Academic Freedom

In “Climate of Fear: Big Science, Big Government” (Forbes, July 8, 2011), Patrick Michaels, lobbyist for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, admits, In his 1961 Farewell Address, Dwight Eisenhower famously predicted the rise of a “military-industrial complex,” in which he said, “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist”. He then went on to speculate as to what Vannevar Bush had wrought.Few remember the next paragraphs, in which he said that at universities, because of the enormous cost of scientific research, “a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity,” and that “we must also be alert” to the “danger that public policy itself could become the captive of a scientific-technological Read More ›

In “Making Stories Visible The Task for Bioethics Commissions” (Issues in Science and Technology 27/2), Meera Lee Sethi and Adam Briggle explore claims made for science finds – under the banner, “Critical skepticism is always appropriate”: blockquote> Narrative explanations can help us understand difficult scientific issues, but they can also mislead us. Critical skepticism is always appropriate. Read More ›

Granville Sewell, math prof, satirist of silly ideas, and apology recipient (from math journal), has this to say about Darwinists’ attempt to rescue their theory from the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Organization always decrees, left to itself. Anyone who has made such an argument is familiar with the standard reply: the Earth is an open system, it receives energy from the sun, and order can increase in an open system, as it is “compensated” somehow by a comparable or greater decrease outside the system. [ … ] According to this reasoning, then, the second law does not prevent scrap metal from reorganizing itself into a computer in one room, as long as two computers in the next room are rusting Read More ›

Unless, of course, it’s okay that bureaucrats and social engineers do your thinking for you … in which case, you won’t be next, you’ll just be toothpaste.

“In Defense of ‘Hurtful’ Speech” (The Wall Street Journal June 24, 2011) Geert Wilders speaks out on an issue of critical importance to the intelligent designcommunity: free thought:

I was tried for a thought crime despite being an elected politician and the leader of the third-largest party in the Dutch parliament.[ … ]

I was brought to trial despite being an elected politician and the leader of the third-largest party in the Dutch parliament. I was not prosecuted for anything I did, but for what I said.

[ … ]

I was dragged to court by leftist and Islamic organizations that were bent not only on silencing me but on stifling public debate …

Is this happening in your country? Shame! It was happening in Canada, and we have started to put a stop to it. We have a long way to go …

The secret of success is Read More ›

Naomi Schaefer Riley discusses “The Economic Upside to Ending Tenure” ( Chronicle of Higher Education, June 19, 2011): In her new book, The Faculty Lounges: and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For (Ivan R. Dee), Naomi Schaefer Riley argues that faculty tenure is among the factors contributing to the decline of higher education in the United States. Here is an excerpt from the book. If colleges were to eliminate tenure tomorrow, they’d have to pay faculty higher salaries. That’s what most economists—and common sense—will tell you. Lifetime job security is a perk, like health insurance or a company car. If you take it away, you’ll have to compensate in another way to get the Read More ›

Caroline Crocker, author of Free to Think, on Darwin trolls harassing students on campus:

At a recent conference in Hawaii I was approached by a group of about eight students lamenting about how only one side of the evolution issue is taught in their classrooms and that anyone who suggests that there may be scientific evidence for the other side is ridiculed. In fact, at universities throughout the country, faculty and administrators harass students who attend Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) club meetings, where they just want to openly and freely investigate the evidence supporting evolution versus intelligent design.  The IDEA club organizers at some universities complain that Read More ›

One of the most common objections to design thought is the idea that it is about the improper injection of the alien  supernatural into the world of science. (That is itself based on a strawman misrepresentation of design thought, as was addressed here a few days ago.)

However, there is an underlying root, a common distortion of the origins of modern science, which Nancy Pearcey rebutted in a  2005 sleeper article as headlined, that deserves a UD post of its own.

Let’s clip the article:

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Yesterday, in the P Z Myers quote-mining and distortion thread, I happened to cite Lewontin’s infamous 1997 remark in his NYRB article, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” on a priori imposition of materialist censorship on origins science, which reads in the crucial part:

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

To my astonishment, I was promptly accused of quote-mining and even academic malpractice, because I omitted the following two sentences, which — strange as it may seem —  some evidently view as justifying the above censoring imposition:

The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

To my mind, instead, these last two sentences are such a sad reflection of bias and ignorance, that their omission is an act of charity to a distinguished professor. Read More ›

Lest there be any lingering doubt about how far Darwinians might go in the enforcement of the dogma, it now appears that even beauty pageant contestants are not immune to consequences for failing to toe the Darwinian line. Contestants in this year’s Miss USA pageant are being asked questions about whether evolution should be taught in public schools. Fox News reports:

In on-camera interviews set to be posted on the official Miss USA website, 2011 pageant hopefuls are being asked if they believe evolution should be taught in schools, and if they would ever pose for nude photographs.

[This post will remain at the top of the page until 5:00 pm EST today, June 10. For reader convenience, other coverage continues below. – UD News]

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At Cannuckian Yankee’s comment 14 on UD Contest post “Why do people refuse to read books they are attacking?” (now being judged), we learn,

There’s a guy on Amazon who’s extremely anti-ID. He comments on or reviews just about every ID book, but it’s quite obvious that he never reads the books. He goes by “sillysilly” sometimes, and other names, but you can tell it’s him.Sillysilly’s “reviews” and comments are pretty much the same – “ID is religion and not science, and you’re a lying jerk if you believe otherwise.”

But then we learn, at 22, Read More ›

Here.

Here’s the paper. PowerPoint here.

Here’s the news story.

Here’s Sewell’s comments.

Uncommon Descent adds its commendation to the editors of Applied Mathematical Letters for doing the right thing:

From Retraction Watch: Read More ›

Three points regarding my withdrawn article, that I don’t believe have been made elsewhere: 1. Although it is fair to call it “ID friendly”, it does not actually mention ID or Darwinism, and does not even conclude that the second law has definitely been violated here, it just makes the rather obvious point that if you want to believe it has not, you have to be honest and admit that what you really believe is that what has happened here is not really extremely improbable (in the sense of footnote 4); you cannot hide behind the truly absurd “compensation” argument of Asimov, et.al. 2. Elsevier should be given credit for doing the right thing, given the mess created by the Read More ›

Math journal retracted one of our UD authors’ accepted article only because Darwinist blogger complained

A brief, lay-friendly, look at Sewell’s stifled paper is here. Comment on it’s significance here.

This just in: Granville Sewell on the controversy.

[This post will remain at the top of the page until 5:00 pm EST. For reader convenience, other coverage continues below. – UD News]

Here, John G. West reports (Evolution News & Views, June 7, 2011) that University of Texas, El Paso math professor Granville Sewell has receive an apology and $10,000 because Applied Mathematics Letters withdrew his article on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, just before publication, based on the say so of a Darwinist blogger:

Witness the brazen censorship earlier this year of an article by University of Texas, El Paso mathematics professor Granville Sewell, author of the book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. Sewell’s article critical of Neo-Darwinism (“A Second Look at the Second Law”) was both peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by the journal Applied Mathematics Letters. That is, the article was accepted for publication until a Darwinist blogger who describes himself as an “opinionated computer science geek” wrote the journal editor to denounce the article, and the editor decided to pull Sewell’s article in violation of his journal’s own professional standards.  Read More ›

It wasn’t like this years ago. I remember Rick Sternberg writing to me mid-decade, about how the Smithsonian honchoes were, at that time, holding meetings to decide his fate. The problem was: They had to get rid of him because he doubted the Darwin lobby’ theories, but had broken no rules. They did, of course, get rid of him, and that time with impunity.  When a film, Expelled, was made, pulling a number of such incidents together, some of the very people who helped engineer the witch hunts loudly denied that they had taken place.

I remember the gifted young astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, a specialist in habitable planetary zones, denied tenure at Iowa State. It was probably due  in large part to the attacks of an atheist religion prof. Gonzalez just couldn’t believe what had happened to him.

So, when I was talking to Granville Sewell recently, and saw that he  was radiantly confident that he would receive an apology, because there was a legal agreement, I was a bit concerned. Having – from years of covering this beat – much more experience than hope, I warned him: The Masters of the Universe are “science,” and as such, are above the law and exempt from common decency. Read More ›

My article “A Second Look at the Second Law,” accepted by Applied Mathematics Letters in January, was, as some of you know, withdrawn at the last moment by the editor, not because of any alleged errors, but because “our editors simply found that it does not consist of the kind of content that we are interested in publishing.” I have now created a 22 minute video which presents the contents of this paper, at the end there is some additional information regarding the fate of the paper.