Once again, Darwinism’s questionable relationship to thermodynamics is the issue.
Readers probably remember mathematician Granville Sewell from last year when a journal, Applied Mathematics Letters, pulled one of his accepted papers because a Darwinist blogger objected. They offered “sincere and heartfelt apologies,” but now that critics are publishing rebuttals, he is not allowed to respond in the journal:
Now, Sewell’s critics are being given space in the journal Mathematical Intelligencer (MI) to critique his censored article in AML. Nobody can reasonably object to critics having their say about Sewell’s work, but it’s outrageous that Sewell can’t publish his article staking out his position, while his critics are allowed to publish their article attacking it. In this latest development, Sewell is facing censorship again: MI won’t let him publish his response to critics!
– Casey Luskin, “Double Censorship: Granville Sewell Can’t Publish Article, Now Denied the Right to Publish His Rebuttal to Critics” (Evolution News & Views, April 25, 2012)
Sewell’s views are based on thermodynamics (here’s a vid), a topic on which Richard Dawkins also barked his shins a while back.
The reasonable conclusion to draw would be that Sewell is right, and his critics are mounting a politically correct defense against him because they cannot risk simply addressing the subject with him in an open forum. That’s been true about Darwinism and thermodynamics for so long now that – as so often where Darwinism is concerned – something stinks.
Sewell has responded here:
Since I will not be allowed to respond in the journal, below is my response, so at least ENV readers can see it. In his MI Viewpoint, Bob Lloyd begins by successfully linking me to Discovery Institute (after which, further rebuttal is hardly necessary), and the rest of the paper is almost entirely dedicated to showing that my “X-entropies” are not always independent of each other, that under certain circumstances they can influence each other.
In fact, in the AML paper I acknowledged that while these different entropies are independent of each other in “our simple models, where it is assumed that only heat conduction or diffusion is going on, naturally, in more complex situations, the laws of probability do not make such simple predictions.” Lloyd says that universal independence of these X-entropies “is central to all the version of his arguments.” Except that I never claimed or believed they were always independent — see point one in my response for more detail on his primary criticism, which entirely misses the main point of the AML paper. In 11 exhausting years of writing on this topic, I have noticed that criticisms are invariably directed toward some minor, peripheral point, while completely ignoring the main argument, which is extraordinarily simple, and made clearly in the last paragraph of my rejected response…and even more clearly in the video below.
– “How the Scientific “Consensus” on Evolution is Maintained” (Evolution News & Views, April 26, 2012
It actually doesn’t matter what Sewell says. He can be made out to say something else, something more easily refuted.
Remember that when you hear that scientists overwhelmingly accept Darwin’s theory or Darwinism in the schools. Too bad for them if it is true.
Note also the difference the Internet makes. You can read what Sewell has to say irrespective of whether the journal accepts his response. Heck, if it weren’t for the Internet, you probably wouldn’t even know what had happened. Read it and judge for yourself.
Breaking, breaking: ID friendly math prof gets apology and damages from journal
My Controversial Tautology (Sewell)
Retraction Watch has noted the math journal’s retraction of its treatment of Granville Sewell
More on the withdrawn article (Sewell)
Granville Sewell’s vindication latest in string of defeats for Darwin lobby … straw in the wind?