Academic Freedom

This is where we now are as a civilisation: >>A Salvation Army bell ringer in California had been beaten in front of a Walmart because he wanted to spread joy this holiday season. Rev. Jamie Wolfe Sr., the man ringing the bell, told CBS Sacramento that he says “Merry Christmas” to everyone who passes by his donation bucket, but one Grinch managed to knock the joy out of him. “He haymakered me, hit me, got me down on the ground and we started wrestling, at that point I’m fighting for my life,” Wolfe Sr. said. The suspect allegedly carried out the unprovoked attack not for the money, but for his cheer. “Store says they love him and he’s been the Read More ›

Listening to the pros and cons of net neutrality’s (I bet, temporary) demise and the freakouts around the coming cyclone (we are told) of fake news: As a lifetime newser and current provider of donor-supported news, I have some thoughts on how to avoid fake news, whether or not government or business is “helping you” (= trying to run your life for their benefit). 1. If you rarely read or hear ideas that challenge you (and freak out whenever you do), please try – really really try – to get out more. Don’t demand rules for the vast throng of adults who have learned mature judgment through regular practice. 2. Treat all news as if it were advertising. What aren’t they telling us? Read More ›

The difference religion makes is not what you might expect. My response to “How a ‘pronoun’ class got a young Canadian academic censured ” by Harley J. Sim at MercatorNet: Readers may wish to supplement Harley Sims’s informative article with Mark Steyn’s commentary on the tape Shepherd dared to make (http://bit.ly/2j4yOnk) and the tape/transcript itself (http://bit.ly/2mMPvok). On the tape, she is heard sobbing as she is not permitted to know who her accuser(s) are or what the accusation is. Her communications profs imply that she is like a Nazi for showing her class a video excerpt from an Ontario public TV program (think NPR) in which a professor protests made-up pronouns. These inquisitors imply that she is in big legal trouble, which Read More ›

From Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Education: California State University at Northridge has settled a lawsuit brought by a former employee who said he was fired for sharing news of an archaeological discovery that supported his young-Earth creationist beliefs. The university says it settled for $399,500 to avoid a protracted legal battle, but some scientists say the outcome has implications for how scientists critique creationist colleagues going forward. … Armitage published his findings in 2013 in Acta Histochemica, a peer-reviewed journal, leaving out his interpretation of the tissue’s age. If Armitage really found soft dinosaur tissue, his interpretation of their age would be irrelevant to others’ subsequent work. It would be irrelevant if he believed that dinosaurs were specially created Read More ›

From Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media: Last month, Wikipedia removed the entry on German insect paleontologist Günter Bechly, seemingly due to his position on intelligent design (ID), the scientific movement considering evidence for design behind nature — a movement opposed to Darwinian evolution. While editors claimed Bechly was not “notable” enough to warrant an entry, others with fewer career accomplishments have long pages on Wikipedia, and Bechly has a distinguished career. … When Wikipedia editors discussed deleting Bechly’s page, the scientist posted his own credentials. He provided links to press, TV, and radio segments mentioning his work, exhibitions he designed, and a few articles from the BBC and Scientific American. “Add to that three described new insect orders, more than Read More ›

Reader Edward Sisson writes to tell us of his encounter with the Who–Whom of science, in connection with the recent Armitage soft dinosaur tissue case:  It reminds me of an idea I had in about 2003, when I was at Arnold & Porter representing (pro bono, with firm authorization) ID organizations and people, for a study and book based on the study, working title “Who Controls Whom in Science.” The basic idea was to research and chart the individuals in power-relationships within academic science — editors of journals, persons on tenure committees, persons who have mentored PhD candidates, persons who sit on PhD thesis defense committees, etc. The research would be updated and published annually. This identifies the individuals in Read More ›

From J. Scott Turner in Purpose and Desire:What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, What modern Darwinism is asking us to admire is a husk of something once living, but with its vital core drained away as we have poked and prodded with our naughty thumbs until we are left with nothing but the beautiful shell. In short, the science of life has become disenchanted with life itself. That is the looming crisis I described in the Preface. (Kindle Locations 4263-4266). Sometimes, hope floats along on hidden reservoirs of the best tradition of classical liberalism, as in Stephen Jay Gould’s quiet supervision of a young Earth creationist, Kurt Wise, for his doctoral degree in Read More ›

From Eric Worrall at Watts Up With That?: Google’s efforts to filter out positions which they think are fake news, like climate skeptic posts, have hit an unexpected snag: Google have just noticed large groups of people across the world hold views which differ from the views championed by the Silicon Valley monoculture. Like we said, the snag is people. As a climate skeptic and IT expert I’m finding this Google difficulty highly entertaining. What people like Google’s Schmidt desperately want to discover is a generalised way of detecting fake news. They believe in their hearts that climate skepticism for example is as nutty as thinking the moon landings were faked, but they have so far failed to find a Read More ›

No, it’s not just about ID. It’s happening all over. From Robert Knight at Townhall: As a Wikipedia editor, I’ve made many edits and updates over the years to the American Civil Rights Union’s Wikipedia page without interference. So, imagine my shock when I was alerted this past Monday that someone had made the page revert to a very old version with content deleted and outright errors inserted. I went online and corrected a couple of things, but my corrections were instantly undone. Then, it got worse. On Wednesday, another editor removed a lion’s share of the content describing the ACRU’s activities and issues. Gone were entire sections on election law, environmental regulation, gun laws and religious freedom. Better still: Read More ›

From Alex Berezow at American Council on Science and Health: Climate scientist Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford University has sued the National Academy of Sciences, which publishes the prestigious journal PNAS, for publishing an article that disagreed with him. The lawsuit claims that Dr. Jacobson was libeled and slandered. He is suing to get the journal to retract the article. For his hurt feelings and bruised ego, he also wants a big bag of money, $10 million to be precise. To understand this, one must factor in the growing influence of post-modernism in science: There are no facts, only feelings. So unsupported claims are not a problem but hurting someone’s feelings is a big problem, if not a crime. The Read More ›

Keep them mad. Maybe serious science is coming up for oxygen… just maybe. From Emma Marris at Nature: On 23 October, a group of current and former volunteers posted an open letter to the central March for Science organization in New York City, alleging that it is secretive, insensitive to the concerns of its volunteers, and unwilling to share power or information with organizers of its many affiliated ‘satellite’ groups around the world. The volunteers also claim that the organization sidelined and stonewalled experienced activists who wanted the movement to focus on how science can be used in ways that perpetuate racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. In a statement to Nature, the March for Science said that it Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: Günter Bechly is a distinguished paleontologist, specializing in fossil dragonflies, exquisitely preserved in amber for tens of millions of years. After revealing his support for the theory of intelligent design, he was pushed out as a curator at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany. He subsequently joined Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture as a Senior Fellow. Now we learn that our colleague has suffered another act of censorship: he has been erased from Wikipedia, ostensibly for not being “notable” enough. Funny, no one had ever heard much about Gunter Bechly before then. At Evolution News, we have documented a range of instances of censorship and intimidation. Rarely, Read More ›

In North America, we think mainly in terms of toxic snowflakes, of the sort that made it dangerous for their biology prof to be on campus. But elsewhere, it can be worse. From Maria Burke at Chemistry World: Thousands of people in the higher education sector have been targeted in Turkey where state and university authorities continue to take sweeping measures in retaliation for alleged political links or content of research, publications or teaching. Punitive actions by the Turkish state have included imprisonment and prosecution; dismissal and expulsion of scholars and students; and restrictions on travel and institutional autonomy. … There have been many reports of widespread restrictions on academics’ travel. Over the past year, for example, Turkey has issued Read More ›

From philosopher of science Adrian Currie at Aeon: There’s a scarcity of jobs compared with the number of applicants, and very few high-ranking and ‘big impact’ journals. This means that the research decisions that scientists make, particularly early on, are high-risk wagers about what will be fruitful and lead to a decent career. The road to academic stardom (and, for that matter, academic mediocrity) is littered with brilliant, passionate people who simply made bad bets. In such an environment, researchers are bound to be conservative – with the stakes set so high, taking a punt on something outlandish, and that you know is likely to hurt your career, is not a winning move. The resulting mediocrity shows. The biologist Barbara Read More ›

From John Maynard Smith (1920–2004): I am convinced that a proper training in science requires that undergraduates are confronted by the problems of contemporary science. Only then can they see science as an activity, and not as a body of received doctrine. Evolutionary Genetics, 1989. p. v. But now, come on. Did Smith really think that or isn’t it more like he thought his own cherished views would never be challenged. 1989 was well before ID theorists, for example, started to apply information theory reasoning to Darwinian claims and long before Third Way challenges were anything more than a tolerated eccentricity. Darwinians have been on a tear against academic freedom ever since. Note: Among his major books were The Theory Read More ›