Denyse O'Leary

the supposed scandal that most American high school biology teachers have not drunk the Darwinade yet is the comments section, for example, I’m completely convinced that the reason actual science has such a poor impact in the science classroom is that large segments of the scientific community absolutely insist on drawing sweeping theological conclusions from biology that they feel strongly impelled to proselytize. Yes, some do openly acknowledge the obvious New Atheist attempt to get the biology teacher to teach what has never been demonstrated, but supports the Darwinist worldview. It;’s almost like all the tax burdens and rich and thick widows’ legacies went to lunch, and some real people had a look. Enjoy it. Won’t last.

Or sea slugs? Like, humans had 100, 000 genes, which proved we were a big-brained ape, then 30, 000, a bit more than a worm. Oh but wait, the fern has 250,000 genes and someone who has never kept a fern can be confident that they’re mostly junk. Now, ten years on, here’s the kind of thing we hear: Since the human genome was sequenced, we know more about our own history, and the lines between us and other species have blurred, Cole-Turner said. A comparison with the Neanderthal genome revealed that Neanderthals likely mated with our ancestors, since between 1 percent and 4 percent of some modern humans’ DNA came from Neanderthals. Even the genome from the first amphibian Read More ›

Jonathan Haidt decided, for some reason, to point out the obvious to a group of American academics recently, that they are overwhelmingly modern materialist statists (liberals).

He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

Why anyone would bother pointing that out, I don’t know. It’s not a bias against conservatives, anyway; it’s a bias against rationality, which they don’t believe in. Our brains, remember, are shaped for fitness, not for truth. Indeed, these are the very people who channel Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone for insights into human psychology, and anyone who doubts the validity of such “research” should just shut up and pay their taxes, right?

Well, his talk had attracted  John Tierney’s attention at the New York Times (February 7, 2007), who drew exactly the right conclusion (for modern statists and Darwinists):

“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design” while rejecting Darwinism.

[ … ]

For a tribal-moral community, the social psychologists in Dr. Haidt’s audience seemed refreshingly receptive to his argument. Some said he overstated how liberal the field is, but many agreed it should welcome more ideological diversity. A few even endorsed his call for a new affirmative-action goal: a membership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020. The society’s executive committee didn’t endorse Dr. Haidt’s numerical goal, but it did vote to put a statement on the group’s home page welcoming psychologists with “diverse perspectives.” It also made a change on the “Diversity Initiatives” page — a two-letter correction of what it called a grammatical glitch, although others might see it as more of a Freudian slip.

I have friends here in Canada who make bets on when the Times will finally, mercifully shut down.

Meanwhile, Megan McArdle weighs in at Atlantic Monthly, driving home the shame: Read More ›

Here’s astronomer Hugh Ross on the Dennis Prager show, on Why the Universe Is the Way It Is (his book).

Ernan McMullin, contributor to Nature of Nature, died at approximately 12:30 pm (5:30 pm Irish time), in hospital at Letterkenny General Hospital near his home in Donegal. Here’s a lecture he gave at Pitt University.

In “Professors group accused of anti-religious bullying”, Charles Lewis reports (National Post, Feb. 8, 2011) on the underbelly of the Canadian Union of University Teachers:

A group of academics has launched a campaign defending Canadian Christian universities against what it terms anti-religious bullying by the country’s leading university teachers’ federation.”What we have here is an academic union ganging up on these smaller Christian universities, and I thought it was high time that people from the public universities take a stand,” said Paul Allen, an associate professor of theology at Concordia University in Montreal.

The protest is a direct response to reports that the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) issued against Trinity Western University in British Columbia more than a year ago, Crandall University in New Brunswick in July and Winnipeg’s Canadian Mennonite University in October.

“It bothered me that this is anti-religious ideology masked as supposedly an academic freedom issue,” said Mr. Allen, who has started a petition to warn about CAUT’s actions. “This was an opportunity in the current [secular climate] to go after religion.”

The petition, which now has 140 signatures, said the investigations are unwarranted and invasive.

Mr. Allen and many others who signed the petition are members of CAUT, which has 65,000 members. Academics at the schools that were investigated are not members.

In each case the investigation concluded that true freedom was being denied to academics because of the requirement to sign a statement of Christian faith. CAUT believes that by agreeing to terms of Christian principles, academics will be hemmed in by a narrow set of doctrine. The association was also worried about the future employment of academics who might sign a document but later change their personal beliefs.

At Trinity Western, for example, teachers must acknowledge there is one God, the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and that Christ is God incarnate.

However, there were no complaints about any of the targeted schools before the probes were launched and none has made a secret of its requirements for hiring.

Read more here:

Okay, you want to live in the world of the Darwinists and their Christian supporters, you’d better get ready for stuff like this.

Of course there were no complaints! But that doesn’t matter, you see. Read More ›

Dembski, below, is appropriately modest about Nature of Nature , in saying that it was seven years in the making. The conference from which the book arose provoked such a storm of outrage from the Baylor Bambinos that Dembski’s Polanyi center (which organized it) was shut down. He became persona non grata among the Bambinos*. If Bill, and senior editor Bruce Gordon,  had just been willing to swallow the Darwinade ladled out to them, they could be pontificating today from some secure chair. But something about respect for the facts … I’ve read the book (advance copy). In it, key thinkers on both sides of the ID controversy present their best arguments. Both sides will doubtless claim victory and you, Read More ›

Recently, distinguished professor Hundert Fundert at Thunderjug University, editor emeritus of the Analytical Encyclopedia of Correct and Incorrect Humour, professed not to know whether I was kidding about the supposed link between atheism and obesity. He probably didn’t get the memo: The link between atheism and obesity is about as plausible in detail as that between traditional religions and violence. No, most atheists are not beer bellies with feet they can’t even see – and most traditionally spiritual people are not violent either. The difference is that journals flirt with the latter claim. So I thought – hey, the Internet’s a free market – I’ll indulge some guy’s fat rap, just for variety. Maybe later, I’ll strike out on my Read More ›

Nabokov was right and the Darwinists who ignored and dismissed him were wrong. Here: Enter the Harvard biology professor, Naomi Pierce, who has had the honour of telling the world this last fortnight, that Nabokov’s fanciful hypothesis is true, down to the most provocative assertions. Using the most advanced current molecular technology, she has tracked the whole history through DNA, confirming Nabokov dead right through fine details on five out of five.This does not surprise me. It would have surprised many drudges in the field, however, who ignored Nabokov’s remarkable paper of 1945, I think for two reasons. The first is that it was written with real literary style. Nabokov invites his reader to step into a Wellsian time machine, Read More ›

He notes, regarding scientists who mysteriously disappear after they start muttering that Darwinism is bullshot or something similar,

The University of Kentucky chose to pay a $125,000 settlement to Gaskell, now at the University of Texas, after Gaskell’s attorneys released records of e-mail traffic among the faculty hiring committee. Seeking a scientist to head UK’s observatory, professors complained that Gaskell was “potentially Evangelical,” while a lone astrophysicist on the committee protested that Gaskell stood to be rejected “despite his qualifications that stand far above those of any other applicant.”This is no isolated incident. An enormous, largely hidden transformation has taken place in what we mean when we speak of “science.” For centuries, the free and unfettered scientific enterprise was fueled by a desire to know the mind of God. “The success of the West,” writes historian Rodney Stark in his important book The Victory of Reason, “including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians.” Now, increasingly, voicing such a desire is likely to get you excluded from the guild of professional scientists.

For years, I’ve tracked the stories that come out regularly about scientists of impeccable credentials whose religion-friendly beliefs proved injurious to their career. In some fields, notably biology and cosmology, Christians who voice doubts about Darwinian theory pay a particularly high price.

That’s because other Christians have bought into big ticket irrelevance and don’t care.

If that ever changes, here’s how you will know: Read More ›

A friend, watching a serial thriller, The Oxford Murders, jotted down this interesting bit of dialogue between a professor who holds the Darwinist view of the brain (shaped for fitness, not for truth) and a design-based one (design in mathematics is real, and the brain is designed to apprehend it):

Elijah Wood is sitting in a lecture hall listening to a professor discuss the significance of Wittgenstein and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Professor: There is no way of finding a single absolute truth, an irrefutable argument that might help to answer the questions of mankind. Philosophy, therefore, is dead. Because “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.”

[Elijah Wood raises his hand]

Professor: Oh, it seems that someone does wish to speak. It appears you are not in agreement with Wittgenstein. That means either you have found a contradiction in the arguments of the Tractatus, or you have an absolute truth to share with us all.

Wood: I believe in the number Pi.

Professor: I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you. What was it you said you believed in?

Wood: In the number Pi, in the Golden Section, the Fibonacci Series. The essence of nature is mathematical. There is a hidden meaning beneath reality. Things are organized following a model, a scheme, a logical series. Even the tiny snowflake includes a numerical basis in its structure. Therefore, if we manage to discover the secret meaning of numbers, we will know the secret meaning of reality. Read More ›

Here’s Kathy Weston (Science, February 04, 2011) on, among other things, the surprising importance of networking – unless you have already got a Nobel prize:

My initial conviction — essential for anyone who wants to make it as a scientist — that I could really make a difference, maybe even win a few prizes and get famous, eroded when I realized that my brain was simply not wired like those of the phalanx of Nobelists I met over the years; I was never going to be original enough to be a star. This early realization, combined with a deep-seated lack of self-confidence, meant that I was useless at self-promotion and networking. I would go to conferences and hide in corners, never daring to talk to the speakers and the big shots. I never managed, as an infinitely more successful friend put it, “to piss in all the right places.”

[ … ]

What could I have done to check my descent into mediocrity? I should have put aside my fears of looking dumb and got on with the networking stuff anyway. And — very importantly — I should have found myself a mentor. Every scientist needs someone in a position of power who has faith in his or her abilities, to provide advice and do a bit of trumpet-blowing on his or her behalf. I should have taken more scientific risks, gone for bigger stakes, and thought harder about direction. Finally, I should have followed my instincts and quit my job before it quit me — but I was hampered by an exaggerated terror of being labeled a failure. (In fact, none of my friends and family seems to care a hoot about my fall from grace, and of course I should have known that all along.)

Much food for thought here, on women in the competitive world of science. Read More ›

Here: Srivastava had been hooked by a different sort of lure—that spooky voice, whispering to him about a flaw in the game. At first, he tried to brush it aside. “Like everyone else, I assumed that the lottery was unbreakable,” he says. “There’s no way there could be a flaw, and there’s no way I just happened to discover the flaw on my walk home.” And yet, his inner voice refused to pipe down. “I remember telling myself that the Ontario Lottery is a multibillion-dollar-a- year business,” he says. “They must know what they’re doing, right?” Oh yes, Mohan, that’s something you can count on for sure. The government around here knows what it’s doing. Or someone knows what they’re Read More ›

Here’s Richard Dawkins, as a friend puts it, “coming out … as a religious bigot”  in analyzing the Martin Gaskell case (“potentially evangelical” astronomer settles for $100K+): The University of Kentucky has caved in and agreed a settlement, out of court, with the allegedly creationist astronomer Martin Gaskell. …[ … ] If Martin were not so superbly qualified, so breathtakingly above the other applicants in background and experience, then our decision would be much simpler. We could easily choose another applicant, and we could content ourselves with the idea that Martin’s religious beliefs played little role in our decision. However, this is not the case. As it is, no objective observer could possibly believe that we excluded Martin on any Read More ›

Via this: Here’s what atheist evolution gurus think of Christian Darwinists: I, at least, think the NCSE shouldn’t take the theological position that faith is consistent with science. And the NCSE should limit its discussion about faith to saying that there are a variety of views about the consilience of science and faith and somebody in conflict should consult his/her minister. People like Larry Moran, P.Z., and I have been saying this for years, but it doesn’t seem to have penetrated Josh’s consciousness. “Josh” is a professional Darwin lobbyist who carries out boss Eugenie Scott’s dictum that a dog collar is worth two white coats, when working the crowd. The inimitable Jerry Coyne, attack by under-Darwin lobbyist Josh, roars back: Read More ›