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Academic Freedom

At Mind Matters News: Jonathan Bartlett: Will the Sokal hoaxes worsen the academic echo chamber?

There’s nothing wrong per se with mainstream thinking — it probably became mainstream for good reasons. However, when only mainstream thinking is allowed, this leads to insularity and an echo chamber mentality. Read More ›

Woke world destroys Darwinian evolutionary biologist

Those other evolutionary biologists had better get with the program and denounce Colin Wright, right? Or just shut up and stay shut up. From an old source: Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. We’d be happy to help but we can only help people who think that intellectual freedom is not negotiable. It must be okay to criticize Darwin too. Read More ›

Maori creationism is okay in New Zealand schools; objectors could be booted from NZ’s Royal Society

Sadly, the Darwinians are now learning the value of the very intellectual freedom they have so long denied to non-Darwinians of all stripes. Read More ›

More on Dr Kojonen’s Darwinist evolution is an expression of deeper design thesis,

as, it is worthy of further consideration (which is not the same as an endorsement). I headline a comment: [[Kojonen develops his case further: I will . . . argue in this book that the teleological order of biological organisms can still, in a rationally permissible way, be understood as a sign of the divine reality, even in an evolutionary cosmos. [ –> a if not necessarily the main thesis] . . . . According to [American Botanist, Asa] Gray (1860), evolution actually “leaves the question of design just where it was before,” because the biological design argument does not in any way depend on whether God created living organisms directly, through miracles, or through a secondary cause such as Read More ›

Good news: Jordan Peterson is Uncanceled at Cambridge U

Cambridge philosophy prof, Arif Ahmed, fills us in. If your alma mater isn’t following Cambridge's lead, stop giving. We don’t need finishing schools for censorious ignoramuses and dunces, often on the verge of violence. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Historian supports new anti-Cancel Culture university

At COSM 2021, he noted that proposed faculty had spent the last 48 hours dealing with a tidal wave of Twitter hate. So, he said, they are over the target… Read More ›

And now… David Hume Cancelled? Jerry Coyne reports.

Jerry, what goes around, comes around. You did to Eric Hedin what the Woke are doing to your faves. They'll Cancel them all. Then they won't have to do any homework. We didn’t tell them to. You did. We could all help stop it now but then you have to stop too. Read More ›

Canceled exoplanets prof Dorian Abbot at the Wall Street Journal

The thing is, in 2017, it was ultra-progressive places like Evergreen where the liberal biology teachers could be run off campus. Now it’s MIT, folks... Either Woke goes or science does. But bureaucrats find it easier to cater to Woke than to resist. The more bureaucrats there are, the less university there will be. Read More ›

Useful reflections on the Cancel Culture everyone faces now

Nick Gillespie asks, "What kind of simulation are we living in where Mein Kampf is easier to purchase than McElligot's Pool?" Oh, that’s easy to answer. It will be as fully an authoritarian culture as the Third Reich but with different authoritarians in charge. And that's the way Cancel Culture supporters want it. Read More ›

Berkeley scientist and center director resigns over MIT’s deplatforming of exoplanet scientist

Note how little difference facts of science make in these matters — whether Abbot has anything to say that contributes to our knowledge does not matter of the Woke are displeased. Darwinism was the original Wokeness in science — immune to fact-based critique. The people who thought that that didn’t concern them are now formally wrong. It’s everywhere now. Read More ›

Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne learns s thing or three about censorship – when he’s not doling it out

The explanation for Coyne’s sudden support for academic freedom might be fairly simple: He thought that Cancel Culture would only ever be deployed against people who think that nature shows evidence of design. He never expected it to come for people HE values. Read More ›

Expert in exoplanets gets the better of Outrage, Inc.

One thing that’s coming out of all these stories is that those who do NOT cower and mumble abject apologies to the gleefully unlettered tend to do better. Mobs have only the authority they seize from cowards. And who wants to defend an abject coward? He’ll sell you out too. A person who takes a stand can be defended. Read More ›