From EvolutionNews.org Judging the success of an idea in reaching and convincing a large audience is a tricky business. In putting your case to the public in books and articles, are you making progress, just holding steady, or losing ground to competitors? What you want is a solid, unambiguous metric. Hmm, as a measure of success in getting a particular argument before a large chunk of the thoughtful, book-reading public, how does a spot on the New York Times bestseller list sound? That would do nicely. And in fact it is just what we are very pleased to report. As careful readers will already have discerned from the headline, Stephen Meyer’s new book, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Read More ›

Now that Eugenie Scott is retiring Director of the NCSE, I nominate Elizabeth Liddle as Eugenie’s replacement. But in the meantime the NCSE might have to count on their Deputy Director Glenn Branch to fill in until they find Eugenie’s replacement. In paging through the NCSE website, I found something that made me chuckle. Glenn is a student of pseudo-science! Glenn Branch is Deputy Director of NCSE. Formerly a graduate student in philosophy at UCLA, where he won prizes both for scholarship and teaching, he is conversant with the philosophical debates surrounding creationism and “intelligent design”; he is also a long-time student of pseudo-science So what does this student of pseudo science do? He tries to thwart the advancement of Read More ›

“If they pressured Springer to reject the papers out of hand, that would have been wrong.” (See Nick Matzke – Book burner.) Tepid, but we’ll take what we can get. WJM writes: “What happened is that Nick and others exercised thuggish intimidation on Springer and Springer, acting in fear of what a few devoted people can do to reputations (especially via the internet) should they set their mind to it, pulled the book from publication at the last minute.” Liddle responds: “IF this is what happened, I condemn it.” Better except for the unnecessary qualification, because everyone familiar with the whole sordid affair knows that is exactly what happened.

Far from attempting to redeem herself, Elizabeth Liddle has actually doubled down on her censorship/fascism apologetics (see comment 113 to my post). Liddle admits that the book Biological Information—New Perspectives had already been peer reviewed. She admits that it was on the verge of publication. But, she notes, after Matzke’s publication on Panda’s Thumb all of a sudden Springer “decided that additional peer review would be necessary” before pulling and ultimately dumping the book. Liddle writes: “This is not surprising: if a lot of scientists write to a publisher and say: we have reason to think that this may not have been properly reviewed, then it’s only responsible to send out for further review.” Oh really? A lot of scientists Read More ›

WJM writes (See Nick Matzke – Book burner):  “Does Liz think that Nick, not having even read the papers, has a sound reason to reach out to the editorial board and “warn” them about publishing work he hasn’t even read?” Liddle responds:  “As much right as Springer had to offer to publish them, having not read them. And indeed to rescind the offer when alerted as to the nature of the conference.” Huh?  Lest anyone forget, Springer’s publication decision was not in the early stages.  They were on the verge of sending the book out the door.  It already had a Library of Congress number for goodness sake.  Yet, Liddle suggests that Springer had never read the papers and was Read More ›

In one of the comments to my last post,  Elizabeth Liddle writes:  “If Nick Matzke or any ‘liberal’ lays so much as a match to a children’s library book I shall be the first to protest.” Yet Liddle refuses to condemn Matzke for his efforts to suppress the publication of the papers from a conference before he had ever seen, much less read, them, which, of course, has the exact same effect as burning the books before they are distributed.  She dismisses this as “editorial judgment,” writing: To call . . . censorship merely “editorial judgement” would indeed be “Orwellian”. But to call the requirement that scientific papers meet a minimum standard of rigor before they are endorsed by a Read More ›