In discussing implication logic and first duties, Wikipedia on ID came up yet again. The lead’s manifest failure to be responsibly objective, descending into slander from the outset, speaks volumes: Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as “an evidence-based scientific theory about life’s origins”.[1][2][3][4][5] Proponents Read More…
academic freedom
Bob Jones University prez fires back at Swamidass re doxxing creationists
Prez Pettit: “BJU students regularly score above the 90th percentile on the Medical College Admission Test …” But that’s just the problem, Steve. They can’t get your students on lack of competence so they have to engage in covert viewpoint discrimination. Swamidass is suggesting a means of proceeding along those lines.
Josh Swamidass on the need to single out and punish creationists
One key effect of Cancel Culture is the elimination of competition by citing grounds that are irrelevant to performance. As Klinghoffer puts it, employers “will wish to know if they are about to take aboard a creationist in a science-related field. For example, a pediatric nurse oncologist, caring for little kids with cancer, while believing that the world is under 10,000 years old.” Someone with “Correct” views on the age of Earth will be deemed more acceptable even with fewer gifts in pediatric nursing. It’s a recipe for Virtuous underperformance.
David Klinghoffer muses on the (almost) Cancelation of physicist Eric Hedin
Klinghoffer: Hedin’s persecutor, Jerry Coyne, “was a prominent academic, enjoying maximum career safety at the University of Chicago. Let’s be honest: between the two, there was no contest. Coyne could move against Hedin without fear, and he did. On the other hand, Hedin’s career was on the line, and both knew it.” Sounds like Darwinism as she is spoke.
Eric Hedin, that Ball State physicist whose ID course was Cancelled, has a new book out
The funny thing is that Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne , who spearheaded getting Hedin’s course cancelled, is often heard wittering these days about people he approves of — or doesn’t disapprove of — getting Cancelled. And it’s not likely he will ever get the significance of the role he played in starting the ball rolling.
A geophysicist’s unconventional guide to surviving campus witch hunts: Show love
Let’s hope it continues to work for Abbot. A couple of difficulties: 1) It’s not clear that Cancel Culture is an academic community, as opposed to a mob running an academic racket. 2) Many Cancelers will interpret efforts to be nice as evidence of weakness, more or less as wolves do. But so long as the strategy really works, go with it.
Should we recognise that “laws of nature” extend to laws of our human nature? (Which, would then frame civil law.)
Laws of Nature are a key part of the foundation of modern science. This reflects not only natural, law-like regularities such as the Law of Gravitation that promotes the Earth to the heavens (from being the sump of the cosmos) but also the perspective of many founders that they were thinking God’s creative, ordering providential Read More…
At New Discourses: The university as a Woke mission field
Jones: I’m sad to say it, but I believe that Critical Social Justice ideology—if not beaten in the war of ideas—will destroy the liberal foundation of American society.
How do we move civilisation (and especially science, tech and math) forward?
We are clearly in an age of reversion to oligarchic domination and lockout of dissent, so the issue is that of formation of a counter-culture, starting with the life of the mind. H’mm, as a preliminary, let us look briefly at a refresher on a more useful ideological/political spectrum than the usual LEFT/RIGHT (which has Read More…
Bill Dembski asks us to acknowledge the work of academic freedom fighters, ACTA
That is, American Council of Trustees and Alumni, celebrating their 25-year history. Never more needed, if you ask some of us. Something like that in every country.
Jerry Coyne seems to be coming to terms with the Woke endgame
We wondered what Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne was doing recently besides being nice to cats (a very fine habit and the sign of a true gentleman). So this now…
Letter from Michael Behe that a chemistry journal wouldn’t publish in 2004
Behe: The authors imply that since no reason is known why, say, DNA should be synthesized discontinuously on the lagging strand, then no good reason in fact exists. Yet not long ago the same sort of fallacious argument from ignorance was made concerning “junk DNA.”
More on the Snowball Earth prof attacked by Cancel Culture
It is becoming increasingly clear that STEM is beginning to recruit students who just should not be at a university at all.
Is a vast variety of new cichlid species in ten million years a “burst”?
One can talk about the cichlid “burst” that lasted ten million years but now, the term “explosion” has become politically incorrect usage to describe the Cambrian because shut up.
Snowball Earth prof attacked by Cancel Culture
Jacobson warns, “What is so disturbing is the large number of graduate and post-doctoral students who signed the list of demands. I warned in 2017 that STEM would not be immune to the social justice (and racial) warfare tearing through universities.”