Denyse O'Leary

When I blogged recently on the media coverage of the intelligent design controversy, I remarked, “Then the big challenge is to find a publication that actually wants the real story. That means readers who want the real story. Only those readers can help you.”

A commenter wrote to ask,

Do you have any ideas on where we will find such readers? Should we be concentrating on informing believers? Will this be resisted by interested parties? Will we then divide our house? Should we concentrate on convincing religious and political power brokers?

ID is often accused of being a media beat up rather than a scientific controversy. Will we reinforce that view if we concentrate on media?

These are challenging questions, so let me take them in turn:

– Do you have any ideas on where we will find such readers? Anywhere there are Internet-linked terminals. There is no shortage of people who question the worldview of the ”Darwinoids”, as a journalist friend calls them. The difficulty is that we are in a transitional phase between reliance on print/broadcast media and reliance on the Internet. The latter operates fundamentally differently from the former because it does not empower the big over the small. Don’t believe me? Look what the Swift Vets did to John Kerry, or the pajamaheddin did to Dan Rather. The swifts and the pajamas were nobodies – apart from the fact that both groups knew something that the public would be very interested to discover.* In the legacy media, both groups would be promptly stifled because they did not fit the story template that had already been hammered out. (Everyone who mattered knew that Kerry was a good officer, you see, and Bush was a bad airman.)

Only on the Internet could these nobodies have succeeded because anyone who can use a search engine could find out what they had to say. Read More ›

Here’s what I told a friend who was complaining about how his national media cover the ID controversy.

Media go through at least four stages in getting comfortable with covering any new issue, including ID:

(There are more than four stages, but no national media that I know of are there yet, collectively, with ID.)

1. First, both print and broadcast media gallop in all directions at once to find traditional sources of support for their existing approaches. Prof. Bumph and Dr. Justzo are leading candidates, as is the entire Society for Circular Solidarity AND the Society for Solid Circularity. Whatever huffing, yelping or caterwauling the esteemed above can provide will certainly be reported. If media can drag foolish politicians in, they will jump at the chance. We KNOW how to cover politicians.

That should settle everything, right? Read More ›

Gareth Cook’s article on the new Harvard origin of life project in the Boston Globe, reads like a press release (except for the very end where he actually quotes Michael Behe). Bill  blogged on it, wondering how seriously they would take any evidence of intelligent design.

Starting with $1 million a year, we are told, Harvard will

bring together scientists from fields as disparate as astronomy and biology, to understand how life emerged from the chemical soup of early Earth, and how this might have happened on distant planets.

On the whole, this “Origins of Life in the Universe Initiative” is good news for the ID guys, first because the Harvard project seems to acknowledge what everyone who looks into the question soon finds out – that origin of life studies have been at an impasse for decades. Read More ›

Bench science, like book editing, is independent of content under normal circumstances.

But as Thomas Kuhn points out in Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigms determine what counts as evidence.

Mark what follows:

If materialism is assumed to be true and Darwinism is the creation story of materialism, then Darwinism is the best available explanation for the history of life.

So Darwinism is treated as true.

I am NOT saying that that follows logically.

Materialism could be true but its orthodox creation story could be untrue at the same time. Some other materialist story could better account for the evidence, for example. Read More ›

At Vere loqui, Martin Cothran notes that Richard Dawkins’The God Delusion, provides ammunition to ID advocates.

ID theorists are familiar with the accusation that ID is both unfalsifiable and anyway, already falsified. (The fact that the two claims can be maintained comfortably at once illustrates the extent to which materialism and Darwinism function as ideologies. In general, all arguments in support of an ideology, even contradictory ones, feel good to the ideologue. He attacks others for not supporting his view even when his view is literally incomprehensible.)

Dawkins will have none of that, however. He wants to be consistent. He accuses the National Center for Science Education of being the “Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists,” because it misguidedly appeases religious people by insisting that ID is not science (and therefore the religious people should ignore ID in favor of Darwinism). Dawkins would prefer that NCSE attack the religious people’s beliefs. Read More ›

Courtesy of the McLaurin Institute, I gave a talk last Thursday night at the Murphy Building of the University of Minnesota’s journalism school, on how North American media cover the intelligent design controversy and why the media are really the ID guys’ most useful unintentional ally – second only to Richard Dawkins, in my view. (Yes, yes, I know, this is a controversial viewpoint, but the Internet is a free country.)

Anyway, I wrote up my notes, and posted them, in case others were interested.

On “bottom up” materialism:

“Atheists who insist that the evidence for bottom up is “overwhelming” are overwhelmed by the force of their own convictions. They mistake rock-like conviction for rock-solid evidence.”

from Part 1: First, how and why did intelligent design get started and why did it grow so quickly?

Read More ›

Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead, which won both the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and 2005 National Book Critics Circle award, says what needs to be said, and no more, about Oxford Professor of the Public Understanding of Science Richard Dawkins’ inane crusade against religion And she says it brilliantly in “Hysterical scientism: The ecstasy of Richard Dawkins”. Reviewing his recent The God Delusion for November’s Harper’s, she notes that “There is a pervasive exclusion of historical memory in Dawkins’s view of science,”observing that, while it is true that Jews were persecuted in Christian Europe, … it is also true that science in the twentieth century revived and absolutized persecution by giving it a fresh rationale – Jewishness was not Read More ›

Non-Darwinian evolutionary biologists may start to speak up in greater numbers as more ID conferences are held. An ID conference sometimes spotlights those who do not want to be called Darwinists or Darwinians, irrespective of their views on ID.

Readers may recall that at our University of Toronto ID conference a couple of weekends ago, I ran into an interesting biochem textbook author named Larry Moran, an evolutionary biologist who does not seem to be a Darwinist or a Darwinian. He proposes an alternative. Read More ›

December 5, Penguin is coming out with The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Intelligent Design .Author Christopher Carlisle is the Episcopal Chaplain at the University of Massachusetts and W. Thomas Jr.l, is a freelance writer. Intelligent Design is one of the hottest issues facing parents and educators to day, but it can be hard to separate the facts from the heated rhetoric. This expert and objective guide gets to the bottom of the questions: What is Intelligent Design? Should it replace or complement traditional science? What’s all the fuss about? • Explains the terms, the controversy, and the involvement of the American courts • Indispensable guide for concerned educators and parents • Written by an expert in the field I wonder Read More ›

Why there is an intelligent design controversy, reason xxx xxx xxx …. Logically derived from confirmable evidence, evolution is understood to be the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection. [ … ] Differences exist between scientific and spiritual world views, but there is no need to blur the distinction between the two. Nor is there need for conflict between the theory of evolution and religious faith. Science and faith are not mutually exclusive. Neither should feel threatened by the other. – 39 Nobel laureates writing writing to the Kansas State Board of Education , via the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity: Nobel Laureates Initiative (September 9, 2005) Toss this one in the “why the intelligent Read More ›

Mike S. Adams, a prof who boldly attacks the stifling sanctimony that overwhelms our culture, writes, In the famous 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial, Clarence Darrow stated: “For God’s sake, let the children have their minds kept open – close no doors to their knowledge; shut no door from them. Make a distinction between theology and science. Let them have both. Let them be taught. Let them both live.” Have you ever met a 21st Century liberal who believes that both evolution and creation should be taught in schools? Or do they say “Let them have only one”? Of course they say today, let them have only one – only ours. Many contemporaries who think of themselves as liberals are not Read More ›

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

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 Read More ›

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.ÂÂI 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.ÂÂConclusions from my earlier writing:ÂÂDarwinian evolution – whatever its other virtues – does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology. This becomes especially clear when we compare it with a heuristic framework such as the atomic Read More ›

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 ›