Category: Intellectual freedom
Rob Sheldon: Have a little pity for scientists scared of SJWs
| December 8, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Naturalism, Science |
Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon takes exception to my (O’Leary for News)’s post, “The Darwinians’ cowardice before SJW mobs explained in detail: They thought the mob was coming for someone else, ” At least in part. He writes, I thought the Aero article was the most honest I have met in a long while. […]
Jerry Coyne takes on the SJWs on male and female brains
| December 8, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Darwinism, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design |
Well, the guy has guts: Cordelia Fine, a professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne, has carved out a niche for herself by attacking the notion that there are any evolved and genetically-based differences between males and females. Her books have been best-sellers (Testosterone Rex won the Royal Society […]
Is Darwinist Jerry Coyne starting to get it about SJW “science”?
| December 6, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Darwinism, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
And anyway, does it even matter, if no one will join him? At least, that’s the word on the street, they’re scared.* Meanwhile, here is Coyne, the author of Why Evolution Is True, concerned about a Woke science studies course that tells us: In the course of this survey, we shall engage a number of key questions […]
The Darwinians’ cowardice before SJW mobs explained in detail
| December 5, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Ethics, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
They thought the mob was coming for someone else. Amid the dead silence in the combox following “The perfect storm: Darwinists meet the progressive “evolution deniers” — and cringe…, , EDTA pipes up 1, Well, how does it feel now that the universal acid shoe is on the other foot? And who on the evolutionist side […]
The perfect storm: Darwinists meet the progressive “evolution deniers” — and cringe…
| December 4, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Darwinism, Evolutionary psychology, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design |
An evolutionary biologist chronicles the onslaught: At first, left-wing pushback to evolution appeared largely in response to the field of human evolutionary psychology. Since Darwin, scientists have successfully applied evolutionary principles to understand the behavior of animals, often with regard to sex differences. However, when scientists began applying their knowledge of the evolutionary underpinnings of […]
Hi tech mogul tells campus autocrats to grow up or get lost
| December 2, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Science |
Well, PayPal’s Peter Thiel put it more politely but… that’s the bottom line. We don’t usually hear tech moguls talking this way. More frequent news is stuff like Is it Google-com or Google.gov? or Digital dictatorship. But Thiel thinks the riot is over: “The reformation is going to happen,” Thiel added, noting it won’t come […]
Without free speech, science would be back in the Stone Age
| December 2, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Science |
Every new idea, good or bad, has had its establishment detractors who want Something To Be Done about the hateful people who make them uncomfortable. Joe Miller and guests talk about science and free speech at More Than Cake: In the tradition of natural law theorists such as John Stuart Mill, Free Speech is considered […]
Two views on the new “Journal of Controversial Ideas”
| November 28, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Peer review |
Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed has the story: Academic freedom is meant to protect scholars with controversial ideas. But a group of philosophers says academic freedom isn’t protection enough in an era of campus speech debates, internet trolls and threats against professors — and that academics now need a place to publish their most […]
Facial Recognition Aids Persecution of Chinese Christians, Muslims
| November 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Religion |
The crackdown on religion is said to stem from Xi Jinping, who became President in 2012. After he got term limits removed in March 2018, some have begun to privately call him “Emperor Xi”: Pastor Bob Fu, a Chinese civil rights activist since Tiananmen Square in 1989 and founder of ChinaAid, reports that facial recognition […]
Who’s behind Quillette besides the “intellectual dark web”?
| November 23, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Media |
Quillette is one of the publications to which we sometimes direct your attention. It publishes figures who, in many cases, shouldn’t be particularly controversial but are. Along comes Politico to oblige us with an explanation: An Australian atheist feminist and psychology dropout, Claire Lehmann, founded it because she realized that magazines are more fun when […]
Atheist historian combats claim that the Church persecuted classical learning
| November 11, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Atheism, Culture, Education, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Religion, Science |
A historian draws our attention this post from late 2016, a reflection on the survival of classical learning during the Christian era, in response to “Skep,” an energetic atheist blogger: But the usual way that those who are forced to admit that there were, in fact, many medieval natural philosophers studying all kinds of proto-scientific […]
Internet freedom has declined significantly worldwide since 2017
| November 3, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design |
You take for granted that you can just choose to read Uncommon Descent. Or something else instead. Increasingly, governments would like you to read what they think is best: There has been a definite uptick in digital authoritarianism worldwide, according to Freedom House, which assessed 65 countries: Chinese officials have held sessions on controlling information […]
Transgender activism: The war on science is an equal opportunity field
| October 22, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Intellectual freedom, Naturalism, Science |
It’s almost as if transactivism was a specific test of whether fact and evidence really matter in science today: In August, Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island was criticized for removing a news release about a peer-reviewed study published in PLoS One by one of its academics—Lisa Littman, a physician and researcher at Brown’s School […]
The Scientist tries to come to grips with the Mortarboard Mob problem
| September 29, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Mathematics, Peer review |
We outlined the story of how a mortarboard mob hounded out of the journals a paper by a respected mathematician that had passed peer review for fear of “repercussions” (= the hell they themselves would go out and raise). The paper was about “greater variability in various traits among males than females of many species, […]
Is there an atheist value system, at odds with traditional ones?
| September 24, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Culture, Ethics, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design |
We are told so at Commentary, using the Soviet Union by way of demonstration: Bolshevik ethics began and ended with atheism. Only someone who rejected all religious or quasi-religious morals could be a Bolshevik because, as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and countless other Bolshevik leaders insisted, success for the Party was the only standard of right […]
AAAS to introduce new policy for expelling members
| September 17, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Science |
The “Fellow Revocation Policy” was announced by president, Margaret A. Hamburg: The governing body of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, founded 1848, voted Saturday to enact a policy under which an elected AAAS Fellow’s lifetime honor can be revoked for proven scientific misconduct or serious breaches of professional ethics. The AAAS Council […]
Darwinian risks all, takes aim at gender theory
| September 12, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Culture, Darwinism, Evolutionary biology, Evolutionary psychology, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design |
Look, as Barry Arrington noted recently, you can’t even publish research today that suggests that some teen girls believe they are boys mainly because of teen groupthink even though such a conclusion must be obvious to anyone who has spent time with teens. Now, a Darwinian has blundered in front of the overloaded freight train of […]
The ID issue vs Digital Empire/Cartel concerns: information utilities/ “superhighway” vs shadow-censoring, de-platforming information gatekeepers
The ID issue has long been a focal point for intense, often deeply polarised debate on our origins and world roots as informed by science. Science, being a major source of knowledge and understanding about our world, which also energises technological innovation and economic growth. Science is often treated as though it is the grounds […]
Sam Harris on taboo topics, Jordan Peterson, and getting sent to PC hell
| July 1, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Culture, Intellectual freedom, Intelligent Design, Naturalism |
Readers will remember Sam Harris as one of the Four Horsemen of the atheist apocalypse (with Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens). Recently, he fell out with the progressives and ended up on the Dark Internet. He talks with Dan Hall at the Independent: Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, best-selling author, philosopher and host […]
You can’t be an honest atheist and a progressive at the same time.
| June 6, 2018 | Posted by News under Atheism, Culture, Intellectual freedom, Philosophy, Science |
From Denyse O’Leary at MercatorNet: … She worries about the fact that some prominent atheists are attracted to the intellectual dark web, “an alliance of heretics” making “an end run around the mainstream conversation” (New York Times). The dark web includes figures like Jordan B. Peterson, Steven Pinker, and Bret Weinstein,) who want to discuss […]
