Our Nick Matzke the most popular scientist at NSF?

Surely someone is willing to pay top dollar for the appropriate noview. RexTugwell

Rex Tugwell at 2, If no reading is required, he can get it down to 10 min. Get a grant for it? Maybe Templeton would spring. Maybe BioLogos would host? See also If anyone cares News

Nick "The Clade Runner" Matzke is a one-trick pony. It seems he can't construct an argument unless it includes stems and crowns. He tried to refute Darwin's Doubt using the sleep-inducing discipline of cladistics. Now "he constructs a 'phylogenetic tree' to show that various academic freedom bills are related to one another". I wonder if Matzke is now busy working on a scathing "review" of the as-yet-unpublished Michael Denton book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. Let's see if he can beat his old record of 36 hours. RexTugwell

This is just the latest in shenanigans from Nick Matzke.

A short history of Matzke's literature bluffing – Nov. 2015 https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/darwins-view-of-the-fossil-record/#comment-589458

i.e. It seems that Nick's primary focus, even before he got his PhD in Evolution propaganda from Berkley, was attacking ID with all the intellectual dishonesty he could muster. What was surprising for me in West's article was the huge amount of money that is being thrown at supposed Darwinian research:

NSF Grant 0919124 is a $422,000 grant intended to "develop bivalve molluscs as a preeminent model for evolutionary studies...." And NSF Grant DBI-1300426 is a $12 million+ grant for the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, which told the NSF it would "provide scientific insights into problems such as the control of invasive species, limiting impacts of infectious diseases, and suggesting new methods for drug design." Perhaps Matzke claims academic freedom bills are an "infectious disease," but I doubt most taxpayers who paid for the grant would agree. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/12/did_nick_matzke101761.html

That is not small change for most work-a-day Americans. And that is just a drop in the bucket of total money given for supposed Darwinian research. A quick search finds many 'funding opportunities'

Biological Sciences (BIO) Active Funding Opportunities http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_list.jsp?org=bio

Perhaps someone can do a bit deeper search and see just how much tax-payer money is available specifically for "Darwinian research" and do an article on it? I'm sure the total would raise quite a few eyebrows. Anyways, less than scrupulous people, i.e. Matzke, who are apparently motivated by a hatred for ID rather than a love for truth, would certainly be more than willing to compromise whatever integrity they might have for monetary reward. I can guarantee that the News desk at UD, and research at ENV, and ID in general, wishes they had it so good as far as available monies were concerned so as to conduct research and experiments. And that highlights most of the problem in biological science. Darwinists apparently have control of a huge amount of tax-payer money. Thus, even though there is no evidence that unguided material processes can ever create non-trivial information, evidence is, none-the-less made to fit the desired 'narrative gloss' of Darwinian evolution so as to secure grant monies. Skell commented:

"Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming's discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No. I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss. In the peer-reviewed literature, the word "evolution" often occurs as a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology. Is the term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers? To find out, I substituted for "evolution" some other word – "Buddhism," "Aztec cosmology," or even "creationism." I found that the substitution never touched the paper's core. This did not surprise me. From my conversations with leading researchers it had became clear that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an immersion in historical biology." Philip S. Skell - (the late) Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. - Why Do We Invoke Darwin? - 2005 http://www.discovery.org/a/2816

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