seventeenth century’

Fred Hoyle was equally scathing when it came to the Big Bang’s association with religion, condemning it as a model built on Judeo-Christian foundations. His views were shared by his Steady State collaborator, Thomas Gold. When Gold heard that Pius XII had backed the Big Bang, his response was short and to the point: ‘Well, the Pope also endorsed the stationary Earth.’
Scientists had been wary of the Vatican’

However, this wariness sometimes bordered on paranoia, as noted by the English Nobel Laureate George Thomson: ‘Probably every physicist would believe in a creation if the Bible had not unfortunately said something about it many years ago and made it seem old-fashioned.’ (pp. 361-62

So Singh has apparently noticed some of the same kind of stuff as I have.

Also, new at The Mindful Hack, Read More ›

The Baylor administration, in attempting to justify its censorship of Prof. Robert Marks and his Evolutionary Informatics Lab, is now raising procedural concerns about the proper deployment of labs and groups on the Baylor server as well as doubts about Prof. Marks’s job performance. This is unconscionable. As I have pointed out here at UD, Prof. Marks and others continue to have labs and groups at Baylor that have never received the Baylor administration’s official blessing. Moreover, the idea that “Bob needs to get back to his proper work” is ludicrous given that he keeps scoring major research grants (just one the other day from the NSF) and given that the people faulting him have never been awarded any research Read More ›

PZ Myers of Pharyngula has stood up on the side of academic freedom at Baylor University for Robert Marks, II. Baylor episode is getting wider circulation Posted on: September 4, 2007 3:07 PM, by PZ Myer “The story of the Robert Marks debacle has now made the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education. If the account is accurate, I’m going to do something you’ll only rarely see: I’ll take the side of the creationist. . . . The problem is that Baylor was more than a little ham-fisted in intruding on Marks’ academic freedom. I categorically reject Marks’ whole philosophy and I’d probably call him delusional, but … it is the professor’s job to talk freely about wacky ideas Read More ›

The story of Prof. Robert Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab and its removal from Baylor has finally made it into the local paper: Web site sparks new intelligent design battle at BU | By Tim Woods www.wacotrib.com/…/09092007wacintelligentdesign.html Waco Tribune-Herald | Sunday, September 09, 2007 A Baylor University professor is fighting university officials to have the school restore his personal Web site in a battle some link to academic freedom and intelligent design. About a week after informing distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering Robert Marks that his Evolutionary Informatics Lab site would need to be taken down, Benjamin Kelley, Baylor’s dean of engineering, ordered the site be removed without Marks’ permission, according to Marks’ attorney, St. Paul, Minn.-based John Gilmore. Read More ›

1: Cell Cycle. 2007 Jun;6(15):1873-7. Epub 2007 Jun 6. Links Universal genome in the origin of metazoa: thoughts about evolution. Sherman M. Department of Biochemistry; Boston University Medical School, 715 Albany St., Boston, Massachusetts 02118, USA. sherma1@bu.edu Recent advances in paleontology, genome analysis, genetics and embryology raise a number of questions about the origin of Animal Kingdom. These questions include:(1) seemingly simultaneous appearance of diverse Metazoan phyla in Cambrian period, (2) similarities of genomes among Metazoan phyla of diverse complexity, (3) seemingly excessive complexity of genomes of lower taxons and (4) similar genetic switches of functionally similar but non-homologous developmental programs. Here I propose an experimentally testable hypothesis of Universal Genome that addresses these questions. According to this model, (a) Read More ›

Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, was released this June 2007. Most scientific establishment reviews have been negative. e.g. See Wikipedia. However, now that schools and universities have awakened from summer, Edge of Evolution is running at Amazon.com Sales Rank: #8,778 in Books. Popular in these categories: #3 in Books > Professional & Technical > Engineering > Bioenginering > Biochemistry #4 in Books > Science > Evolution > Organic #9 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Science & Religion Behe’s revised edition of Darwin’s Black Box, 2nd Rev. edition 2006, is also doing well: Amazon.com Sales Rank: #5,452 in Books. Popular in these categories: #2 in Books > Science Read More ›

You might wonder whether Prof. Robert Marks is the only faculty member at Baylor who has a “group” or a “lab” not blessed by the Baylor administration. The other day I mined a bunch of cases here at UD where the terms “group” and “lab” are used at Baylor, almost certainly without the Baylor administration’s blessing or knowledge. Here’s what I wrote: (1) Robert Marks has another research entity on the Baylor server: “The Baylor University Time Scales Group” (note the Baylor URL: web.ecs.baylor.edu/faculty/marks/Research/TimeScales). This research group (a collaboration between engineering and mathematics) has been allowed to proceed unimpeded by Baylor, using its name and absent any disclaimer. Is Baylor now, to maintain a foolish consistency, going to take down Read More ›

What does Bob Marks want? He wants the right to run computer simulations at Baylor that might (possibly) reduce confidence in Darwinian evolution.

That is, the simulations might show that Darwinian evolution is not nearly as probable as professional Darwinists claim.

Actually, the Wistar meetings showed that way back in the 1960s, but Darwinism is just too good a creation story for materialism to pass up. So otherwise respectable scientists have been lying for Darwin ever since, and snuffing out the careers of anyone who breaks rank.

Contrary to popular belief, you need NOT be a creationist or an ID guy. All you have to do is stop believing in magic – Darwinian magic – and ask for evidence.

That’s a Big Sin because the evidence does not support Darwinism.

Well, that explains the role of the Darwinist, who can hardly help suppressing evidence, but what about Baylor, the alleged Christian university? Elsewhere, I have pointed out that institutions like Baylor essentially protect Christians from a world that favours materialism. The justification for their existence would be revolutionized if word got out that materialism is largely disconfirmed over a broad area. As I said there,

In a trice, the harsh reality from which the institution protects its dumb sheeplike students is – a harsh UNreality. The students are not meat puppets who foolishly imagine that they have immortal souls and must therefore be humoured by their silly little campus groups. They are people who actually do have immortal souls who are being trained by the institution to accept a culture that lies to them that they are meat puppets. And the institution essentially brokers the lies in the interests of the materialist culture – and to its own prestige.
Now do you see the threat posed by an intellectually rigorous inquiry into intelligent design?

Last night, my mom and I were watching a video of one of my favourite movies – The Great Escape. Suddenly, some of the dialogue seemed startlingly relevant to the struggle of scientists like Marks.

Listen, as the German Colonel Von Luger explains to the Allied prisoners of war: Read More ›

[[Derbyshire continues to embarrass himself regarding ID — see his most recent remarks in The Spectator — so I thought I would remind readers of UD of a past post regarding his criticisms of ID. –WmAD]]

John Derbyshire has written some respectable books on the history of mathematics (e.g., his biography of Riemann). He has also been a snooty critic of ID. Given his snootiness, one might think that he could identify and speak intelligently on substantive problems with ID. But in fact, his knowledge of ID is shallow, as is his knowledge of the history of science and Darwin’s writings. This was brought home to me at a recent American Enterprise Institute symposium. On May 2, 2007, Derbyshire and Larry Arnhart faced off with ID proponents John West and George Gilder. The symposium was titled “Darwinism and Conservatism: Friends or Foes.” The audio and video of the conference can be found here: www.aei.org/…/event. Read More ›