Before it’s deleted: A riff on the publicly funded, court-enforced Darwin lobby. Stars long-ago scientist Richard Dawkins and Darwin’s broomstick Eugenie Scott*: Lines like “He’s smarter than you, he’s got a science degree!” and “You don’t know me, you don’t know Dick!” Stuff that People Who Count complain about tends to disappear so, if interested, watch now … * Mistakenly identified earlier as pseudo-ID expert Barbara Forrest.
A guy who has been a hack, a flack, and a prof tells us what we suspected …
Journalists, on the other hand, usually treat anything as true if someone in a position of ostensible authority is willing to say it, even anonymously (and if no one is going to sue over it). The accuracy of anyone’s statement, particularly if that person is a public official, is often deemed irrelevant. If no evidence is available for an argument a journalist wishes to include in a story, then up pop weasel words such as “it seems” or “some claim” to enable inclusion of the argument, no matter how shaky its foundation in reality. What’s more, too many journalists believe that their job description does not require them to adjudicate between competing claims of truth. Sure, there are “two sides”—and only two sides—to every story, according to the rules of objectivity. But if both sides wish to deploy lies and other forms of deliberate deception for their own purposes, well, that’s somebody else’s problem.- Eric Alterman, “The Professors, The Press, The Think Tanks—And Their Problems,” Academe Online, (May/June 2011)
Reflection: Read More ›
And not even just a different story read backwards, like I thought?
Liberty University biology prof David A. DeWitt, author of Unraveling the Origins Controversy, commented on my characterization of the overlapping codes of the genome. Seeing that Christianity Today is actually taking BioLogos and yesterday’s science seriously, I had written,
A friend, a faithful Christian in science, was dismayed by the story. He is an information theorist. … The genome, to take one small point, is full over overlapping codes. (It’s as if a short story read backwards is a flawless different short story, and sections of it, read letter by letter down the right hand side are a flawless paragraph.)
and DeWitt replies,
In the mitochondrial genome the overlapping codes are for different subunits of the same protein complex (ATP Synthase). So it is not even that “backwards is a flawless different short story” it is another volume in a series of short stories involving the same characters!
which all happened, of course, merely by the magic of Darwin’s natural selection acting on random mutations. But presumably Christian Darwinists are free to dress it their unbelievable scenario in God talk as long as they feel like it. Only, Read More ›
… in the last year of his life.
Not anyone’s idea of a fundamentalist Christian, Gordon Rattray Taylor (1911-1981) was the author of a well-known anti-population-growth work and other trendy stuff as well. In the last year of his life (1983) Taylor wrote The Great Evolution Mystery, disowning Darwinism. Some excerpts here.
He talked about this, for example:
A Mystery of the Natural World: A Worm Armed for War
An interesting column by one, Howard Rich, the moral of which is not to rely on legacy media for news you actually need:
In the immediate aftermath of the tragic Tucson shooting earlier this year, the legacy press took it a step further — essentially implying that the new media was complicit in the attack on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords by virtue of the “climate of hate” it helped create in America.
Obviously, the facts of the Tucson case quickly (and completely) debunked this theory — but not before a parade of liberal talking heads had spewed a torrent of reckless vitriol on new media outlets and the First Amendment freedom they exercise.
But is there something in it for them?
Fast-forward three months to April 6, when reporter Matthew Boyle of The Daily Caller published a report outlining the details of Read More ›
Here Brent Bozell notes, On NPR, evening anchor Michele Norris mourned that “when you reach back to the era of Rather and Jennings and Brokaw, it seemed like getting an anchor job in the past was much like a lifetime appointment, much like a Supreme Court justice.” Media reporter David Folkenflik answered that “holding one of these jobs is no longer being one of the highest priests of journalism because the notion of authoritativeness has been undermined. Even the New York Times does not command, in some ways, as absolute a voice about what is news and what isn’t anymore.”It is refreshing that Americans today reject the notion that we should bow before the network TV anchormen as the most Read More ›
David Warren comes to some interesting conclusions on the decay of current legacy media, conclusions that you can mull over for yourself. But these are the observations I chiefly wish to note: Nothing is new under the sun, not even decay, but the slide of mainstream journalism — not merely into partisanship, but into the assertion of falsehoods and the hiding of truth — has become a public issue. Polls show declining public trust: Journalists often rank below politicians. More to the point, I have myself noticed the collapse of standards from within the trade, over several decades.One way to put this would be: “There are no broadsheets any more, only tabloids.” News media have become indistinguishable from the media Read More ›
NOVA scienceNOW: Where Did We Come From? Airing Wednesday, February 16 at 8pm on PBS In this episode of NOVA scienceNOW, journey back in time to the birth of our solar system to examine whether the key to our planet’s existence might have been the explosive shockwave of an ancient supernova. Meet a chemist who has yielded a new kind of “recipe” for natural processes to assemble and create the building blocks of life. And see how the head louse, a creepy critter that’s been sucking our blood for millions of years, is offering clues about our evolution. Finally, meet neuroscientist André Fenton, who is looking into erasing painful memories with an injection. Thoughts?
Sometimes I think atheists are simply having arguments with themselves – or, more precisely, with phantoms bred by their own ignorance. It’s easy to see why atheism does not make more headway, even in modern secular society: Once atheists begin to spell out the sort of deity they are rejecting, it becomes clear that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
From the NCSE: Congratulations to NESCent
NCSE is happy to congratulate the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) on the renewal of its grant from the National Science Foundation. According to a March 2, 2010, press release, NESCent was awarded a five-year grant renewal in the amount of $25 million, to continue its core programs in evolution research, informatics, and education through 2014.
This is the second major NSF grant that NESCent has received, which brings the total funding for the Center to $40 million. The grant will enable the Center to continue its core programs in evolution research, informatics and education through 2014.
Today’s Fox News website had this little story, entitled Climate Scientists Plan to Hit Back at Skeptics. In the article, Stanford University climate researcher Paul R. Ehrlich had this to say about global warming skeptics:
“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.
Its worth noting Ehrlich’s use of the phrase “merciless enemies”. In other words, challenge the preferred dogma, and you’re not just ignorant – you’re an enemy, and thus, by extension, deserving of any and all ad hominem attacks hurled your way. One can almost hear “let me assure you, we haf vays to make you accept the dogma!” Read More ›
Premier Radio, one of the UK’s leading Christian radio stations, has been featuring several interviews/debates in recent weeks on matters related to ID, some of which have been flagged here and here. The most recent one bears the title of this post and was aired last weekend (6th Feb), in which I debated the question with the historian Thomas Dixon, who basically holds that while we may have needed God to do science, we don’t need the deity anymore. My own view is that if we mean by ‘science’ something more than simply the pursuit of instrumental knowledge, then that quest still doesn’t make much sense without the relevant (Abrahamic) theological backdrop. I continue this line of argument in a Read More ›
Apparently round two of the controversy over the California’s Science Center’s cancellation of Darwin’s Dilemma is getting ready to take place. This was reported and discussed here back in October, as well as here and here in December.
Now, a California State Senator is calling the constitutionality of the censorship into question. Read More ›
It is almost axiomatic in our culture that the pronouncements of Science are synonymous with Truth. This received wisdom is so prevalent that whenever media reports begin with the words “Scientists have found that…[fill in the blank]”, whatever follows is widely believed by the public to be unassailable fact. So revered is Science and so respected its methods, that the mere suggestion that something might be amiss is considered ignorance or heresy. And so the statements of Science are defended vigorously while the critics are dismissed as quacks and uninformed idiots. The prevailing attitude seems to be (to slightly bend the well-known quote from Richard Dawkins) “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in the findings of Science [emphasis and edit mine], that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).”
For those of us who have long been engaged in the ongoing Evolution/Intelligent Design debate, we know that Read More ›