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Question: should the following statement get a science professor ousted from teaching?

the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science.

Richard Dawkins

And for exploring aspects of this most momentous hypothesis in all of science, Dr. Crocker was removed from teaching at George Mason.

As reported by Casey Luskin at www.EvolutionNews.org

there are cases documenting genuine discrimination against scientists who support intelligent design (ID). One of those incidents took place at George Mason University (GMU), where Caroline Crocker was ousted from teaching biology because she challenged to neo-Darwinian evolution and favorably mentioned ID in the classroom. Dr. Crocker later appeared in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, but now many more details about Caroline Crocker’s story are revealed in her new autobiographical book, Free to Think: Why Scientific Integrity Matters.
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Question:

When does adaptationism stop being a useful research strategy and start being a silly exercise?

Allen Orr
Dennett’s Strange Idea

Answer: pretty much all the time.

In Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea Dennett argued:

“[Darwinism] eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.”

But in my earlier blog posting Survival of the Sickest, Why We Need Diseases, I put forward reasons why Darwin’s “revolutionized world-view” perverts and twists reality. This “revolutionized world-view” goes against accepted conventions in medical science and Systems Biology.
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After Darwinist Steve Matheson debated Stephen Meyer at Biola, various essays appeared on the internet pointing out Matheson’s numerous errors and oversights. In the face of having his assertions publicly discredited (see a summary in Fact Free Science of Matheson), he wrote an open letter to Stephen Meyer. Your Discovery Institute is a horrific mistake, an epic intellectual tragedy that is degrading the minds of those who consume its products and bringing dishonor to you and to the church. It is for good reason that Casey Luskin is held in such extreme contempt by your movement’s critics, and there’s something truly sick about the pattern of attacks that your operatives launched in the weeks after the Biola event. It’s clear Read More ›

Rob Crowther reports: California Science Center to Pay Attorneys’ Fees and Settle Open Records Lawsuit by Intelligent Design Group

The California Science Center (CSC) has agreed to settle a lawsuit with the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute and release records that it previously sought to conceal regarding its cancellation of the screening of a pro-intelligent design film last year.

“After months of stonewalling by the Science Center, this is a huge victory for the public’s right to know what their government is doing, especially when the government engages in illegal censorship and viewpoint discrimination,” said Dr. John West, Associate Director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.
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“I think this will come to be a classic story of orthodoxy derailing objective analysis of the facts, in this case for a quarter of a century…The failure to recognize the full implications of this-particularly the possibility that the intervening noncoding sequences may be transmitting parallel information in the form of RNA molecules-may well go down as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.” —John Mattick, Molecular biologist, University of Queensland, quoted in Scientific American Steve Matheson, a teacher and Darwinist promoter at a religious school, repeats the biggest mistake in molecular biology. In contrast, Richard Sternberg, an evolutionary biologist at the Biologic Institute, defends objective analysis of the facts. See Sternberg’s defense of the facts Read More ›

Pagels and others (like Nei) have argued that the majority of biological features could not have emerged from Darwinian means. If they are right, it stands to reason that if evolution is true, it has to be mostly non-Darwinian. At UD we have explored various non-Darwinian theories of evolution by scientists like Jukes, King, Kimura, Nei, Morgan, Bateson, Davison, and others. There are more names such as : Portmann, Troll, Heikertinger, Goldshmidt, Bertalanffy. Martin also lists Friedrich Nietzsche and Marx as non-Darwinians. Here is the website: http://cadra.wordpress.com/

NASA was once a bastion of religious toleration. They sent 2 creationists to the moon (Reverend Jim Irwin and General Charles Duke). They let Buzz Aldrin quietly celebrate communion on the Moon, Sunday, July 20, 1969. On NASA’s official website is the record of this Christmas greeting of 1968: www.NASA.gov. Here is a video of that 1968 event: Apollo 8 Christmas Greeting from Genesis 1. And we have: Buzz Aldrin Sharing Psalm 8 in Flight.

Sad to see that this same organization is now suspected of harboring Darwinists who would vent their prejudices against one of UD’s very own contributors, David Coppedge, for much lesser actions (loaning a DVD to an interested coworker). Isn’t a little toleration in order?

In contrast, this could also be seen to be proselytizing a particular religious view:

“A NASA workshop defined ‘life’ to mean a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution,”

To paraphrase Rodney King, “can’t we all just get along?”

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There are many biologists and philosophers of science who are highly scientifically literate who question certain aspects of the theory of evolution

John Bruer
National Science Board, National Science Foundation
Lead Reviewer
What Happened to Evolution at NSB

Way to go National Science Foundation. Say it again!, “There are many biologists and philosophers of science who are highly scientifically literate who question certain aspects of the theory of evolution.”
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What are the central theological failings of intelligent design? First, it is blasphemous.

Peter Hess, Faith Project Director, NCSE

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Eight years ago, biochemist Michael Behe wrote this open letter to the prestigious scientific journal, Nature:

Sir-

As a public skeptic of the ability of Darwinian processes to account for complex cellular systems and a proponent of the hypothesis of intelligent design, (1) I often encounter a rebuttal that can be paraphrased as “no designer would have done it that way.” …
If at least some pseudogenes have unsuspected functions, however, might not other biological features that strike us as odd also have functions we have not yet discovered? Might even the backwards wiring of the vertebrate eye serve some useful purpose?
….
Hirotsune et al’s (3) work has forcefully shown that our intuitions about what is functionless in biology are not to be trusted.

Sincerely, Michael J. Behe
An Open Letter to Nature

Contrast that with Ken Miller’s now falsified claim in 1994:

the designer made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles.

Ken Miller, 1994

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recent molecular data supports the theory of mutation-driven evolution rather than neo-Darwinism.

Masotoshi Nei
Member National Academy of Sciences
Selectionism and Neutralism

Not only is the notion of Darwinism challenged by ID proponents and creationists, but it is also challenged by non-Darwinian theories of evolution. The competing schools of thought are the Mutationists and the Neutralists. Dawkins describes some of the history of the Mutationists versus the Darwinists:

It is hard to comprehend now but, in the early years of this [20th] century when the phenomenon of mutation was first named, it was not regarded as a necessary part of Darwinian theory but an alternative theory of evolution!

Richard Dawkins
Blindwatchmaker

Darwinism so dominates evolutionary thinking that most presume evolution must proceed under the influence of selection. Not so. In fact the absence of selection is also a mechanism of evolution! In the words of yet another member of the National Academy of Sciences:

many genomic features could not have emerged without a near-complete disengagement of the power of natural selection

Michael Lynch
The Origins of Genome Architecture, intro

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From the NCSE: Congratulations to NESCent

NCSE is happy to congratulate the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) on the renewal of its grant from the National Science Foundation. According to a March 2, 2010, press release, NESCent was awarded a five-year grant renewal in the amount of $25 million, to continue its core programs in evolution research, informatics, and education through 2014.

and NESCent Press Release

This is the second major NSF grant that NESCent has received, which brings the total funding for the Center to $40 million. The grant will enable the Center to continue its core programs in evolution research, informatics and education through 2014.

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We have been occasionally graced at UD by visits of DNA researcher Andras Pellionisz who wrote:

the issue of “Junk” DNA itself is much more vital for human kind, since hundreds of millions are dying of “Junk DNA diseases” while the urgency of plunging into active research is overlooked because on ANY ideological grounds.

Those looking at

http://www.junkdna.com/junkdna_diseases.html

will realize that for those to whom SCIENCE of “junk” DNA is still not the “mainstream” are socially guilty because of putting priority on ideology over survival.

Hundreds of millions of patients don’t appreciate delay of medicine by ideology.

DNA Researcher Andras Pellionisz

Darwinists like Falk, Miller, Ayala, and Dawkins have generally argued DNA is mostly “junk”, the by-product of mindless Darwinian processes. The pro-junk, anti-mind Darwinist position is what Dr. Pellonisz has labeled a “socially guilty” position.

Personally, I’m ambivalent to the question of whether these Darwinists are socially guility or not. The point remains, however, that the issue of “junk” DNA is of great medical significance.
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Rick Sternberg, PhD PhD is one of the finest and most courageous evolutionary biologists on the planet. He recently has come to the defense of Stephen Meyer by Asking Darrel Falk to Pick a Number

Rick points out a peculiar claim by Darrel Falk which can be falsified:

almost certainly much, if not most, of the DNA plays no role, and in many cases can be harmful

Darrel Falk
Professor of Biology

Sternberg counters with an implicit wager after first providing some insights:

I have long questioned the assumption that most genomic DNA sequences are “nonsensical” or “junk.” And given the data that have emerged over the past seven or so years, a functionalist view of genome has robust empirical support. It is for this reason that I think many of the arguments presented by the Biologos Foundation are “wrong on many counts,” to borrow a phrase from Darrel Falk.

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[This is somewhat old news, but I think it is worthy of posting.]

Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman reports:
Which Religious Sins Will Sink the Scientist

The Chief Scientist of the Israeli Ministry of Education, Dr. Gavriel Avital, is being called upon to resign because he has defied two religious doctrines. No, not Jewish doctrines, but secular doctrines of the “scientific consensus”, evolution and global warming.

Pharyngula reported on February 22, 2010The Don McLeroy of Israel
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