Links of Interest: Hoax of Dodos, a response to inaccuracies in Flock of Dodos Haeckel's Bogus Embryo Drawings (Clip on YouTube)

Defeating Olson’s "A"-argument: Haeckel’s Fraudulent Drawings Are in Textbooks
The easiest way to demonstrate that Haeckel’s fraudulent drawings are in Raven & Johnson’s 2002 edition of Biology is simply to show drawings straight out of the textbook. In Figure 1 below, Haeckel’s original drawings are shown on the left, while Raven & Johnson’s actual drawings are on the right:

Figure 1: Haeckel's Embryo Drawings (Rotated) Next to Raven & Johson (2002) for Comparison of Near-Identical Similarities

If you still aren’t convinced that Raven & Johnson’s diagram is merely a colorized and ever-so-slightly reworked version of Haeckel’s drawings, then consider Figure 2, where Haeckel’s original drawings are overlain on top of Raven & Johnson’s (2002) drawings of Haeckel’s Embryos:

Figure 2: Haeckel's Embryo Drawings Overlain on Raven & Johnson (2002) to show Equivalence

Alternatively, click here to see an animation that overlays Haeckel’s embryo drawings over the drawings of Raven & Johnson’s 2002 biology textbook. (Depending on your connection speed, it may take a little while to load.)

Raven & Johnson’s textbook merely took Haeckel’s original drawings, slightly reworked them, and added some color. For all intents and purposes, these are Haeckel’s drawings. The textbooks don’t lie: here are Haeckel’s drawings in a modern textbook.

Defeating Olson’s "B"-Argument: Haeckel’s Fraudulent Drawings Are Used to Represent Factual Data That Promote Evolution in the Present Day
As I explain in "What do Modern Textbooks Really Say about Haeckel's Embryos?," Raven & Johnson use Haeckel’s fraudulent drawings to promote evolution as fact in the present day:

The drawings are presented as valid evidence for the modern theory of evolution, and are not used merely to provide historical context. They come from a section entitled "Embryonic Development and Vertebrate Evolution." The caption reads: “Embryonic development of vertebrates. Notice that the early embryonic stages of these vertebrates bear a striking resemblance to each other, even though the individuals are from different classes (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals). All vertebrates start out with an enlarged head region, gill slits, and a tail regardless of whether these characteristics are retained in the adult.” (pg. 1228-1229) The text states: “The patterns of development in the vertebrate groups that evolved most recently reflect in many ways the simpler patterns occurring among earlier forms. Thus, mammalian development and bird development are elaborations of reptile development, which is an elaboration of amphibian development, and so forth (figure 58.16).” (pg. 1228-1229) Although Haeckel is mentioned, it is clear that the textbook authors regard these drawing as evidence apart from Haeckel’s interpretation.

The text not only discusses “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” but also affirms it, albeit in a slightly different form. This entire discussion comes from a subsection entitled “Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny,” in which the authors repudiate Haeckel’s claim but then defend a reformulated version of it: “The developmental instructions for each new form seem to have been layered on top of the previous instructions, contributing additional steps in the developmental journey. This hypothesis, promoted in the nineteenth century by Ernst Haeckel, is referred to as the ‘biogenetic law.’ It is usually stated as an aphorism: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; that is, embryological development (ontogeny) involves the same progression of changes that have occurred during evolution (phylogeny). However, the biogenetic law is not literally true when stated in this way because embryonic stages are not reflections of adult ancestors. Instead, the embryonic stages of a particular vertebrate often reflect the embryonic stages of that vertebrate's ancestors.” (pg. 1228-1229, emphases in original) Earlier the text stated: “In many cases, the evolutionary history of an organism can be seen to unfold during its development, with the embryo exhibiting characteristics of the embryos of its ancestors.” (pg. 450) The basis for the text’s claims that the law holds is the fraudulent Haeckel-derived drawings, which obscure the differences between the embryos.

There is no indication whatsoever that Haeckel’s drawings are used to merely give some kind of “historical context.” Rather, the drawings are used to represent facts about development in the present day, based upon the fraudulent obfuscation of differences between early embryo stages.

In short, Randy Olson’s arguments have failed. He recently claimed that “PZ Myers a few days later on his blog, took the movie, went through it scene by scene, moment by moment in that whole sequence on Haeckel’s embryos, and bottom line said there’s nothing inaccurate in the film.” According to Olson, it would seem that PZ Myers does not consider it “inaccurate” to use drawings which are known to fraudulently obscure the differences between embryos to promote a version of the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

Conclusion
In a debate over his film, Olson recently claimed that it was his “agenda” to make the issue of Haeckel’s embryos the “battlefield” over intelligent design. Have it your way, Dr. Olson: Perhaps Haeckel’s ideas aren’t the bedrock of modern evolutionary biology in 2007, but his drawings and ideas sure are used in a lot of textbooks to promote evolution as fact. Moreover, we never claimed Haeckel's ideas were the foundation of evolutionary biology today—we only said the drawings and ideas are inaccurate and shouldn’t be used as any kind of an argument for evolution. Randy Olson responded by denying that they are even in textbooks promoting evolution: Either (A) They aren't in textbooks, or (B) They're used in textbooks

If Randy Olson wants to make this the “battlefield,” so be it: The textbooks don’t lie: This textbook uses Haeckel’s drawings to promote evolution as fact in the present day. And that’s precisely the kind of textbook that Randy Olson and his film have claimed doesn’t exist.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 11:11 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Observational Astronomy, a peer-reviewed astronomy textbook by D. Scott Birney, Guillermo Gonzalez, and David Oesper (2nd. ed., Cambridge University Press, 2006).

One of Dr. Gonzalez’s recent accomplishments at ISU that has received less attention is his co-authorship of a prestigiously published astronomy textbook, Observational Astronomy. Published by Cambridge University Press and also peer-reviewed, the textbook is used in Dr. Gonzalez’s own department to teach astronomy. Aside from his own department, universities internationally use Observational Astronomy, including University of Toronto, New Jersey’s Science & Technology University, University of Manitoba, Valparaiso University, and Franklin and Marshall College. Prestigious textbook authorship is a new avenue of scholarship for Dr. Gonzalez since he joined ISU. How can his critics sustain the claim that he has not "started new things" at ISU?

This is not Dr. Gonzalez’s only recent foray into textbooks. The concept of "galactic habitable zone," a term that Science reported was "coined in 2001 by astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez" (Robert Irion, "Are Most Life-Friendly Stars Older Than the Sun?," Science Vol. 303:27, 01/02/2004), is discussed in the latest edition of the college introductory astronomy textbook The Cosmic Perspective (Addison Wesley Publishing, 2007, 4th ed., pg. 723).

Another measure of a scientist’s productivity is the number of citations to his or her work by other scientists. As we recently reported, Guillermo Gonzalez has the highest normalized citation count among all astronomers in his department since 2001, the year he joined ISU. What makes this significant is that he leads his department in normalized citations even in recent years, such as 2006, the same year he published Observational Astronomy. To maintain that level of output shows he is working—and producing—very hard and very effectively. His work has not "slowed down considerably" since joining ISU. In fact, Dr. Gonzalez is making a larger individual impact upon his field, measured by normalized citation counts, than any other astronomer in his department since the year he joined ISU.

Perhaps next time the Chronicle of Higher Education will be able to find a foil who actually has "studied Mr. Gonzalez's work in detail" so they aren’t embarrassed by such baseless comments.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 1:41 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Not so fast, say disabilities advocates Andrew J. Imparato and Anne C. Sommers of the American Association of People With Disabilities. In their Washington Post article, "Haunting Echoes of Eugenics," the two authors describe, among other things, the terrible campaign to eliminate persons with Down syndrome before they ever arrive.

According to Imparato and Sommers, fully "85% of pregnancies diagnosed with Down syndrome end in abortion."

As I have written earlier, this year marks 100 years since Indiana passed the world's first forced sterilization law. Like Mike Egnor yesterday, Imparato and Sommers note that it is also 80 years since "the disgraceful Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell" where Justice Holmes wrote:

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles is enough.

Incidentally, last week in the Senate I heard parents from the Down Syndrome Association of Northern Virginia (DSANV) speak about their experiences. They are supporting the Prenatally Diagnosed Condition Awareness Act. Each one spoke of how difficult it was not to have support and information from their doctors but rather a speech about "you have a choice to make."

Unfortunately, Imparato and Sommers do not mention where Holmes--an avid Darwinist--got his "unfit" language. But hopefully the message came across in their conclusion:

On this 80th anniversary of Buck, let's not foolishly believe that victims of eugenics are an artifact of history. So long as we speak in terms of good genes and bad genes, recognize a life with a disability as an injury, and allow health policies to value some lives over others, we continue to create human rights violations every day.

Posted by Logan Gage at 12:20 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Each February, admirers of Charles Darwin celebrate his birthday. “Darwin Day” is a celebration of secularism and of materialistic science, and particularly a celebration of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Some particularly enthusiastic Darwinists compare Darwin Day to Lincoln’s birthday. Their motto (I'm not making this up): “Lincoln freed the slaves; Darwin freed our minds.”

Some of us take a more nuanced view of Darwin’s legacy. This May is a poignant time to pause and to reflect on Darwin’s influence on American medicine and society. This May 2nd marked the 80th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Buck vs. Bell.

On May 2, 1927, the United States Supreme Court returned an 8 to 1 verdict in the case of Buck vs. Bell. Carrie Buck (above, with her mother) was a sixteen-year-old girl who was raped and had given birth to a daughter. Carrie had some problems in school, and her mom had some brushes with the law in her youth. Carrie’s social worker noted that she fit the definition of “feeble minded” under Virginia’s eugenic laws. She was involuntarily institutionalized at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, and she was ordered sterilized. She fought sterilization all the way to the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority decision:

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes…Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Where did this modern “science” of eugenics come from? In Descent of Man, Darwin himself applied his theory of natural selection to the breeding of human beings:

…the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

Eugenicists set out to realize Darwin’s dream — to take “random” evolution in hand, and to breed, selectively, from our “best stock.” In the first half of the 20th cenury, sixty thousand Americans who were judged to be of inferior stock were involuntarily sterilized. Recently, Darwinists have scrambled to distance themselves from the obvious connection between Darwinism and eugenics. But the historical record is clear. The founders and scientific leaders of the eugenics movement—Darwin himself (in Descent of Man), his cousin Francis Galton (who coined the word 'eugenics') and his admirer Herbert Spencer (who coined the term 'survival of the fittest'), and Darwin's acolytes Karl Pearson, Ernst Haeckel, R.A. Fisher, Charles Davenport, and Harry Laughlin— were all fervent Darwinists.

Eugenics is still with us. It persists in the form of prenatal testing and abortion of handicapped or unwanted babies, in the growing acceptance of euthanasia of the seriously ill in the United States and of euthanasia of the handicapped in many countries in Europe. Culling the unfit, which Darwin wistfully endorsed in Descent of Man, is very much a part of 21st century medicine.

Darwin did “free our minds.” He freed many well-educated scientists and doctors from the traditional Judeo-Christian standard of human exceptionalism. He freed many doctors from the Judeo-Christian view that human beings have inherent dignity simply as human beings, and that the moral value of our actions is measured by what we do to help the least, not the best, of our brothers. Judeo-Christian ethics is the antithesis of social Darwinism, and of eugenics. The eugenic doctors who sterilized Carrie Buck were freed of their ethical moorings by Darwin’s ideas.

Darwin cast a long shadow on American medicine. It is fitting to take some time to remember the people who were caught in that shadow. Please find a moment to remember Carrie Buck, and how her life was changed, and why.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 3:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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Action Item: Help Guillermo Gonzalez in his fight for academic freedom. Contact ISU President Gregory L. Geoffroy at (515) 294-2042 or email him at president@iastate.edu and let him know that you support academic freedom for Dr. Gonzalez to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

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How frequently a scientist’s work is cited by other scientists is an important indicator of the impact the scientist is having on the scientific community. The Smithsonian/NASA data system allows one to compute a "normalized" citation count that corrects for inflated citation rates caused by articles with multiple authors. In the normalized citation count, an article published by a scientist with many co-authors is weighted less than an article authored by the scientist alone.

Gonzalez joined ISU in 2001. His normalized citation count for articles published during 2001-2007 is 143, the best of any other astronomer in his department during this period. The next best citation count among all of his astronomer colleagues is 103; and the best citation count for a tenured astronomer in his department is only 68, or less than half of Gonzalez's count.

"In other words, Iowa State denied tenure to a scientist whose impact on his field during the past six years outstripped all of the university's existing tenured astronomers according to a prestigious Smithsonian/NASA database," said Dr. John West, Associate Director of the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute.

"It's important to stress that the normalized citation counts for 2001-2007 only include citations to articles published during the most recent 6 years, yet Gonzalez is still the top ranked in his department," added Discovery Institute analyst Casey Luskin, M.S., J.D., who computed the citation counts using the Smithsonian/NASA data system. “These statistics refute any claim that Gonzalez’s scholarly productivity and impact ‘trailed off’ since coming to Iowa State.”

In fact, if one looks at normalized citation counts for articles published during individual years, Gonzalez topped his astronomy colleagues in 2001, 2003, and again in 2006 (the most recent full year for which statistics are available). In addition, he came in second in his department in 2002. The years in which Gonzalez was not first in his department in normalized citations likely reflect his work on two major book projects—The Privileged Planet, written under a competitive research grant from the Templeton Foundation that was awarded after a peer-review process by several leading astronomers; and Observational Astronomy, a peer-reviewed college-level astronomy textbook published by Cambridge University Press in 2006.

According to Luskin, "This new data adds to the mounting evidence that Gonzalez may have been denied tenure at ISU not because of his record as a scientist, but because of discrimination against his views in support of intelligent design."

Amazingly, even if one compares the lifetime normalized citation counts for all of the astronomers at ISU, Gonzalez comes out in second place. The only colleague who has a higher lifetime normalized count than Gonzalez is a senior tenured astronomer who already is a full professor.

"For an untenured assistant professor to best nearly everyone in his department in lifetime normalized citations is most impressive, and it makes even more indefensible the university's decision to deny him tenure," comments Luskin.

The normalized citation count is not the only measure of impact on the scientific community by which Gonzalez is ranked highly among the astronomers in his department. As reported last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Gonzalez also ranks second among his astronomer colleagues according to the "h-index" statistic, which similarly seeks to measure how widely a scientist's articles are cited by other scientists. According to the Chronicle, “Mr. Gonzalez has a normalized h-index of 13."

A full discussion of these findings, along with the data supporting them, is provided in an article by Luskin posted here.

[UPDATED on May 28, 2007 at 9:25 am. Article originally reported that Gonzalez had highest h-index in department based on Chronicle of Higher Education report; but the Chronicle erred in its calculations and posted an updated calculation here.]

Posted by Robert Crowther at 8:30 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

An extremely important measure of a scientist's reputation is the impact his or her research is having upon a field as measured by the number of citations to that scientist’s work in research articles by other scientists. In short, the more times a scientist’s work has been cited by others, the greater the impact of his work on his particular field. By this standard, Iowa State University (ISU) astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez has performed incredibly well, despite his denial of tenure by ISU.

Gonzalez joined ISU in 2001, and for his publications since 2001 he has the highest normalized citation count of all astronomers in his department, including both tenured and untenured faculty! Moreover, despite the fact that he is much younger than many of the tenured faculty members in the department, he has the second highest lifetime normalized citation count among all astronomers in his department.

Normalized citation counts for ISU astronomers are reflected in the graphs below:

This data was collected using the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), a widely respected database cataloging the scientific literature in astronomy. The database can calculate the “normalized citation count” for a given scientist, which represents a sum of the number of citations for each paper of a given author corrected for the number of authors in each paper. This is intended to measure the individual contributions made by a single scientist by taking into account the fact that an author will have relatively less contribution to a paper with many authors compared to a paper with fewer authors. (Thus if a paper has 2 authors, each author would get .5 citations added to their citation count every time that paper is cited; if there are 4 authors, then each author gets 0.25 citations; but if there is only 1 author, the author gets 1 citation added, and so forth.)

Normalized citation counts for ISU astronomers since 2001, and also over their entire lifetimes are also represented in the third and fourth columns in the table below:

Table 1: Normalized Citation Count for All Astronomers in ISU Dept. of Physics & Astronomy (2001-2007, and Lifetime) (Emboldened data indicates highest in the table for that column; methodology explained in further detail below.)

As can be seen, Dr. Gonzalez has the highest normalized citation count for articles published since 2001 (the year he joined ISU) among astronomers in his department. He is even second in his department in lifetime normalized citations! Given this high citation count, it seems clear Dr. Gonzalez has had a tremendous impact upon the science of his field of astronomy. By this measure, there is every reason to believe he has demonstrated the “excellence” in research that normally leads to an award of tenure. Perhaps are there other factors in the mix?

Methodology:

It’s clear from the ideologically motivated attacks on Dr Guillermo Gonzalez, an assistant professor of astronomy and co-author of The Privileged Planet, that scientists who acknowledge the evidence for design in the universe are not welcome as tenured members of the Iowa State University faculty.

Anti-design scientists and bloggers have admitted publicly that they will continue to exclude intelligent design scientists from academia. Yet in the 20th century many of the advances in the understanding of our universe were accompanied by vigorous open discussion of the design implications of cosmological theories.

From the Enlightenment to early the 20th century, virtually all astronomers believed that the universe was eternal. When solutions for Einstein’s tensor equations were proposed in the first decades of the 20th century, it was evident that they were compatible with an expansion (or contraction) of the universe. With Edwin Hubble’s observation of the redshift that showed evidence for an expanding universe, some astrophysicists proposed that the universe had a moment of creation. Many other astrophysicists were troubled by the theological implications of a “moment of creation,” and proposed a Steady State (eternal) model of the cosmos.

There was a vigorous free discussion of the scientific, philosophical and theological implications of the expanding universe by scientists in the early and mid 20th century. A “moment of creation” — the Big Bang — implied a creator, and implied design. Based on the evidence, design won, and the advocates of the steady state model showed integrity and grace in acknowledging that the Big Bang theory, despite its design implications, was the best theory to explain the emergence and structure of the universe.

As agnostic astrophysicist Robert Jastrow famously said:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Modern atheists know that they lost the scientific debate about the Big Bang in the 20th century. This time around, they are making sure that there will be no debate.

Please contact Iowa State University President Gregory L. Geoffroy (515-294 -2042 or president@iastate.edu) and ask him to grant tenure to Dr. Gonzalez, and to end the blacklisting of scientists who support intelligent design at Iowa State.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 9:11 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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Action Item: Help Guillermo Gonzalez in his fight for academic freedom. Contact ISU President Gregory L. Geoffroy at (515) 294-2042 or email him at president@iastate.edu and let him know that you support academic freedom for Dr. Gonzalez to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

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Here is a recap of the major developments this week in the Guillermo Gonzalez tenure case:

1. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Gonzalez ranks first among his astronomer colleagues at ISU according to the "h-index" statistic, which seeks to measure how widely a scientist's articles are cited by other scientists. According to the Chronicle, “Mr. Gonzalez has a normalized h-index of 13, the highest of the 10 astronomers in his department. The next closest was Lee Anne Willson, a university professor who had a normalized h-index of 9.”

2. It was revealed that at same time ISU denied tenure to Gonzalez this past spring, the university promoted to full professor his chief academic persecutor, atheist professor Hector Avalos, who believes that the Bible is worse than Hitler's Mein Kampf.

3. The world's preeminent science journal, Nature, featured the Gonzalez case in an article in its news section. In the article, Gonzalez's former post-doctoral advisor at the University of Texas, Austin, is quoted as saying: "He is one of the best postdocs I have had” and "I would have said he was a serious tenure candidate."

4. U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Sam Brownback issued a statement defending Gonzalez's right to academic freedom, while Darwinist academics vociferously advocated blacklisting pro-intelligent design scientists from academia.

5. ISU spokesman John McCarroll continued to invent facts in his effort to defend the tenure denial, this week claiming that a professor's publications prior to being hired by ISU aren't considered during the tenure process. Asked to provide documentation for this latest claim, McCarroll declined to respond.

If you have just heard about this story, you should check out the key developments from last week, which included the admission by two members of Gonzalez's department that intelligent design played a role in his tenure denial, and the release of tenure statistics showing that ISU approved 91% of its tenure applications this year. In addition, tenure standards for ISU's Department of Physics and Astronomy revealed that outside research funding was not a stated criterion for tenure decisions in the department.

Posted by John West at 12:15 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Links of Interest: Hoax of Dodos, a response to inaccuracies in Flock of Dodos Haeckel's Bogus Embryo Drawings (Clip on YouTube)

Darwinian biologist Ken Miller has authored many biology textbooks. His first textbooks (from the early 1990s) used Haeckel’s fraudulent embryo drawings and blatantly promoted the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. This is seen below in the re-printed text and scan of page 162 from Miller’s 1994 textbook Biology: Discovering Life with the caption also shown (see here for the full scan of page 162):

To Miller’s credit, he fixed later editions of his textbooks—he took out Haeckel’s drawings and replaced them with real embryo photographs, and he also stopped promoting recapitulation theory. Like many Darwinists, however, Miller then tried to rewrite history and pretend that these mistakes had not been promoted by biologists for many decades.

Randy Olson would have you believe that when Haeckel’s drawings are used, they are only given to provide some kind of “historical perspective on biology” or “historical context” and that they are not promoted as actual fact in the present day. Miller & Levine’s 1994 version of Biology: Discovering Life demonstrates how Olson’s claim is false:

Darwin and his contemporaries knew that early embryos of many animals look nearly identical and that the earliest stages of development in “lower” animals seem to be repeated in the development of “higher” animals such as ourselves (Fig. 8.15). Darwin realized that the similar developmental paths followed by animal embryos make sense if all of us evolved long ago from common ancestors through a series of lengthy evolutionary changes.

These striking embryological similarities led some of Darwin’s contemporaries (though apparently not Darwin himself) to believe that the embryological development of an individual repeats its species’ evolutionary history.

Why, then, should the embryos of related organisms retain similar features when adults of their species look quite different? The cells and tissues of the earliest embryological stages of any organism are like the bottom levels in a house of cards. The final form of the organism is built upon them, and even a small change in their character can result in disaster later. It would hardly be adaptive for a bird to grow a longer beak, for example, if it lost its tongue in the process.

The earliest stages of the embryos life, therefore, are essentially “locked in,” whereas cells and tissues that are produced later can change more freely without harming the organism. As species with common ancestors evolve over time, divergent sets of successful evolutionary changes accumulate as development proceeds, but early embryos stick more closely to their original appearance.

(Joseph S. Levine & Kenneth R. Miller, Biology: Discovering Life, pg. 162 [2nd Ed., D.C. Heath, 1994])

Miller was clearly promoting Haeckel’s famous idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, as he argues that “the embryological development of an individual repeats its species’ evolutionary history,” and that animals evolve by simply tacking on new stages of development to old ones, which are locked in.

Before Darwinists object by claiming that Miller is merely discussing the history of evolutionary thought and the views of "Darwin's contemporaries," I point out two important facts:

(1) The quoted text comes from a section titled "DATA SUPPORTING THE FACT OF EVOLUTIONARY CHANGE" (emphasis in original) and a sub-section titled "Similarities in Anatomy and Development." (pg. 162)

(2) There is no indication anywhere in the text that any of these ideas are wrong or that they are no longer believed. The reader is left with the distinct and unambiguous impression that this is how vertebrate development works.

It seems that Darwinists like Olson are simply wrong to argue that these drawings and ideas have not been promoted in modern textbooks. As one example, keep in mind that during the Dover trial, Miller testified that at its peak usage, students in "more than 200 colleges and universities around the country" read his early textbooks like this one. (Day 1 am testimony, pg. 41) Yet Darwinists are now denying that any of the ideas in these textbooks, shown here before your very eyes, have ever been promoted in modern textbooks.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:05 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Readers of Evolution News and Views will no doubt be familiar with the decision by Gregory L. Geoffroy, the president of Iowa State University, to deny tenure to Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, an assistant professor and pro-I.D astronomer. It is obvious that Dr. Gonzalez, who was extraordinarily qualified for tenure, was denied tenure because of his pro-I.D. views.

One hundred and twenty Iowa State faculty members signed a petition denouncing Dr. Gonzalez’ viewpoints, and he was opposed by his department chairman and several faculty members who have made their bias against intelligent design scientists clear in public statements.

Ironically, we owe much of our modern understanding of the universe to pro-intelligent design astronomers. Georges Lemaitre was the astrophysicst who pioneered the Big Bang Theory. Fr. Lemaitre (above, with Einstein) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, honorary prelate, and a professor of physics and astronomy. He famously described the moment of the Big Bang as “the day without yesterday”, referring to the first day of creation in Genesis, and he was explicit in his belief in the evidence for God’s design in the universe. His Big Bang theory met with considerable opposition because of its religious implications.

Would a young Georges Lemaitre get tenure at Iowa State today?

The bias against Dr. Gonzalez has made it clear that scientists who think that there is evidence for design in the universe need not apply for tenure at Iowa State University. That would mean that Fr. Lemaitre, not to mention Nicholas Copernicus (a Catholic cleric), Galileo (a devout Catholic who saw the cosmos as God’s handiwork), Albert Einstein ("I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists…” ) , Arthur Stanley Eddington (pioneer astrophysicist and devout Quaker), and countless other physicists and astronomers who have explicitly acknowledged that they see intelligent design in the universe just don’t pass Iowa State’s ideological litmus test.

Dr. Gonzalez, by believing that there is evidence for intelligent design in the universe, is in very good company. It seems that scientists like Dr. Gonzalez and Fr. Lemaitre who see design in the universe are persona non-grata on Iowa State’s faculty.

Please contact Iowa State University President Gregory L. Geoffroy (515-294 -2042 or president@iastate.edu) and ask him to reverse his decision to deny Dr. Gonzalez tenure. Iowa State should foster integrity and scholarship, not ideological bigotry, in science.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 12:05 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Fundamental to the argument of many Darwinists against intelligent design theory in biology is the assertion that design in biology is undetectable. Darwinists argue that biological design is undetectable because, while we have experience with ‘designers’ in archeology, forensic science, etc., we have no experience with designers in biology, and thus cannot reliably detect the work of a biological designer. Intelligent design proponents reply that there are reliable criteria that indicate design, regardless of whether we have actual knowledge of the designer.

Without doubt, the detection of design is of primary importance in many fields of science, such as archeology, forensic science, cryptography, and bioterrorism. And the detection of design is at least theoretically possible even if we have no experience with the designer. The design inference is the scientific basis for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, in which investigators search for signal patterns that imply intelligent agency amid the dense background of naturally occurring signals in the cosmos. Despite our lack of experience with extraterrestrial intelligence, we assume, reasonably, that we could detect at least some design in signals sent from intelligent agents.

In the field of archeology, a remarkable discovery has shed light on the scientific validity of the inference to design when we have no knowledge of the designer. In 1900, divers exploring a 1st century B.C. shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera found a coral-encrusted device the size of a small laptop computer that was clearly part of the 2000 year-old ship’s cargo. Further examination of this device, called the Antikythera mechanism, including x-ray and CT studies, shows it to be a remarkable assembly of precisely designed gears. Many scientists believe that it was a device for predicting eclipses and planetary motion, but its precise function is still a mystery. Its resemblance to an analog computer is striking (an x-ray image is shown above). Archeologists believe that the technology to produce such a device didn’t emerge until at least the 14th century A.D. They have no evidence as to who designed it, and no evidence even of who could have designed it. Yet the inference to design is obvious, and no archeologist doubts that it is a designed artifact. Design can be inferred from an artifact alone, regardless of the obscurity or the implausibility of a designer.

Living things are full of nanotechnology that greatly exceeds the complexity and the specificity of the Antikythera mechanism. In any other field of science, such technology would be recognized as the product of intelligent design. The Darwinian mechanism of random mutation and natural selection has never been shown experimentally to be capable of producing such remarkable specified complexity. Although the philosophical implications of the design inference in biology are profound in comparison with the implications of the design inference in the Antikythera mechanism, we can infer design in both situations. The reverse engineering approaches to studying the Antikythera mechanism can be applied to biology as well.

Although we have no direct scientific knowledge of the designers of either the Antikythera mechanism or of the nanotechnology in living cells, the inference to design, by analogy to modern human design, is reasonable and is valid scientific methodology.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 2:10 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

He's a young astronomer with dozens of articles in top journals; he has made an important discovery in the field of extrasolar planets; and he is a proponent of intelligent design, the idea that an intelligent force has shaped the Universe. It's that last fact that Guillermo Gonzalez thinks has cost him his tenure at Iowa State University.

Gonzalez's early career was far from controversial. He graduated with a PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1993 and did a postdoc at the University of Texas in Austin. "He proved himself very quickly," says David Lambert, director of the university's MacDonald Observatory. He and Gonzalez co-authored several papers on variable stars, and Lambert says that while there, the young Cuban immigrant was an impressive scientist. "He is one of the best postdocs I have had," he says.

Unfortunately, some scientists are quite proud to support the dogmatic trampling of Gonzalez's academic freedom at Iowa State University (ISU).

"I would have voted to deny him tenure," says Robert Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park. "He has established that he does not understand the scientific process."

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Action Item
Help Guillermo Gonzalez in his fight for academic freedom. Contact ISU President Gregory L. Geoffroy at (515) 294-2042 or email him at president@iastate.edu and let him know that you support academic freedom for Dr. Gonzalez to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

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"We were starting to see Iowa State mentioned as a place where intelligent-design research was happening," says Hector Avalos, a religious-studies professor who helped lead the signature drive. "We wanted to make sure that people knew the university does not support intelligent design." Avalos adds that they did not name Gonzalez directly, and he takes no position on the astronomer's tenure.

"There is a pattern happening to everybody who's pro intelligent design," says one pro-design biologist, who declined to be named because his own tenure process has just begun. "The same thing could happen to me," he says. "I don't want to get into trouble."

Eli Rosenberg, who chairs Iowa State's physics department, concedes that Gonzalez's belief in intelligent design did come up during the tenure process. "I'd be a fool if I said it was not [discussed]," he says.

But not all scientists agree. "Nothing I have seen in his refereed papers leads me to believe his beliefs are impinging on his science," says David Lambert. "I would have said he was a serious tenure candidate."

UPDATE 4:25PM PST:
Dr. Gonzalez is out of the country speaking at a university but was reached via e-mail today with news about the Nature article. He responded as follows:

The reporter is not correct to say that I am appealing on the grounds of my religious belief. That is absolutely false. I specifically told a representative of the President's office last week that I am not appealing the tenure decision on the grounds of religious discrimination.

Regarding the second quote [that "He considers himself a 'sceptic' of Darwin, and says that his Christianity helps him to understand Earth's position in the Universe"], it is not something I said. I said something like, "ID research can have positive religious implications". The way he phrased it, it might be interpreted to mean that I employ my Christian beliefs to force fit the data into a Christian mold. My ID research is strictly based on observations; it does not depend on any religious assumptions, Christian or otherwise. Neither do we discuss religious aspects in our Privileged Planet book.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 12:17 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In my previous post on bloggers who were intolerant of ID-proponents in the academy, I highlighted University of Minnesota biologist P.Z. Myers’ admission that, "if someone comes up [for tenure] who claims that ID 'theory' is science, I will vote against them." But Myers isn’t the only example; other influential Darwinist scientists and other academics have made similar comments. Jason Rosenhouse, assistant professor of mathematics at James Madison University, asks, if we "assume that Gonzalez's ID advocacy played a significant role in the school's decision," then "[i]s that a bad thing?" His answer is clear: "No, it isn't." Rosenhouse explains how he believes it is reasonable to be intolerant of ID-proponents in the academy:

In my view it is perfectly appropriate to deny tenure to someone you reasonably believe is going to devote much of his career to the professional advocacy of pseudoscience.

Indeed, Dr. Rosenhouse displays no real commitment to academic freedom. He refers to academic freedom as "a vague notion" that probably doesn't apply to non-tenured faculty because "[t]he whole point of tenure is to give you academic freedom … You have to earn academic freedom ... by not spending your pre-tenure years aligning yourself with groups hostile to the sort of work your department does." In his view, academic freedom is gained by agreeing with the establishment. (Note: Evidently the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) disagrees with Rosenhouse: "During the probationary period a teacher should have the academic freedom that all other members of the faculty have." (AAUP Policy Tenth Ed.2 10/26/06).)

But Rosenhouse suggests that if you happen to come to a conclusion in your work that is unpopular among your department, you do not have the freedom to remain as an academic. If that view isn't a little disturbing, consider how Rosenhouse explicitly states that there should be no academic freedom when "your opinions are so at odds with the facts or your arguments are so easily refuted that no abstract principle can or should protect you." What Rosenhouse is saying is that academic freedom grants merely the freedom to generally agree with everyone else in your department. Is that really "freedom"?

Admitting Intolerance, But Not Justifying It
Another influential Darwinist, blogger Ed Brayton, has himself acknowledged that anti-ID viewpoints very likely negatively impact ID-proponents during tenure evaluations, admitting, “My point is not that ID didn't have anything to do with being denied tenure; it may well have had quite a bit to do with him being denied tenure. … Publicly espousing an idea rejected by 99% of those in your field is almost certainly going to have an effect on how your colleagues view you…" (emphasis added)

In the same discussion, North Carolina State University biologist Reed Cartwright justified viewpoint discrimination against ID proponents by stating, “I think it is reasonable to hypothesize that Gonzalez's connection to the Discovery Institute did him no favors. If there were any faculty members, who were knowledgeable about Behe and Lehigh, they might have formed the opinion that granting tenure to Gonzalez was risky.” Brayton and Cartwright have accurately described the fact that intolerant behavior weighs heavily during tenure evaluations, but have they actually justified this behavior?

Fortunately, the constricted view of academic freedom favored by these Darwinists has not been adopted in the official standards at Iowa State University. In fact, ISU is supposed to uphold a strong commitment to academic freedom, as its faculty handbook claims that academic freedom is “the freedom … to explore all avenues of scholarship, research, and creative expression” and ISU claims that “[a]cademic freedom is the foundation of the university because it encourages and guarantees the right to inquiry, discourse, and learning that characterize a community of scholars.” (emphasis added)

Apparently this "foundation of the university" does not truly matter to some leading and influential Darwinist academics.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 11:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

At the heart of the attacks on Iowa State University astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez is the book The Privileged Planet, which he co-authored with Jay Richards. We now know that Gonzalez's authorship of this book played a role in his denial of tenure. It also provoked more than 120 of Gonzalez's faculty colleagues to sign a petition in 2005 denouncing intelligent design and urging all other faculty members to do the same. Ironically, the book has garnered praise from an impressive list of scientists, including some prominent supporters of biological evolution. Consider just a few of The Privileged Planet's endorsements and ask yourself whether the ideas raised in this book presented any kind of valid reason for removing Gonzalez from his university:

Is our universe a blind concatenation of atoms, evolution a random walk across a meaningless landscape, and our sense of purpose a pathetic shield against a supremely indifferent world? Or does the universe and our place within it click into place, repeatedly? These starkly different views open up immense metaphysical and theological questions, and at least part of the answer must come from science and the unfolding triumphs of cosmology, astronomy, and evolution.

In a book of magnificent sweep and daring Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards drive home the arguments that the old cliché of no place like home is eerily true of Earth. Not only that, but if the scientific method was to emerge anywhere, the Earth is about as suitable as you can get. Gonzalez and Richards have flung down the gauntlet. Let the debate begin; it is a question that involves us all.
Simon Conway Morris
Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology, University of Cambridge
Author of Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe

This thoughtful, delightfully contrarian book will rile up those who believe the ‘Copernican principle’ is an essential philosophical component of modern science. Is our universe designedly congenial to intelligent, observing life? Passionate advocates of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) will find much to ponder in this carefully documented analysis.
Owen Gingerich
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Author of The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus

Not only have Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards written a book with a remarkable thesis, they have constructed their argument on an abundance of evidence and with a cautiousness of statement that make their volume even more remarkable. In my opinion, their Privileged Planet deserves very careful attention.
Michael J. Crowe
Cavanaugh Professor Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame
Author of The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750-1900

Impressively researched and lucidly written, The Privileged Planet will surely rattle if not finally dislodge a pet assumption held by many interpreters of modern science: the so-called Copernican Principle (which isn’t actually very Copernican!). But Gonzalez and Richards’ argument, though controversial, is so carefully and moderately presented that any reasonable critique of it must itself address the astonishing evidence which has for so long somehow escaped our notice. I therefore expect this book to renew—and to raise to a new level—the whole scientific and philosophic debate about earth’s cosmic significance. It is a high class piece of work that deserves the widest possible audience.
Dennis Danielson
Professor of English, University of British Columbia
Editor, The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking

In this fascinating and highly original book, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards advance a persuasive argument, and marshal a wealth of diverse scientific evidence to justify that argument. In the process, they effectively challenge several popular assumptions, not only about the nature and history of science, but also about the nature and origin of the cosmos. The Privileged Planet will be impossible to ignore. It is likely to change the way we view both the scientific enterprise and the world around us. I recommend it highly.
Philip Skell
Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Physics, Pennsylvania State University
Member, National Academy of Sciences

This new book is an excellent and timely contribution to the broadening and increasingly important discussion of origins.
Henry F. Schaefer III
Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry
Director, Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry, University of Georgia
Five-Time Nobel Prize Nominee

Posted by Robert Crowther at 12:05 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

United States Senator and Republican presidential candidate Sam Brownback (R-KS) has issued a forceful statement expressing alarm over the denial of tenure to pro-intelligent design astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State University. According to Sen. Brownback, “such an assault on academic freedom does not bode well for the advancement of true science.”

Obviously, the Gonzalez case is not a partisan issue, and surveys show that the vast majority of Americans of both major parties as well as independents support academic freedom for learning about intelligent design. Let’s hope that officials from across the political spectrum begin standing up for Gonzalez’s academic freedom. Iowa State University is a government-funded institution, and it is ultimately accountable to the taxpayers that fund it as well as the citizens who pay tuition. Thus, it is perfectly appropriate for public officials to express their concern that ISU live up to its own standards of academic freedom as well as the guarantees of the First Amendment.

The full text of Brownback’s statement is reprinted below, taken from Brownback’s website:

Brownback Alarmed by Tenure Denial in Iowa

"Such an assault on academic freedom does not bode well for the advancement of true science."

DES MOINES, Ia— U.S. Senator Sam Brownback, Republican candidate for President, today commented on the denial of tenure to Iowa State University Professor Guillermo Gonzales.

"When I was informed that Professor Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure, I was puzzled given his excellent academic record of achievement and faithful service. I understand that now two of Dr. Gonzalez's colleagues have indicated that Gonzalez's interest in intelligent design theory was, at least in part, responsible for this denial of tenure. This is rather alarming."

Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez is currently an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Iowa State University, and has authored more than 65 scientific papers and articles. Dr. Gonzalez developed the concept of the Galactic Habitable Zone and co-authored "The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery, which was published in 2004." The Privileged Planet provides scientific evidence for intelligent design theory, which challenges neo-Darwinism's claim that the development of the universe is the result of an unpredictable and purposeless process. Intelligent design theory rather explores recent discoveries in the fields of physics, cosmology, biochemistry, genetics, and paleontology that logically point to an intelligent cause in the development of life and the cosmos.

Brownback continued, "Observation, testing, and the development of reasonable hypotheses have long been integral to good science. Scholars, such as Professor Guillermo Gonzales, ought not to be intimidated nor silenced by those in the academic community who would rather dismiss a well-reasoned hypothesis than debate it on its merits. Such an assault on academic freedom does not bode well for the advancement of true science."

Posted by John West at 1:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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Action Item: Help Guillermo Gonzalez in his fight for academic freedom. Contact ISU President Gregory L. Geoffroy at (515) 294-2042 or email him at president@iastate.edu and let him know that you support academic freedom for Dr. Gonzalez to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

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This week McCarroll is being quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education asserting that "Tenure review only deals with his [Gonzalez’s] work since he came to Iowa State."

Wrong again. There is nothing in ISU’s applicable tenure standards that says that articles published prior to coming to ISU somehow don’t count. (By the way, even if McCaroll’s claim happened to be true, it shouldn’t matter, because Gonzalez has produced 21 peer-reviewed journal articles since coming to ISU, which is still significantly more than the 15 peer-reviewed articles that are supposed to demonstrate research excellence in his department). ISU is obviously getting desperate in its effort to discredit Gonzalez. If I were in their shoes, I guess I would be too. How do you defend the denial of tenure to someone who has produced 68 peer-reviewed journal articles, exceeding by 350% his own department’s standard for excellence in research needed for tenure?

Yesterday we sent an e-mail to Mr. McCarroll asking him to justify his latest bogus claim by citing for us the applicable language in the Faculty Handbook or departmental tenure standards. He has not responded.

Posted by John West at 11:59 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

While Iowa State University denied tenure this spring to gifted pro-ID astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, it turns out that it decided at the same time to promote to full professor outspoken atheist Hector Avalos, religious studies professor and faculty adviser to the ISU Atheist and Agnostic Society. Avalos has led the charge against Gonzalez and intelligent design on ISU's campus, helping to draft a 2005 petition denouncing intelligent design that ultimately was signed by more than 120 ISU faculty.

Apparently ISU professors who are horrified by the supposed mixing of metaphysics and scholarship on the part of ID proponents have no qualms about supporting Avalos's explicit anti-religious propaganda, including his effort to equate the Bible with Hitler's Mein Kampf (for more on Avalos's view of the Bible, see below). It is worth pointing out that ISU issued a press release a few years ago boasting about Avalos's appointment as the executive director of a group affiliated with the Council for Secular Humanism that seeks to debunk religion.

Avalos's promotion to full professor comes just in time for the publication of his new book on the Bible later this month. According to the publisher's description, Avalos argues in the book

that our world is best served by leaving the Bible as a relic of an ancient civilization instead of the "living" document most religionist scholars believe it should be. He urges his colleagues to concentrate on educating the broader society to recognize the irrelevance and even violent effects of the Bible in modern life.

Just how extreme Avalos's view of the Bible is can be seen in his previous book, Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence (2005), in which he repeatedly equates the Bible with Hitler's Mein Kampf. Indeed, in a section of the book titled "Scripture: A Zero-Tolerance Argument," Avalos actually suggests that the Bible is worse than Mein Kampf:

In fact, Mein Kampf does not contain a single explicit command for genocide equivalent to those found in the Hebrew Bible... Thus, if all of Mein Kampf is to be rejected simply for its implied genocidal policies, we should certainly reject all of the Bible for some of its explicit and blatant genocidal policies. [p. 363]

At other points, Avalos appears to blame Jewish people for Hitler's attempt to exterminate them, locating the origins of the Holocaust in what he calls "Hebrew racism." Consider the following passages:

"The purpose here is to show that the Nazi policy of genocide was based on premises quite similar to those in the Hebrew Bible." [p. 316]

"the Nazi Holocaust represents the synthesis of attitudes found in both the New Testament and the Hebrew scriptures." [p. 318]

"[Scholars Katz and Wolpoff] fail to see the parallels between certain practices promulgated in the Hebrew Bible itself. Indeed, the supreme irony of the Holocaust is that the genocidal policies first systematically enunciated in the Hebrew scriptures were reversed by the Nazis. Nazi ideology simply had better technology to do what biblical authors had said they would do to their enemies." [pp. 318-319]

"Hitler saw himself as trying to counteract Hebrew racism, which he saw as the main counterpart and enemy of the German race." [p. 319]

As if these statements were not enough, Prof. Avalos has equated creationism with Nazism, denounced religion-inspired acts of love, and even suggested that we "eliminate religion from human life altogether":

"Nazi ideology is similar to creationist ideology, which believes that scientific findings support the biblical stories of Creation and the Flood." [p. 318]

"any act of love based on religion is immoral." [p. 369]

"Mother Teresa... advocated policies that helped to generate the very pool of poor people she was attempting to help. Religious beliefs are largely responsible for arguments against contraception, which helps to perpetuate poverty and conflicts over scarce resources. So in the end, did Mother Teresa help more people than were harmed by her religious belief?" [p. 370]

"until the Abrahamic religions overthrow the master-slave model in which they were born, we see little progress to be made. Since all religious beliefs are ultimately unverifiable, the greatest scarce resource of all is verifiability. And one way to remedy or minimize unverifiability in any decision-making process, especially that leading to violence, is to eliminate religion from human life altogether." [p. 371, emphasis added]

Iowa taxpayers can be relieved to know that ISU is making sure their tax dollars will be spent on worthy scholars like Prof. Avalos rather than disreputable astronomers like Dr. Gonzalez.

Posted by John West at 1:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

An article today by Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Richard Monastersky reveals new evidence that further strengthens the case that pro-ID astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure at Iowa State University on illegitimate grounds, although Monastersky does his best to downplay the evidence through spin and speculation.

According to Monastersky, data from a prestigious Smithsonian/NASA astrophysics database show that Gonzalez has the highest rating for citations to his work of anyone in his department: “Mr. Gonzalez has a normalized h-index of 13,” the second highest in his department. The fact that Gonzalez—an Assistant Professor—is ranked higher than almost every other member of his department, including full tenured professors, is incredible.

Even the originator of the h-index rating (physicist Jorge Hirsch) concedes the point: “Under normal circumstances, Mr. Gonzalez's publication record would be stellar and would warrant his earning tenure at most universities, according to Mr. Hirsch.” (emphasis added) Hirsch's assessment especially would seem to be true at a university like ISU, where the approval rate for tenure applications was 91% in 2007!

But then comes the spin.

Although Hirsch acknowledges “he has not studied Mr. Gonzalez's work in detail and is not an expert on his tenure case,” that doesn’t stop him from ill-informed speculation: “It's not clear that he started new things, or anything on his own, in the period he was an assistant professor at Iowa State." (How the heck would Hirsch know, if "he has not studied Mr. Gonzalez's work in detail"?) The same kind of speculation is offered by David L. Lambert, who supervised some of Gonzalez’s postdoctoral work in the 1990s, and admits that it was good. But he adds that "I don't know what else he has done” (emphasis added) since arriving at Iowa State. So now professed ignorance of Gonzalez’s work is apparently considered adequate grounds for dismissing it.

Buried in Monastersky’s article is additional information that places these attacks on Gonzalez in a different light:

Mr. Gonzalez's publication record, however, does list 21 papers since 2002, many in top journals. "It looks to me like discrimination," said one astronomer, who did not want to be named, fearing a backlash for speaking up in favor of an intelligent-design proponent. "They can't say that he doesn't have a decent publication record, because he absolutely does," said the astronomer of Mr. Gonzalez's scholarship.

Mr. Gonzalez also published a textbook, through Cambridge University Press, that is being used by other faculty members in the department.

In other words, even if one counts only the articles Gonzalez has published since 2002 (the year after he came to ISU), he still has produced significantly more papers than the 15 needed to fulfill the benchmark for research excellence specified by his own department’s tenure standards. He also has co-authored a refereed astronomy textbook published by Cambridge University Press that is used by faculty in his own department.

Thus, the insinuation that Gonzalez has somehow become unproductive as a scholar since coming to ISU is utterly false. It is true that he has published fewer peer-reviewed articles each year while at ISU than he did as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington. But that is perfectly normal. A postdoctoral researcher who has no teaching obligations obviously can produce more journal articles per year than someone who must teach classes and engage in various forms of university service. The relevant fact is that Gonzalez has continued to produce multiple new peer-reviewed journal articles each year, even while co-authoring a major college astronomy textbook, and even while teaching his classes and fulfilling the normal requirements for university service at ISU. It is notable that Gonzalez’s department nominated him for an “early achievement” award in research at ISU in 2004. Significantly, that nomination came before the controversy erupted on campus over the publication of The Privileged Planet.

Of course, intelligent design had nothing to do with Gonzalez's denial of tenure. Keep repeating that statement 100 times and perhaps someone will believe it.

[UPDATED on May 28, 2007 at 9:26 am. Article originally reported that Gonzalez had highest h-index in department based on Chronicle of Higher Education report; but Chronicle erred in its calculations and posted an updated calculation here.]

Posted by John West at 3:54 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I recently read Carl Zimmer’s response to my critique of his November, 2006 article in National Geographic. In this post I will discuss Zimmer’s response to me regarding embryology and developmental biology. The embryonic hourglass is the idea that vertebrate embryos (like those of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) start off developing very differently, converge with some similarities at the pharyngular stage, and then again diverge. I stated in my original article that “vertebrate embryos start off quite differently,” but that “Zimmer's diagram selectively displays embryos from the encircled stage where they are most similar.” The implication is that this falsifies the idea that evolution proceeds by tacking on new stages of development because these vertebrate groups start off with different forms of development from their very beginning.

Zimmer justifies his exclusion of the differences between earlier stages where embryos are different by arguing that the embryonic hourglass is an imaginary idea, stating: "As fellow scienceblogger PZ Myers has clearly explained, the differences in the earliest stages are superficial." But are the early embryonic differences truly just "superficial"? As Richardson et al. explain:

According to recent models, not only is the putative conserved stage followed by divergence, but it is preceded by variation at earlier stages, including gastrulation and neurulation. This is seen for example in squamata, where variations in patterns of gastrulation and neurulation may be followed by a rather similar somite stage (Hubert 1985). Thus the relationship between evolution and development has come to be modelled as an “evolutionary hourglass” (Fig. 1; Elinson 1987; Duboule 1994; Collins 1995).

Table: Demonstration that Other Developmental Biologists Have Similarly Promoted the Embryonic Hourglass, where Vertebrate Embryos Start Off Very Differently:

The Embryonic Hourglass According to Richardson et al., “There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in the vertebrates: implications for current theories of evolution and development,” Anatomy and Embryology, (1997) 196:91–106.	The Embryonic Hourglass According to Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution: Why Much of What We Teach about Evolution is Wrong (Regnery, 2000).

Clearly I am not inventing the evolutionary hourglass, despite any suggestions that Zimmer might make in that direction. Yet Zimmer tries to minimize the differences between early vertebrates during development, stating:

In many cases, the difference is simply whether an embryos develops as a mass of cells, or a mass of cells sitting atop a yolk. Whatever the differences in how the earliest embryos look, they undergo the same core steps of development, known as gastrulation. And the same genes control that process. In other words, what we see in the earliest stages of vertebrate embryos today are variations on an ancestral theme.

Zimmer then claims that such genetic similarity implies "variations on an ancestral theme" or "the standard evolutionary process." That's one way to view it, or perhaps the "variations on a theme" implies exactly what we might expect from a creative designer. Yet another pro-ID embryologist friend sent me the following regarding differences in vertebrate embryos prior to the pharyngular stage:

For one thing the cleavage patterns are very different. For instance, both amphibians and mammals have holoblastic cleavage (where the entire egg mass is divided up) but cleavage) but mammals division pattern is rotational where the amphibian is radial (pictures help here) Also, mammals separate cells to become the amnion, chorion and blastocyst whereas amphibians don't. Fish, reptiles and birds alternatively have meroblastic or incomplete cleavage (where a large portion of the egg mass is left as a big yolk that the embryo develops on top of) but there are differences here too.

Recent workers have shown that early development can vary quite extensively (Raff et al., 1991), even within closely related species, such as sea urchins (Raff et al., 1991; Wray and McClay, 1989), amphibians (Collazo, 1990; Elinson, 1987), and vertebrates in general (Elinson, 1987). By early development, I refer to those stages from fertilization through neurolation (gastrulation for such taxa as sea urchins, which do not undergo neurulation). Elinson (1987) has shown how such early stages as initial cleavages and gastrula can vary quite extensively across vertebrates.

(Andres Collazo, “Developmental Variation, Homology, and the Pharyngula Stage,” Syst. Biol. 49(1):3-18, 2000, emphasis added.)

Convergent Evolution and Evo-Devo
Finally, Zimmer tries to give a convincing account of evo-devo by noting that the same genes control growth of various limb-buds:

[M]any of the same genes are at work in fins, hands, and wings. The differences emerge thanks to the differences in when and where in the limb bud the genes produce their proteins. This is precisely the sort of evolution scientists are talking about when they refer to tinkering with genes that control development.

Zimmer’s article focuses on vertebrate development. But the case for intelligent design in limb-bud controlling genes gets stronger when one realizes that the same regulatory genes are used to control limb growth in organisms far more diverse than vertebrates: mammals, urochordates, sea urchins, insects, annelid worms, and onycophorans, all use a similar regulatory gene to control limb growth. But they have radically different types of limbs, making this either a case of radically extreme “convergent evolution” or simple common design. (See Paul Nelson and Jonathan Wells, “Homology in Biology,” in Darwinism, Design, and Public Education (Michigan State University Press, 2003), pg. 316.) As plant geneticist from the Max Plank Institute, Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, wrote in Dynamical Genetics, "No theorist in evolutionary biology will ever derive chicken and insects from a winged common ancestor, and yet, clearly related sequences are specifically expressed in wing buds and imaginal disks." Can Zimmer's hypothesis account for such extreme convergence? Or perhaps again, Zimmer knows something most other biologists don't know.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 2:56 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

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Action Item: Help Guillermo Gonzalez in his fight for academic freedom. Contact ISU President Gregory L. Geoffroy at (515) 294-2042 or email him at president@iastate.edu and let him know that you support academic freedom for Dr. Gonzalez to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

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As reported last week, two members of the department that denied tenure to astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State University (ISU) have publicly admitted that Gonzalez's work on intelligent design played a role in his denial of tenure. Two additional members of the department have been connected to a National Center for Science Education statement denouncing intelligent design as "creationist pseudoscience." Yet these new facts haven't stopped Iowa State or its defenders from continuing to promote the idea that nothing was amiss in Gonzalez's tenure process.

ISU's spin is conspicuous for its avoidance of what should be a central question in the Gonzalez case, namely: Given the poisoned atmosphere regarding intelligent design on the ISU campus, what specific steps did the ISU administration take to ensure that Prof. Gonzalez was treated fairly during the evaluation and promotion process?

It should have been obvious to ISU administrators that Prof. Gonzalez would likely face discrimination during his tenure process given the hostile work environment he had experienced. After the book and video The Privileged Planet came out, more than 120 of his faculty colleagues signed a petition “reject[ing] all attempts to represent Intelligent Design as a scientific endeavor,” and “urg[ing] all faculty members to uphold the integrity of our university of science and technology... and reject efforts to portray Intelligent Design as science.” (emphasis added) The demand that “all faculty members... uphold the integrity” of ISU by repudiating intelligent design was practically an invitation to deny tenure to Dr. Gonzales in the name of defending the university’s reputation. Dr. Gonzalez was further demonized through anti-intelligent design events held on ISU’s campus, including a forum specifically set up to denounce Dr. Gonzalez and The Privileged Planet.

Again, given the hostile environment toward the intelligent design viewpoint at ISU, a university administration genuinely committed to academic freedom and diversity of thought would have taken measures to try to ensure that the tenure process was based on valid criteria and not tainted by the ideological litmus tests of campus Darwinists.

So what exactly did the ISU administration do to ensure Gonzalez’s fair treatment? Did it specifically instruct all faculty evaluators that they should not take into consideration Dr. Gonzalez’s intelligent design views in their tenure evaluation? If not, why not? If so, well then, let’s see the evidence--the actual memos and meeting notes where these instructions were supposed to have been given. Unlike the rationale for why Dr. Gonzalez was denied tenure, information about what measures (if any) the ISU administration adopted to ensure a fair tenure process for Dr. Gonzalez should not be confidential and should be presented to the public.

Posted by John West at 12:10 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Following his May 16 piece, Lawrence Selden has more incisive commentary on the Guillermo Gonzalez denial of tenure scandal at Iowa State University:

Is the faculty at Iowa State University intellectually insecure? The statement of two years ago signed by 120 members of the faculty perhaps suggests that, especially when compared with the actions of other schools and faculties. I wonder if they are afraid that others will think they are backward country bumpkins for allowing someone who is interested in exploring intelligent design on the faculty.

Harvard University is not ashamed of Owen Gingerich, who had this to say about Gonzalez' book The Privileged Planet:

This thoughtful, delightfully contrarian book will rile up those who believe the ‘Copernican principle’ is an essential philosophical component of modern science. Is our universe designedly congenial to intelligent, observing life? Passionate advocates of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) will find much to ponder in this carefully documented analysis.

The University of Cambridge is not ashamed of Simon Conway Morris, who had this to say:

Is our universe a blind concatenation of atoms, evolution a random walk across a meaningless landscape, and our sense of purpose a pathetic shield against a supremely indifferent world? Or does the universe and our place within it click into place, repeatedly? These starkly different views open up immense metaphysical and theological questions, and at least part of the answer must come from science and the unfolding triumphs of cosmology, astronomy, and evolution.

In a book of magnificent sweep and daring Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards drive home the arguments that the old cliché of no place like home is eerily true of Earth. Not only that, but if the scientific method was to emerge anywhere, the Earth is about as suitable as you can get. Gonzalez and Richards have flung down the gauntlet. Let the debate begin; it is a question that involves us all.

... Are these schools not ashamed because they are clearly more academically respected and more intellectually secure than Iowa State?

Selden's full post is here.

Posted by Jonathan Witt at 12:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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Action Item: Help Guillermo Gonzalez in his fight for academic freedom. Contact ISU President Gregory L. Geoffroy at (515) 294-2042 or email him at president@iastate.edu and let him know that you support academic freedom for Dr. Gonzalez to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

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The big story this week was the denial of tenure to widely-published pro-ID astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State University, despite the fact that he exceeded by 350% his department’s standard for research excellence in peer-reviewed publications. Here is a recap of the key developments in the case during the past week:

1. Two tenured professors in Gonzalez’s department publicly admitted that his work on intelligent design played a role in his tenure denial.

2. Two additional faculty members in Gonzalez’s department were found to be connected to a national statement denouncing intelligent design as “creationist pseudoscience.”

3. Tenure statistics were obtained showing that 91% of faculty who applied for tenure this year at ISU received it, refuting the university’s claim earlier in the week that its tenure standards are “so high, that many good researchers have failed to satisfy the demands of earning tenure” at ISU.

4. Tenure standards for ISU's Department of Physics and Astronomy were released showing that outside research funding was not a stated criterion for tenure decisions in the department.

Posted by John West at 11:30 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

All too predictably, during the past week various Darwinists have been trying to divert attention away from the Guillermo Gonzalez tenure case through a campaign of misinformation about both Dr. Gonzalez and intelligent design. Whether they do so knowingly—as a calculated attempt to defame Gonzalez and smear his professional record—or through ignorance isn't always clear. Either way, the truth about Dr. Gonzalez's work and achievements is readily available. (A great place to start is the Biosketch of Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, Astronomer and Asst. Professor at Iowa State University.)

Let's take a look at some of the false facts being tossed around.

False Fact #1: Dr. Gonzalez's Work is about Intelligent Design in Biology.
One commenter on Ed Brayton's blog said, "I suspect that one reason that Gonzales was denied tenure was that he was hired to teach courses, perform research, and seek research grants in the field of astronomy. He was not hired by the biology department to do any of the above in biology (in which by the way he had no competence or training). Since he was apparently more interested in biology then in astronomy, denial of tenure seems perfectly reasonable."

In fact, none of Dr. Gonzalez's work on intelligent design deals with biology. Rather, Dr. Gonzalez’s research detects design in his own area of expertise: physics and cosmology, as the subtitle of his book The Privileged Planet reads, "How our place in the cosmos is designed for discovery." Dr. Gonzalez's work on ID deals almost singularly with cosmic design, not biological design.

False Fact #2: Dr. Gonzalez Doesn't Have Many Published Peer-Reviewed Papers.
Another commenter wrote, "I'm posting the 17 papers that ISI knowledge returns when I searched," and this comment was then linked from Pandas Thumb by someone who similarly wrote, "See here for a review of Gonzalez’ publication record." This led to later statements from misinformed commenters, like “This really is a straightforward case - Gonzalez doesn’t have a leg to stand on. It is dishonest of the DI to say that he outperformed by 350% ISU expectations." However, Dr. Gonzalez has many more than 17 publications—68 refereed papers to be exact. In fact, a fair comparison yields even more publications from Dr. Gonzalez: the 17 publications listed by this Darwinist included non-refereed papers. When both Dr. Gonzalez's refereed and non-refereed papers are counted, he has published over 95 publications, as is reflected in this listing of his publications.

False Fact #3: Dr. Gonzalez's Research Has Not Been Cited Often.
The same commenter who claimed Dr. Gonzalez had published a mere 17 papers also claimed that many of the papers had extremely low citation rates. As we explain in the Biosketch of Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, Astronomer and Asst. Professor at Iowa State University, "His work has been cited in Science, Nature, and many other scientific journals. All told, there were nearly 1,500 citations to his articles and research in science journals by the end of 2005." This is an astoundingly high citation rate for a scientist so young in his career. It is worth noting that Dr. Robert J. Marks, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University stated:

"My jaw dropped when I saw one of his papers has 153 citations and 139 on another. I have sat on oodles of tenure committees at both a large private university and a state research university, chaired the university tenure committee, and have seen more tenure cases than the Pope has Cardinals. This is a LOT of citations for an assistant professor up for tenure."

False Fact #4: The Only Publications that Matter are the Ones Published Since Joining ISU.
Some commenters seemed to operate under the assumption that the only publications that should be counted are the ones published by the tenure applicant since joining ISU. But this is not what tenure guidelines for the Department of Physics and Astronomy state: "For promotion to associate professor, excellence sufficient to lead to a national or international reputation is required and would ordinarily be shown by the publication of approximately fifteen papers of good quality in refereed journals." There is no indication that the publications must be since joining ISU, and the text seems to assume that all publications in the scientist's career are to be counted.

False Fact #5: Dr. Gonzalez Must Have Been Denied Tenure Due to a Lack of Research Grants.
Some commentators have implied that the denial of tenure to Gonzalez was related to a lack of research grants. Yet, as reported here, the tenure standards of Gonzalez's department do not even mention grants as a factor in tenure and promotion—so if this was an issue Dr. Gonzalez's department was disregarding its own standards for tenure. (It should be added that those who have made this claim are merely speculating, because the specifics of Gonzalez's tenure denial are confidential while the denial is on appeal.)

False Fact #6: ISU's Tenure Standards Are So High Even Many Good Researchers Cannot Get Tenure There.
ISU has tried to insist that it is really difficult to get tenure at ISU, but as we revealed earlier this week, the facts contradict this claim. Indeed, the tenure acceptance rate at ISU has risen from 85% in 2003 to 91% in 2007! This hardly shows that it is particularly difficult to get tenure at ISU.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:09 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

With the Guillermo Gonzalez controversy as the background, blogger Lawrence Selden at Darwinian Fundamentalism has written an insightful comparison of Iowa State University and Arizona State University. He concludes:

While Iowa State is trying to shut down creative thinking, Arizona State is reveling in it.

Where would you rather go to school?

An excellent question.

Posted by John West at 12:03 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There has been much unfounded speculation this week about the specific standards governing astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez’s application for tenure at Iowa State University. Some have claimed, for example, that outside research grants must be a primary criterion for tenure at ISU. Unfortunately, the specific tenure and promotion standards adopted by the Department of Physics and Astronomy at ISU have not been available online. So we have decided to make them available for download here so that people can read the standards for themselves. These standards make clear that the key criterion for research excellence in Dr. Gonzalez’s department is the number of refereed papers, not the level of outside funding:

Evaluation of research ability is based primarily upon published papers in refereed journals.... (p. 4)

As for how many published papers are required to demonstrate the “excellence” in research needed for promotion to associate professor with tenure, the standards are clear about the “typical” case:

For promotion to associate professor, excellence sufficient to lead to a national or international reputation is required and would ordinarily be shown by the publication of approximately fifteen papers of good quality in refereed journals.

Dr. Gonzalez, of course, has published 68 refereed articles in peer-reviewed journals, exceeding the normal standard of his department by 350%! Significantly, nowhere do his departmental standards even mention outside research grants as a criterion for promotion or tenure.

This would seem to suggest that research funding could not have been a determinative factor in Dr. Gonzalez’s tenure application. If it was, then his department would have been guilty of ignoring its own published standards and substituting a new ad hoc standard in order to deny his application. If Dr. Gonzalez’s department based its decision on a standard not mentioned in its published criteria, then the decision to deny him tenure would raise important due process and fairness questions. It also would raise the question of why: Why would his department go outside of its official standards? Coming up with ad hoc standards to penalize someone when that person has met the regular standards is a classic technique employed to cover up discrimination.

I should emphasize that since the details of Dr. Gonzalez’s tenure appeal are currently confidential, I am discussing hypothetical scenarios here. Those who have speculated that research funding may have played a role in the Gonzalez decision do not actually know whether this was the case.

What is known is that Dr. Gonzalez clearly exceeded his department’s stated criterion for research excellence: He has published far more than his department’s usual benchmark for refereed articles, his work has been featured in top-line science journals such as Science and Nature, his articles have been widely cited by other scholars, and he even has co-authored a college astronomy textbook published by Cambridge University Press.

This new revelation that his department had no stated requirement for outside research funding adds to the likelihood that his denial was made on improper grounds--either through the direct violation of his academic freedom and free speech rights, or through the application of ad hoc standards outside the stated criteria in order to find a pretext for removing him.

Posted by John West at 3:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

According to a story to be published in the May 26 edition of World Magazine (already available online here), two faculty members of the department that denied tenure to Guillermo Gonzales at Iowa State University have admitted that his work on ID played a role in the denial. While Prof. Eli Rosenberg, Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, insisted to the magazine that intelligent design "was not an overriding factor" (emphasis added), he then conceded according to the magazine that Gonzalez's pro-ID book The Privileged Planet "played into the decision-making process. He also explained that the reputation of a professor among others in his field is a significant factor." Of course, if "reputation" is used as a code word for whether one's views are popular among fellow scientists, then this is another way anti-ID bias entered into the decision.

But Rosenberg is not the only department member who admitted that intelligent design played a role in the tenure decision.

ISU astronomy professor Curtis Struck told World that he was not surprised at the denial of tenure to Gonzales because "[h]e includes some things in his astronomy resumé that other people regard as taking a coincidence too far." Struck was obviously referring to Gonzalez's arguments for intelligent design.

Struck's comments mean that at least three of the five tenured astronomers in Gonzalez's department have now been tied to anti-ID bias. As noted earlier this week, another tenured astronomer in the department signed a statement circulated by the National Center for Science Education denouncing intelligent design as "creationist pseudoscience," while the husband of a third astronomy professor signed the same statement.

Despite his own admission, Prof. Rosenberg tried to do damage control by claiming that there was something deficient about Dr. Gonzalez's sterling research record: "You take a look at somebody's research record over the six-year probationary period and you get a sense whether this is a strong case. Clearly, this was a case that looked like it might be in trouble." Really? Was Gonzalez somehow derelict in publishing 350% more peer-reviewed publications than his own department's stated standard for research excellence? Or in co-authoring a college astronomy textbook with Cambridge University Press? Or in having his research recognized in Science, Nature, Scientific American, and other top science publications?

It is worth pointing out that in early 2004 Gonzalez's department nominated him for an "Early Achievement in Research" award for an outstanding record in research. So what changed between 2004 and 2006 when Gonzalez submitted his tenure application? Well, 2004 was the year The Privileged Planet was published. Dr. Gonzalez continued to publish peer-reviewed journal articles, and even co-authored the Cambridge University Press textbook in 2006, but his department seems to have soured on him just as the controversy over intelligent design heated up on the ISU campus and around the nation. Coincidence... or design?

Isn't the answer obvious?

Posted by John West at 12:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

It seems like just yesterday that University of Minnesota biologist P.Z. Myers, who runs what Nature declared to be the #1 science blog, admitted, "I get to vote on tenure decisions at my university, and I can assure you that if someone comes up who claims that ID 'theory' is science, I will vote against them."

As Iowa State University (ISU) has denied tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, possibly due to his views on intelligent design, pro-ID biologist Mike Gene has provided insightful commentary on the situation: "[T]his issue has become larger than Guillermo Gonzalez's situation, so it won't matter when the official reasons for denial are eventually supplied. What matters is that the academics have gone on record and given you a peek behind the closed doors and how they would handle someone who took ID seriously." Gene quotes various pro-Darwin-only voices expressly stating that ID-proponents do not deserve tenure. The intolerant undergraduate I recently highlighted now appears to have been merely the tip of the iceberg.

Let me begin by highlighting the widespread intolerance for intelligent design advocates among the general science community, in this case regular participants at popular science blogs. Later I’ll examine more closely the same sort of intolerance coming from credible scientists and scientific scholars.

"Whackjobs" with "Narcissistic Gall"
One commenter on a Darwinist blog, who claims to be a “psychoanalytically-oriented clinical psychologist,” told "ordinary folks ... who know absolutely nothing” about this issue that they have "narcisstic [sic] gall" if they feel that denying tenure to a highly-published young scientist (who has previously been the target of vicious attacks at his university due to his pro-ID viewpoint) may imply a tinge of unfair intolerance.

Another commenter on Ed Brayton's blog offered free and unsolicited advice for untenured pro-ID faculty… along with some name-calling: "Prof. Gonzales, like Michael Behe, may actually have a decent publication record in respectable journals but Behe waited until after he had tenure before turning into a whackjob."

"Cleansing" an "Embarrassment"
A commenter on Pandas Thumb used similar name-calling while justifying what he called the “clensing [sic] of an embarassment [sic]”:

From my vantage point, it makes a lot of sense why ISU would not grant this guy tenure. I wouldn’t want my alma mater to. Why would ANY science related department want someone on their staff with tenure who clearly supports pseudoscience and is a Fellow of the DI??? Duh!!! This is not a ‘persecution of a critic of Darwinism’. It’s an a [sic] clensing [sic] of an embarassment [sic]."

(http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/05/iowa_state_univ.html#comment-175650)

"And even if his peers at ISU decided he didn't deserve tenure because of his pro-ID ideas, that's not a conspiracy against ID, it's called the sensible protection of the university's reputation by members of the faculty. It would be perfectly justified, in my opinion, to block someone from getting tenure over their ID stance in a science department, because ID isn't science. It's an effort to undermine science. It's denialism."

(Mark Hoffnagle, "Get Off the Damn Cross Already")

"Racis[m]" and "Horsemuffins"
Another one of Brayton’s commenters stated that “[i]f two professors were in contention for one tenured spot, and both were equally qualified but for their differing opinions on evolution vs. ID, you'd be a fool not to choose the one who supported the most credible theory, and pass on the guy who clung to a load of long-debunked horsemuffins.” Apparently this commenter doesn’t care that the pro-evolution viewpoint is already the dominant in the academy, indicating the low value he places on viewpoint diversity. This commenter continued, taking an extremely low road by comparing supporting ID to supporting racism in order to justify a ban on ID proponents:

If his "hobbies" cause damage to the university's standing as an educational institution, then that fact should indeed be questioned and discussed. As a politically-motivated pack of lies, the pseudoscience of ID should be considered just as embarrassing to a university -- or even a kindergarten -- as any pseudoscience used to prop up, say, a racist ideology.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 1:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My friend and colleague John West wrote an essay recently commenting on my post about the link between Darwinism and eugenics. He raised some very important points, with which I agree, and I’d like to clarify my view and clarify our fundamental agreement.

I have pointed out that Darwin’s theory is really a theory of the natural non-purposeful origin of biological complexity. The artificial manipulation of living things, such as breeding, biotechnology, experimental design in microbiology, recombinant DNA research, etc. aren’t related in any meaningful way to Darwin’s theory of natural origins. Everyone knows, and has always known, that living things can be altered by intentionally selecting some living things for breeding and by not breeding others. Illiterate herdsmen in the 10th millennium B.C. had that worked out. Human beings have always known that you can change living things on purpose.

Darwin made a radical claim: that all natural functional biological complexity arose without purpose. He proposed that differential reproduction of organisms that varied accidentally could entirely account for functional biological complexity, such as the structure of the eye, etc.

In the age of molecular biology, the genetic code, and the discovery of molecular machines inside cells, the theory that everything in biology arose without purpose or design is, well, teetering.

Darwinists, recognizing that Darwin’s theory was a bit “evidence lite,” have always tried to inflate the application of Darwin’s actual scientific assertion, which dealt only with natural complexity. They have asserted that all sorts of things—the biotechnology industry, experimental microbiology, antibiotic resistance in bacteria, etc.—are indebted to Darwin’s theory. As examples of purposeful alterations of bacteria or of their environment, these human interventions obviously are not an example of Darwin’s actual scientific assertion about the non-purposeful emergence of all natural biological complexity.

Modern eugenics was another example of the application of Darwin’s theory to purposeful breeding of living things: people. Modern eugenics was almost entirely a Darwinist project; virtually all the major eugenicists were, and are, Darwinists. The moral and philosophical link between Darwinism and eugenics is tight. The artificial manipulation of the human population obviously isn’t a direct application of Darwin’s scientific theory of natural selection, but Darwinism entails a materialistic ideology in which eugenics emerges naturally.

Dr. West notes that the linkage between Darwinism and eugenics isn’t just philosophical and moral. It’s logical. Darwin proposed that Caucasian Europeans (like himself) were the pinnacle of human evolution, and that they emerged by a struggle for survival. Altruism degraded the process by which the human race could advance. Darwin famously wrote in the 5th chapter of Descent of Man that the smallpox vaccine had regrettably allowed weak human beings to survive, and "excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

Ironically, Darwinists saw eugenics (a term coined by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton) as the humane solution to the altruism-driven degeneration of the human race. Rather than exterminate the weak, they reasoned that it would be better to take control of evolution and prevent the weak.

As philosopher Benjamin Wiker has pointed out, every major scientific theory necessarily entails a view of morality and of the world. Darwin’s theory profoundly altered our view of human beings. If we’re just animals without transcendent souls and without transcendent worth, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be bred like animals, especially if it's for our own good. In the Darwinian worldview, eugenics was a (relatively) humane approach to promoting the excellence of the human race, with “excellence” understood as being an intelligent healthy Caucasian of European descent, and presumably one holding to the Darwinian worldview. Eugenic programs fostered the procreation of people whose racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and philosophical characteristics were the same as those of the Darwinists themselves.

Eugenics is the moral, philosophical, and logical application of Darwin’s scientific theory to human beings. It is a part of the degradation that Darwinism wrought.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 12:22 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A distinguished science professor at a major American university has weighed in on Iowa State University's denial of tenure to pro-ID astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, expressing astonishment at the result. According to Dr. Robert J. Marks, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University:

I went to the Web of Science citation index which is the authority on citations. Only journal papers, not conference papers, are indexed. There are lots of Prof. Gonzalez's papers listed. My jaw dropped when I saw one of his papers has 153 citations and 139 on another. I have sat on oodles of tenure committees at both a large private university and a state research university, chaired the university tenure committee, and have seen more tenure cases than the Pope has Cardinals. This is a LOT of citations for an assistant professor up for tenure. The number of citations varies with discipline and autocitations are included in the tally, but this is a LOT of citations for an Assistant Professor. A lot.

The Iowa State U. Astronomy department is here. Their big star is Lee Anne Willson, University Professor. A University Professor is a rank more prestigious than a full Professor. She is their star. Her top two papers are cited 99 and 86 times. And she has been at this for 33 years.

And then there's Steven D. Kawaler, a full Professor who is the Current Program Coordinator for astronomy. He has a nice citation record with tops of 243 and 178.

There may be reasons I don't understand for denying Prof. Gonzalez tenure, but scholarship is absolutely not one of them.

Posted by John West at 12:35 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Two of the five active tenured astronomy professors in the department that denied tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State University are connected to a widely-publicized statement that denounces intelligent design as "creationist pseudoscience."

Professor Steven Kawaler, the Program Coordinator for astronomy in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at ISU, actually signed the statement, and he provides a link to both the statement and an article about it on his website.

University Professor Lee Anne Willson, meanwhile, is married to ISU mathematics professor Stephen J. Willson, who also signed the anti-ID statement.

Known as "Project Steve," the anti-ID statement was the brainchild of the pro-Darwin National Center for Science Education. The statement declares that "it is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including… 'intelligent design,' to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation's public schools."

Iowa State University has made much of the fact that Dr. Gonzalez's tenure application was rejected starting at the level of his department. Now we know that at least 40% of the tenured faculty in astronomy in his department are connected to a statement that regards intelligent design as "creationist pseudoscience" and insists that "it is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible" for it "to be introduced into… science curricula."

Typically it is the tenured faculty in one's own area who have the most weight in a department when it comes to tenure recommendations. And, of course, only the tenured faculty of a department are allowed to vote on a tenure recommendation.

Can any fair-minded person still believe that the denial of tenure to Gonzalez had nothing to do with his views on intelligent design?

Posted by John West at 3:18 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Iowa State University (ISU).

Born in Havana, he and his family fled from Cuba to the United States in 1967, where he earned a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Washington in 1993. Author of nearly 70 peer-reviewed scientific papers and co-author of a major college-level astronomy textbook, Dr. Gonzalez’s work led to the discovery of two new planets, and his research has been featured in Science, Nature, and on the cover of Scientific American.

Dr. Gonzalez’s Scientific Research
In late 1995, Dr. Gonzalez began working on a series of projects examining stars with planets to see what sorts of properties they exhibited. This has been a major part of Dr. Gonzalez’s scientific research, and he has published twelve articles in peer-reviewed science journals on the subject and continues to research new planets and systems. Dr. Gonzalez’s research in this area led his research team to the discovery of what is known as the Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ), a term Dr. Gonzalez coined.

Our star, the Sun, is one of the few stars in the Galaxy capable of supporting complex life. The sun is composed of the right amount of “metals,” and its orbit about the galactic center is just right. Our solar system is also far enough away from the galactic center to not have to worry about disruptive gravitational forces or too much radiation. When all of these factors occur together, they create a region of space now known as a Galactic Habitable Zone. Dr. Gonzalez believes every form of life on our planet—from the simplest bacteria to the most complex animal—owes its existence to the balance of these unique conditions. Dr. Gonzalez has also made novel contributions by developing the idea of the moon as “Earth’s lunar attic,” where the moon may serve as a repository for meteorites that originally came from Earth or other nearby planets. Dr. Gonzalez views the moon as a museum for the history of our solar system, and further exploration could yield great insight into our planet’s own history. His work has lead to feature stories in Science and Nature, two of the world’s premiere scientific publications. And he and his associates wrote a cover story about GHZ in Scientific American.

Dr. Gonzalez’s Book on Intelligent Design
In 2004, Dr.Gonzalez co-authored the book The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery, which presents empirical evidence for the hypothesis that the universe is the product of intelligent design. Supported by a research grant from the Templeton Foundation, the book has earned praise from such eminent scientists as David Hughes, a Vice-President of the Royal Astronomical Society, Harvard astrophysicist Owen Gingerich, and Cambridge paleobiologist Simon Conway Morris. The Privileged Planet was developed into a documentary and shown on PBS stations around the country.

Attacks on Dr. Gonzalez’s Academic Freedom
After the release of Privileged Planet, ISU religious studies professor Hector Avalos—faculty advisor to the campus Atheist and Agnostic Society—began publicly campaigning against Dr. Gonzalez and his work. Although Dr. Gonzalez had never introduced intelligent design into his classes, Avalos helped spearhead a faculty petition urging “all faculty” at ISU to “uphold the integrity of our university” by “reject[ing] efforts to portray Intelligent Design as science.” Avalos later conceded to a local newspaper that Gonzalez was the key motive for the petition. The logical conclusion of this campaign against Dr. Gonzalez came in the spring of 2007, when ISU President Gregory Geoffroy denied Dr. Gonzalez’s application for tenure.

Key Facts about Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez

• He has authored 68 peer-reviewed scientific articles in refereed science journals.
  
• He is an author of Observational Astronomy, second edition (2006), a college-level astronomy textbook published by Cambridge University Press (authors: D. Scott Birney, G. Gonzalez and D. Oesper).
  
• His work has been cited in Science, Nature, and many other scientific journals. All told, there were nearly 1,500 citations to his articles and research in science journals by the end of 2005.
  
• His research led to the discovery of 2 new planets.
  
• He is building new technology to discover extrasolar planets.
  
• He served on the NASA Astrobiology Institute Review Panel in June 2003, and the National Science Foundation Advanced Technologies and Instruments review panel in January 2005.
  
• He has served as a referee for Astronomical Journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics, Astrophysical Journal (and Letters), Icarus, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Nature, Naturwissenschaften, Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Origins of Life and Evolution Biospheres and Science.

Key Facts about Tenure Process at Iowa State University

• According to ISU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, “[f]or promotion to associate professor, excellence sufficient to lead to a national or international reputation is required and would ordinarily be shown by the publication of approximately fifteen papers of good quality in refereed journals. (Physics and Astronomy Procedures and Promotion and Tenure Policy and Procedure, emphasis added, page 4.)
  
• Having produced 68 refereed scientific papers, Dr. Gonzalez has exceeded his own department’s standard for “excellence” in research by more than 350%.

Guillermo Gonzalez Timeline
1963– Guillermo Gonzalez born in Havana, Cuba.
1967 – Family fled Cuba to Miami, FL.
1970 – Received first telescope.
1983 – Graduated from high school and moved away to attend the University of Arizona for astronomy program on full-tuition scholarship.
Featured in the Miami Herald at age 19 as “one of five South Florida finalists in the national Westinghouse science competition for building a device that measures conductivity changes of water from its solid to liquid states.”
1987 – Graduated from University of Arizona.
1987 – First refereed paper published in Solar Physics.
1993 – Received Ph.D. from University of Washington in astronomy.
1995 – Conducted postdoctoral research at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bangalore; observed solar eclipse, prompting him to formulate what would later become the privileged planet hypothesis.
1999 – Appointed Research Assistant Professor at University of Washington.
2001 – Left University of Washington to become Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Iowa State University (ISU).
2001 – Co-authored cover story in Scientific American.
2002 – Feature story on Gonzalez’s research published in Nature.
Began construction of new telescope attachment to discover extrasolar planets.
2004 – Feature story on Gonzalez’s research published in Science.
The Privileged Planet published.
ISU Atheist and Agnostic Society sponsored campus forum to attack The Privileged Planet. Event featured religious studies professor Hector Avalos.
2005 – The Privileged Planet film screened at the Smithsonian Institute and begins airing on PBS stations around the nation.
Petition signed by more than 120 ISU faculty members urging “all faculty” at ISU “to uphold the integrity of our university of science and technology” by “reject[ing] efforts to portray Intelligent Design as science.”
2006 – ISU Atheist and Agnostic Society co-sponsored another campus event attacking intelligent design.
Cambridge University Press published second edition of college textbook Observational Astronomy, co-authored by Gonzalez.
Gonzalez’s research on the moon as the earth’s “lunar attic” highlighted on National Geographic Channel.
Gonzalez submitted application for tenure.
2007 – Gonzalez published his 68th peer-reviewed scientific paper and is denied tenure by ISU President Geoffroy.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 3:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Ames, Iowa Tribune is now calling for an explanation from Iowa State University's president about the recent denial of tenure to pro-ID astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez. It seems clear that the hard questions being raised about Gonzalez's case aren't about to go away.

Posted by John West at 10:38 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Iowa State University has attempted to defend its denial of tenure to widely-published pro-ID astronomer Guillmero Gonzalez by insisting earlier this week that tenure is hard to get at ISU. Indeed, according to a statement about the Gonzalez case posted on ISU’s home page, tenure

is a high standard of excellence and achievement -- so high, that many good researchers have failed to satisfy the demands of earning tenure.

So just how “many” is “many”? Not very many, it turns out. We requested data from ISU on the number of tenure applications and rejections at the university for the past five years, and here is what we found out:

According to these figures, the tenure acceptance rate at ISU has been steadily climbing for the past five years, from a “low” (!) of 85% in 2003 to this year’s acceptance rate of 91%.

Put another way, the rejection rate for tenure applications at ISU has fallen from 15% in 2003 to only 9% in 2007:

Are we really supposed to believe that a 91% acceptance rate for tenure applications at ISU represents such a “high standard of excellence and achievement... that many good researchers have failed to satisfy” it?! Or that a scientist like Dr. Gonzalez—who has published 350% more papers than needed to satisfy his own department’s standard for research excellence—was somehow in the bottom 9% of tenure applicants this year?

Even if one looks at Dr. Gonzalez’s own department, the 10-year approval rate of tenure applications is nearly 70% if one accepts data reported in The Des Moines Register yesterday. That is less than the university as a whole, but still very good odds of acceptance. Again, are we to believe that Dr. Gonzalez—whose work has been recognized in Science, Nature, Scientific American, and many other scientific publications—is in the bottom third of his department? I guess that’s why his department uses in its courses the astronomy textbook he co-authored for Cambridge University Press last year.

Posted by John West at 12:30 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Bill Dembski has posted an excellent riposte to John Derbyshire's recent comments at the AEI conference on Darwinism and conservatism in which George Gilder and I participated. Eventually I plan to write my own reflections about some of Derbyshire's comments, but in the meantime Dembski hits the nail on the head.

Posted by John West at 7:54 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The powers-that-be at ISU seem to be a little vexed by the attention they’re getting for denying tenure to astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez. Yesterday they released a statement regarding Dr. Gonzalez’s case, “Facts regarding the status of tenure case at Iowa State,” an unusual move on their part.

The statement reads in part:

Tenure is a complex process. It is among the most important decisions a university makes and is never taken lightly. Outside of academia, however, there is little shared understanding of tenure, its rigor and significance. (emphasis added)

The haughty contempt they display is typical of liberal elites. Instead of saying something productive to the discussion, ISU writes off concern for Dr. Gonzalez's academic freedom as nothing more than this misunderstanding of naive ignorance. The truth of the matter is that many other professors and scholars who care about academic freedom are concerned by what’s happening to Guillermo Gonzalez at ISU. Trying to frame the conversation as otherwise is disingenuous, and claiming that your opponents are unqualified to criticize you does not answer their criticism—it merely stonewalls the discussion.

Posted by Anika Smith at 3:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Showtime Networks will air filmmaker Randy Olson's fanciful evolution film Flock of Dodos, apparently not realizing that key parts of the film are so wildly inaccurate that they amount to a hoax. In response, Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman has sent a letter requesting air time to respond to the film’s various false claims.

Flock of Dodos makes a number of false assertions about scientists and institutions researching the theory of intelligent design, and has drawn fire from scientists and scholars for its misrepresentations and outright inventions. Discovery’s Center for Science & Culture (CSC) has launched a webpage, www.hoaxofdodos.com, detailing the false facts in the film.

Discovery Institute sent a letter last week to Showtime Networks Chairman and CEO Matthew C. Blank outlining just a few of the film’s numerous errors.

Perhaps the most outlandish error is the claim that modern biology textbooks have not used illustrations derived from Ernst Haeckel’s fraudulent 19th century embryo drawings as evidence for evolution. Contrary to Olson’s film, these bogus drawings that misstate the evidence for evolution have been endlessly recycled in modern textbooks, a fact that even noted evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould admitted. Yet Olson tries to convince viewers that critics of Darwin’s theory have been lying when they claim these drawings are in textbooks. But it turns out that he’s the one telling fibs.

“Olson apparently didn’t look at many textbooks for himself, because these diagrams unquestionably have been used in modern textbooks, as we have documented extensively in textbook reports and online,” said attorney Casey Luskin, CSC’s program officer for public and legal affairs. “In fact, we even showed the textbooks to Olson, but he refused to correct his film, preferring to keep hoaxing his audiences. Now he’s trying to hoax Showtime’s viewers as well.”

For more information visit www.hoaxofdodos.com.

Posted by Anika Smith at 12:30 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So what is the Darwinist Amen-chorus saying about Iowa State University's refusal to grant tenure to ID-proponent Guillermo Gonzalez? Predictably, they are in denial. According to them, intelligent design proponents may be evil and deserve to be wiped off the face of the earth, but of course Darwinists aren't engaging in persecution when they deny them jobs, harass them, and vilify them. They are merely engaging in normal academic behavior!

This seems to be the point of Darwinist Ed Brayton's escape-from-reality blog complaining about what he calls the "ID Persecution Complex." In truth, however, it's not ID proponents who suffer from a failure to accept reality, it's the Darwinists. Darwinists like Brayton exhibit symptoms of what might be called Darwinist Denial Syndrome: When confronted with evidence of discrimination against an ID proponent, they deny, deny, deny.

According to Brayton, reports that ID scientists have faced discrimination are just a “false cry of persecution.” Brayton undermines this claim by ranting breathlessly out of both sides of his mouth. Take his discussion of the discrimination and harassment faced by Dr. Richard Sternberg. Out of one side of his mouth Brayton insists the discrimination never happened. Then—without even pausing—he rants out the other side of his mouth that Sternberg deserved the treatment he got because he allowed an article supporting ID to be published in the biology journal he edited.

Those who want the real story about the persecution of Sternberg should read the United States Congressional Report on the investigation of Sternberg's case that was issued last December. Lest there be any doubt, it was subtitled "INTOLERANCE AND THE POLITICIZATION OF SCIENCE AT THE SMITHSONIAN: SMITHSONIAN’S TOP OFFICIALS PERMIT THE DEMOTION AND HARASSMENT OF SCIENTIST SKEPTICAL OF DARWINIAN EVOLUTION." Findings of the investigation included:

• Officials at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History “explicitly acknowledged in emails their intent to pressure Sternberg to resign because of his role in the publication of the Meyer paper and his views on evolution.” They wanted “to make Dr. Sternberg’s life at the Museum as difficult as possible and encourage him to leave.”
• “NMNH officials conspired with a special interest group to publicly smear Dr. Sternberg; the group was also enlisted to monitor Sternberg’s outside activities in order to find a way to dismiss him.”
• “The hostility toward Dr. Sternberg at the NMNH was reinforced by anti-religious and political motivations.” NMNH scientists demanded to know whether Sternberg “was religious,” “was a Republican,” “was a fundamentalist,” and whether “he was a conservative.”

Brayton goes on to claim there is no evidence that Gonzalez was denied tenure because of his advocacy of intelligent design.

It is convenient for them to cry persecution, but there simply is no evidence for it. And here's something else they won't say: people get denied for tenure every single day, all over the country, for a million different reasons, some fair and some unfair.

There is no evidence that Gonzalez didn't meet the criteria for tenure. So, one has to wonder what other reason there might be. It's abundantly clear that there has been a very hostile environment at ISU for ID proponents such as Gonzalez, with events organized to denounce him, letters written defaming him, and petitions organized to stifle his right to free speech. (see here and here)

Brayton can claim that there is no persecution of Darwin skeptics or ID proponents, but the evidence says otherwise. As far back as the early 90s, biology professor Dean Kenyon was temporarily barred from teaching his biology classes at San Francisco State University. Recently Caroline Crocker suffered the same fate at George Mason University, and she subsequently lost her position. And unfortunately, there are countless other instances of discrimination and academic intimidation:

• University of Idaho president Timothy White has imposed a speech code banning criticism of Darwinian evolution in science classes. According to White, it is “inappropriate” for any faculty member to teach “views that differ from evolution” in any “life, earth, and physical science courses."


• Chemistry professor Nancy Bryson lost her job at a state university after she gave a lecture on scientific criticisms of Darwin's theory to a group of honors students.


• Three days before graduate student Bryan Leonard's dissertation defense was to take place, Darwinist professors at Ohio State University accused Leonard of "unethical human-subject experimentation" because he taught students about scientific criticisms of evolutionary theory.


• High school teacher Roger DeHart was driven from his public school simply because he wanted his students to learn about both sides of the scientific debate over Darwinian evolution.


• This effort to win the debate over evolution through censorship and intimidation is promoted by the over-the-top rhetoric of leading Darwinists. Biology professor P.Z. Myers at the University of Minnesota, for example, recently wrote this about anyone supporting intelligent design or questioning modern evolutionary theory: “Our only problem is that we aren’t martial enough, or vigorous enough, or loud enough, or angry enough. The only appropriate responses should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the public firing and humiliation of some teachers, many school board members, and vast numbers of sleazy far-right politicians.”

Posted by Robert Crowther at 10:02 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Associated Press is now covering the denial of tenure Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State University, filing a fair-minded and generally accurate article that mentions some of Dr. Gonzalez's scientific accomplishments and discusses the surrounding context of intolerance.

Posted by John West at 7:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Today's Des Moines Register has an article highlighting the growing controversy over the denial of tenure to gifted astronomer Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State University (ISU). The story is remarkably fair and accurate as far as it goes, and it reveals that the approval rate for tenure applications in Gonzalez's department over the past ten years has approached 70%! So much for the claim that tenure at ISU is particularly hard to get. Unfortunately, what the article doesn't do is give any information about Dr. Gonzalez's outstanding scholarly record--such as the fact that his work has been recognized in Science, Nature, Scientific American, and many other top science publications; or the fact that he is co-author of a major college astronomy textbook published last year by Cambridge University Press; or the fact that he exceeded by 350% the stated standard for research excellence adopted by his department. For a list of Dr. Gonzalez's extensive peer-reviewed journal articles, click here.

Posted by John West at 6:46 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A blogger named "Angry Astronomer," an undergraduate at the University of Kansas, has exemplified how anti-ID intolerance is passed on to the next-generation. The “angry” Jon Voisey assumes that Guillermo Gonzalez does not deserve tenure because Dr. Gonzalez displays “dishonesty” in “extension activity” simply because Gonzalez supports intelligent design. Mr. Voisey has no evidence of dishonesty on the part of Dr. Gonzalez, but simply assumes that supporting intelligent design necessarily implies dishonesty. In Mr. Voisey’s vision of academia, ID proponents need not apply. We should feel for college undergraduates like this who have been led down the path of intolerance by University of Kansas professors who model knee-jerk prejudice against proponents of intelligent design**.

The "angry astronomer" then cites Discovery Institute’s internal search engine listing of publications by Guillermo Gonzalez on our website and claims that it “doesn’t feature a single one published in a respected astronomical journal.” Poor Mr. Voisey: He’s trying to imply Dr. Gonzalez doesn't have a prestigious publication record, and is so eager to join the fray that he doesn’t consider the possibility that our website doesn’t house Dr. Gonzalez’s dozens of technical research articles. In fact, Dr. Gonzalez has published refereed journal articles in journals such as The Astrophysical Journal, The Astronomical Journal, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Solar Physics, Icarus, and Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Dr. Gonzalez’s research has been highlighted in Science and Nature and Dr. Gonzalez even wrote the cover story for Scientific American in 2001. For a list of Dr. Gonzalez’s publications, click here.

Mr. Voisey is apparently a sci-fi fan, so it’s appropriate to end by observing that the wrath of the “Angry Astronomer” appears little more potent than the useless rage of "Mr. Furious" from the movie Mystery Men.

** "All they are is oppressors. They’re not martyrs and victims."
—University of Kansas Professor Paul Mirecki on "intelligent design proponents," Lawrence Journal World, Nov. 22, 2005

[Some corrections and edits made a few minutes after this was posted.]

Posted by Casey Luskin at 1:40 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Editor's Update: Discovery Institute has just issued a press release about Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez's denial of tenure.

This is a very sad day for academic freedom. Dr. Gonzalez is a superb scholar and a fine human being. His research has been featured in Scientific American, Science, Nature, and many other science journals. Iowa State's decision to deny him tenure is a travesty, and the university should be held to account for its action. This deserves to be an even bigger story than the persecution of evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg at the Smithsonian.

Ironically, Dr. Gonzalez arrived in America as a child refugee from Castro's Cuba. Unfortunately, he seems to have discovered that the Darwinist ideologues in America's universities can be nearly as unforgiving as the Marxist ideologues of his home country.

Stay tuned for more information as this story develops.

Posted by John West at 1:33 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So just why was gifted astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State University denied tenure? Certainly not because he hasn't fulfilled his university's tenure standards for excellence in research. According to his own department's standards, to be promoted to associate professor (with tenure),

excellence sufficient to lead to a national or international reputation is required and would ordinarily be shown by the publication of approximately fifteen papers of good quality in refereed journals.

So how many refereed articles has Gonzalez published? Ten? Twelve? Fifteen? Twenty? Actually, he has published 68 articles in refereed journals, thus exceeding his own department's normal standard for research excellence by 350%! (Unfortunately, the Ames Tribune story about the denial of tenure to Gonzalez wrongly reports that this standard is a "minimum" requirement for tenure in his department. In fact, it is offered as the usual and ordinary benchmark for meeting his university's research excellence standard.)

Since Gonzalez clearly far exceeded his university's stated standard for research, the question again arises: Why was he denied tenure? It seems obvious that it was due to ideological bias against intelligent design--which has been on clear display at Iowa State during the past few years, as Gonzalez has been publicly attacked and demonized by faculty colleagues for his support of ID.

Posted by John West at 1:06 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

One of the more frequent questions people ask about intelligent design is whether any scientists actually support ID theory. There are many notable biologists, biochemists, physicists, and astronomers who support intelligent design, and their work continues to develop the young scientific theory. Here are just a few of them:

Darwinists lack two traits desirable for scientists: decorum and a developed sense of irony. University of Minnesota Associate Professor of Biology and star Darwinist science blogger P.Z. Myers provides evidence for this observation in a recent scatological tirade on Pharyngula, the popular Darwinist science blog that is read daily by thousands of young scientists and aspiring scientists.

Dr. Myers was commenting on a profile that Dr. Michael Behe, a Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University and a prominent advocate of intelligent design, wrote about famed biologist Richard Dawkins for TIME magazine. Behe disagrees strongly with Dawkins’ scientific views on Darwin’s theory.

What Dr. Behe actually wrote was very different than what TIME ended up publishing, as he recounted earlier. This is what appeared as Dr. Behe's comments about Dawkins’ contribution to the I.D./Darwinism debate:

It is a measure of the artful way Dawkins, 66, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, tells a tale and the rigor he brings to his thinking that even those of us who profoundly disagree with what he has to say can tip our hats to the way he has invigorated the larger debate.

The incompetence is stunning. Richard Dawkins makes the Time 100 list, and who do they commission to write up his profile?

Michael F**king Behe.

That's not just stupid, it's a slap in the face. It would have been no problem to find a smart biologist, even one who might be critical of Dawkins' message, to write something that expressed some measure of respect from the editorial staff. But to dig up a pseudoscientific fraud whose sole claim to fame is that he has led the charge to corrupt American science education for over a decade is shameful.

Which professor is shamefully corrupting American science education?

Posted by Michael Egnor at 10:03 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig Tackles Giraffe Evolution

"What are the limits of accidental genetic alterations in giraffes (microevolution), where the construction of genetic information requires intelligent programming because undirected mutations ('chance mutations') no longer have explanatory value?"

"The question of new irreducibly complex systems (in comparison to the short-necked giraffes) should be investigated thoroughly on the anatomical, physiological and genetic level."

"Likewise the question of specified complexity should be thoroughly researched on both levels (probabilistic complexity, conditionally independent pattern for gene functions, gene cascades, organs and organ systems)."

"Population size and Haldane’s Dilemma for long and short-necked giraffes."

" The question of similar or identical systems in the long-necked giraffe compared to other known (or as yet unknown) bionic and cybernetic structures and functions in engineering (it is very probable that we can still learn a lot from the giraffe's anatomical and physiological constructions)."

[B]iologists committed to a materialistic world view will simply not consider an alternative. For them, even the most stringent objections against the synthetic evolutionary theory are nothing but open problems that will be solved entirely within the boundaries of their theory. This is still true even when the trend is clearly running against them, that is, when the problems for the theory become greater and greater with new scientific data. This essential unfalsifiability, by the way, places today’s evolutionary theory outside of science, one of whose defining characteristics is that theories can only be considered to be scientific if they are falsifiable, and when they set forth criteria by which they can potentially be falsified.

(Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, "The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe, Part 2")

"At Last, the Truth About Love" is the subtiltle of Robert Wright’s recent essay "Why Darwinism isn’t Depressing" published on the New York Times Op-Ed page. Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Moral Animal, notes that neuroscience and evolution have left some people, well, downhearted.

He notes:

One commentator recently acknowledged the ascendance of the Darwinian paradigm with a sigh: “Evolution doesn’t really lead to anything outside itself.”

Wright reassures us:

Cheer up! Despair is a plausible response to news that our loftiest feelings boil down to genetic self-interest, but genetic self-interest actually turns out to be our salvation. The selfishness of our genes gave us the illuminating power of love and put us on the path to a kind of transcendence.

Like it or not, we are survival machines. But survival machines are unfairly maligned. The name suggests, well, machines devoted to their survival. In truth, though, natural selection builds machines devoted ultimately to the survival of their genes, not themselves. Hence love.

Feel manipulated? Don’t worry- we get the last laugh…Genes are just dopey little particles, devoid of consciousness. We, in contrast, can perceive the world. And how!! Thanks to love, we see beyond our selves and into the selves around us.

…would never have gotten off the ground had love not emerged on this planet as a direct result of Darwinian logic…Transcending the arbitrary narrowness of our empathy isn’t guaranteed by nature. (Why do you think they call it transcendence?). But nature has given us the tools-not just the empathy, but the brains to figure out how evolution works, and thus to see that the narrowness is arbitrary.

So our purposeful acts are, and can only be, directed at replication of our genes. Love, however adorned, is merely …MUST…COPY…SELF. But then so is philosophy, so is essay writing, so is everything we do, including our efforts to understand everything we do. We’re just replicators.

Can we replicators transcend this darkness? Wright thinks we can. Using our evolved cognitive tools we can imagine that we can break out of …MUST…COPY…SELF… —yet our evolved tools can only purposefully be directed to replication. Our efforts to break out of being replicators must be themselves efforts to replicate, or be merely mistakes, unconnected to reality. By Darwinian logic, everything we do that's connected to reality is a mating ritual. The effort to deny it is…a mating ritual. Darwinism itself is… a mating ritual. And the only way to feel better about all of this is to pretend that it’s not all a mating ritual. But… that’s a mating ritual!

What to make of this nonsense? Darwinism has given us second-rate science, lethal social policy (eugenics), and puerile philosophy. But Wright is right. Don’t be depressed. Just imagine that Darwinism isn’t true!

No wonder I’ve been feeling so cheery lately.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 4:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I recently discussed how Wikipedia has inaccurate information on intelligent design, or constantly rebuts (fallaciously) the claims of ID proponents. This post looks at merely two sentences out of the long Wikipedia entry on intelligent design and finds inaccuracy, misrepresentation, bias, and hypocrisy. These two sentences come from Wikipedia's discussion of polls and intelligent design. Wikipedia presently states:

According to a 2005 Harris poll, ten percent of adults in the United States view human beings as "so complex that they required a powerful force or intelligent being to help create them".[17] Although some polls commissioned by the Discovery Institute show more support, these polls have been criticized as suffering from considerable flaws, such as having a low response rate (248 out of 16,000), being conducted on behalf of an organization with an expressed interest in the outcome of the poll, and containing leading questions.[18]

(1) Support for the intelligent design viewpoint is much greater than 10% of Americans: Intelligent design includes a broad spectrum of beliefs. It includes those who accept common descent and support a form of intelligently guided evolution. It also includes those who believe that an intelligent agent designed life-forms separate from other species in something close to their present form. ID doesn’t require special creation by any means, but special creationists do share with other intelligent design proponents the view that the complexity of life arose via intelligence, and not an unguided / random process like natural selection acting upon mutation. William Dembski explains this:

Intelligent design does not require organisms to emerge suddenly or to be specially created from scratch by the intervention of a designing intelligence. To be sure, intelligent design is compatible with the creationist idea of organisms being suddenly created from scratch. But it is also perfectly compatible with the evolutionist idea of new organisms arising from old by gradual accrual of change. What separates intelligent design from naturalistic evolution is not whether organisms evolved or the extent to which they evolved, but what was responsible for their evolution.

(William A. Dembski The Design Revolution, pg. 178 (InterVarsity Press, 2004).)

Note: there are MANY other possible intelligent design views besides the one which states that “Human beings were created directly by God.” But I only list those two here as they were the only ones used in the poll.

Conclusion: The Harris poll did not present a question which precisely tested support for the general intelligent design viewpoint, and the Wikipedia article misrepresents the poll’s findings by making support for intelligent design appear over 7 times less than a correct interpretation of the data would suggest.

(2) Wikipedia’s statement compares two different types of poll questions: overall support for intelligent design versus overall support for teaching ID: Wikipedia favorably cites the Harris Poll because it implies (using the misinterpretation of poll data discussed above in point (1)) a low overall support for intelligent design (10%). Wikipedia acknowledges that some polls “show more support” for intelligent design, but then tries to attack them by citing to an article by Chris Mooney (more on Mr. Mooney below). But the 2001 Zogby poll questions attacked in the Mooney article cited by Wikipedia do not discuss overall support for ID! Rather, the questions Mooney attacks assess overall support for teaching intelligent design in schools.

Conclusion: Wikipedia did not actually refute poll questions which “show more support” for ID because their cited-source critiques only poll questions assessing support for teaching ID, a different type of question.

(3) Wikipedia selectively present only the low poll data regarding intelligent design, and presenting it inaccurately: Wikipedia cited the Harris Poll favorably, and the only data cited implies low support for intelligent design (10%, though that number is misinterpreted). Yet the intelligent design entry ignores the fact that this same 2005 Harris poll found that 59% of Americans support teaching ID.

Moreover, when there is high poll data regarding intelligent design, the site attacks the poll, as in the case of the 2001 Zogby poll that found that 78% of Americans support teaching ID. Wikipedia’s bias is exposed in that the site praises a 2005 Harris Poll when there is low poll data, but fails to mention that high poll data from that same poll, and when it does cite (vaguely) high poll data from a different poll, it attacks it:

Conclusion: Wikipedia’s intelligent design entry selectively presents only the lowest poll data regarding intelligent design (which it misinterprets to be much lower than it actually is).

(4) Wikipedia claims Discovery Institute’s poll is biased, but hypocritically cites a highly biased source to make that point: That reference given is an article printed in a plainly biased source, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, whose co-founder, Paul Kurtz, is one of the leading atheist activists of the 20th and 21st centuries. According to Wikipedia, Kurtz and "is founder and chairman of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry," "is founder and chairman of ... the Council for Secular Humanism," ""contributed to the writing of Humanist Manifesto II," and “was largely responsible for the secularization of Humanism”! The article’s author is Chris Mooney, apparently “copresident and a founding member of the Yale College Society for Humanists, Atheists and Agnostics,” who “interned with the CFA [Campus Freethought Alliance] … where he helped draft the organization's ‘Bill of Rights for Unbelievers.’” Mooney’s column is called “Doubt and About.” Does all that sound unbiased?

Conclusion: The Wikipedia authors are so biased against intelligent design, they’re willing to cite a heavily biased source in order to allege a bias on the part of ID-proponents. Chances are, they didn’t even notice the logical hypocrisy in what they did.

The most interesting question is this: Will Wikipedia’s Darwinist editors now allow this post to be cited as a 3rd-party refutation of their statements about polls and ID? If they do cite it, will they allow it to be unrebutted? Time will tell.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 6:36 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Most people — including most professional biologists — think that one either accepts the neo-Darwinian theory of the universal common ancestry of life via undirected natural causes, or else one is a "creationist," meaning someone who advocates multiple independent starting points for life, all of them specially created.

In the neo-Darwinian picture (the upper left quadrant), all organisms on Earth share a common ancestor, often abbreviated as "LUCA," for Last Universal Common Ancestor.

In the horizontal axis of the matrix, this historical geometry is designated as "monophyly" [mono (single) phylum (tribe)]. "Polyphyly" designates a geometry with multiple independent starting points [poly (many) phylum (tribe)].

In the lower right quadrant, one finds the viewpoint diametrically opposed to the single Tree picture, held historically by persons such as the great Swedish botanist Linneaus, or the 19th century Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz. This view maintains that organisms spring from separate original ancestors, and owe their existence to purposeful design.

But other views are possible, and have been pursued both in the past and today by prominent biologists. In the upper right quadrant, evolutionary theoreticians argue that life came to be via strictly natural causes, but did so multiple times, and some of those independent lineages survive to the present. In the lower left quadrant, by contrast, one finds those scientists who support the single-tree-of-life picture, but who also argue that design (of some form) is necessary for life's existence.

ASA is the American Scientific Affiliation, a group of Christians in the sciences. CRS is the Creation Research Society, another group of Christians in the sciences, who support special creation as a scientific theory.

Posted by Paul Nelson at 2:25 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Transposons are a type of DNA which many Darwinists have written off as mere genetic junk. The pro-Darwin TalkOrigins archive tells us that transposons "can be thought of as intragenomic parasites." But don’t feel bad for the poor transposons — it looks like they might be looking at a new career as “the DNA formerly known as junk": biologists from Stanford and UC Santa Cruz are reporting that "'Junk' DNA Now Looks Like Powerful Regulator."

That type of "junk" is the transposon. As the press release about the study explains, "Large swaths of garbled human DNA once dismissed as junk appear to contain some valuable sections." The scientists report that in the past, they "had identified a handful of transposons that seemed to regulate nearby genes. However, it wasn't clear how common the phenomenon might be. 'Now we've shown that transposons may be a major vehicle for evolutionary novelty.'…" Taking off the "evolutionary" spin, the translation is: they think transposons play important roles in gene regulation.

According to the press release, however, it has taken scientists decades to investigate and validate this function—a lot longer than it should have: "Bejerano and his colleagues aren't the first to suggest that transposons play a role in regulating nearby genes. In fact, Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock, PhD, who first discovered transposons, proposed in 1956 that they could help determine the timing for when nearby genes turn on and off."

Apparently this idea was stalled out due to the evolutionary assumption, á la Talk Origins, that they are nothing more than useless "intragenomic parasites." Yet it was as far back as 1994 that pro-ID scientist and Discovery Institute fellow Forrest Mims had warned in a letter to Science against assuming that "junk" DNA was "useless" (scroll to the bottom of the page to see the letter). Science wouldn't publish his letter, but it now appears that another prediction of intelligent design has been validated.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:30 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

“If conservatives want to address root causes rather than just symptoms they need to join the debate over Darwinism, not scorn it or ignore it," said CSC's John West at an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) debate earlier this week about whether Darwinism can be aligned with conservatism. He's exactly right, and conservatives are starting to agree--at least that the discussion needs to take place. Case and point, the AEI event itself. The New York Times took the event seriously enough to send Patricia Cohen to cover the event and pen this report on it, which appears on the front page of today's paper.

In light of the Times' past coverage of the debate over evolution, Cohen's article is not all that surprising. The Times genuflects to Saint Darwin on its science pages, but (sometimes) does a better job of addressing academic freedom and policy issues in the Darwin debate in its other sections.

Cohen's article highlights the debate among conservatives, and gives a pretty evenhanded report on the views of each side. On the one side you have John West, author of Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest, and tech icon George Gilder, author of the supply-side bible Wealth and Poverty. They clearly do not buy either Darwinism's scientific case, or the attempts to apply it to political philosophy.

Siding with Darwin and using his ideas to defend their political views were John Derbyshire of National Review and noted political scientist Larry Arnhart, author of Darwinian Conservatism.

Mr. Derbyshire, who has described himself as the “designated point man” against creationists and intelligent-design proponents at National Review, later said that many conservatives were disturbed by positions taken by the religious right.

“There are plenty of people glad to call themselves conservatives,” he said, “who don’t see any reason not to support stem cell research.”

Mr. Arnhart, in his 2005 book, “Darwinian Conservatism,” tackled the issue of conservatism’s compatibility with evolutionary theory head on, saying Darwinists and conservatives share a similar view of human beings: they are imperfect; they have organized in male-dominated hierarchies; they have a natural instinct for accumulation and power; and their moral thought has evolved over time.

“The current debate is not primarily about religious fundamentalism,” Mr. West, the author of “Darwin’s Conservatives: The Misguided Quest” (2006), said at Thursday’s conference. “Nor is it simply an irrelevant rehashing of certain esoteric points of biology and philosophy. Darwinian reductionism has become culturally pervasive and inextricably intertwined with contemporary conflicts over traditional morality, personal responsibility, sex and family, and bioethics.”

Of course, it is in the area of economics that many seem to think Darwinism and conservatism are in complete alignment because they think "survival of the fittest" somehow justifies free enterprise.

West, like Gilder, disagrees:

Ironically, Darwin’s theory in the nineteenth century was primarily used to attack capitalism as nothing but survival of the fittest, so it was leftists who were anti-conservative who really liked that analogy because they thought it could stigmatize capitalism. That’s also one reason why most capitalists – not all, but most in the nineteenth century and beyond – didn’t like the claim that Darwinism was analogous to capitalism. They thought it was too negative. Nineteenth century free marketeers and capitalists thought, just like George Gilder today, that capitalism benefits everyone. The Darwinian view really grew out of Thomas Malthus’s idea that we need to be concerned about human overpopulation and that you should apply survival of the fittest in nature to human society. Nineteenth century capitalists thought that was way too negative because it suggests the only way one person can get ahead is by walking over another person’s dead body. They pointed out that, in fact, free economic exchange benefits both sides. It benefits the poor as well as people who are not poor.

Fundamentally, Darwinism and free enterprise aren’t a good fit because the things you see that make competition go are really intelligently designed. When someone designs a product, it is because they’ve worked on it, they’ve had an idea. It’s not a random mutation; it’s not a random variation. So the thing that makes competition work is all the intelligent designers who are making things they think will add to our wealth and add to our creativity and benefit human society. These products and innovations are not blind, random variations of the sort called for in Darwinism.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 11:10 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

At Townhall.com, David Limbaugh has a critique of the Left's narrow-mindedness ("Leftist Thought Control"), especially concerning science issues. He reports that intolerance runs rampant where those who believe they hold the monopoly on the truth: "Consider the leftist refrain that red-state conservatives do not merely possess a different worldview, but are not part of the 'reality-based community.' Consider the near monolithic liberalism and secularism of our university faculties."

At the end of his article, Limbaugh touches on the story of Richard Sternberg's academic persecution at the Smithsonian, with an interesting warning at the end:

Tom Bethell, in his "Politically Incorrect Guide to Science," quotes author Michael Crichton as saying that consensus science "is an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had."

We are witnessing a similar phenomenon on the subject of evolution versus intelligent design. Evolutionist Richard Dawkins, explains Bethel, believes that evolution is not a debatable topic. "I'm concerned about implying that there is some sort of scientific argument going on," said Dawkins. "There's not." Meanwhile the Intelligent Design movement is gathering courageous and impressive adherents who would debate the notion that no debate is going on.
But when these recalcitrant upstarts refuse to toe the line, they sometimes pay the price. Bethell tells of the publication by the peer-reviewed "Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington" of an article on the Cambrian Explosion by the Discovery Institute's Steven Meyer. Though Meyer relied on the work of respected scientists in the article, its subject matter did not sit well with the "consensus" gods. Richard Stenberg, the editor of the journal, was virtually accused of being a religious fundamentalist and a right-winger for publishing the piece. He was required to "surrender his office and keys to the department floor, denying him access to the specimen collections he needed." And, according to Bethel, "A senior Smithsonian scientist complained that publication of the article 'made us into the laughing stock of the world, even is this kind of rubbish sells well in backwoods USA.' Notice," wrote Bethel, "it was not the substantive claims about the Cambrian Explosion that caused such fury, it was their publication in a peer-reviewed journal."

If this trend continues, it's hard to imagine what we'll see in next decade. How the left can consider itself fair and open-minded in view of such developments is beyond comprehension.

Posted by Anika Smith at 10:14 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

If you've weren't able to make it to Washington for AEI's debate on Darwinism and Conservatism, you're in luck: the video and audio recording are now available online here.

The debate features thoughtful analysis from two of Darwin's conservative champions, Larry Arnhart and John Derbyshire, as well as Darwin's conservative critics, including Discovery's own John West and George Gilder. The arguments are lucid and compelling, well worth a listen.

Posted by Anika Smith at 11:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

TIME Magazine asked me to write an entry on Richard Dawkins for "The TIME 100" this year. After their editing, it came out rather more insipid than I wrote it. They asked for 400-500 words, but pared it down to 187 — and that’s after adding their own phrases (e.g., "deeply unsettling to proponents of intelligent design," "the rigor he brings to his thinking," "the Bible advises us," etc.)!

The entry, as I originally wrote it, follows below:

Of his nine books, none caused as much controversy — or sold as well — as last year’s The God Delusion. Yet the leading light of the recent atheist publishing surge, Oxford University’s Richard Dawkins, has always been a man driven by the big questions. Born in Kenya in 1941 of British parents, he received a mild Anglican upbringing. But at the age of sixteen Dawkins discovered Charles Darwin’s theory, and thought he’d found a pearl of great price.

His academic career as an evolutionary biologist got off to a fast start in the 1970's with his first book, The Selfish Gene, which argued a then-unfashionable notion: like many politicians in Congress, individual genes of a genome are looking out just for their own good. So if somehow an unconscious gene mutated to be copied more effectively, it would outcompete its fellow DNA fragments. The fundamental idea of this “gene-centered” view of evolution had been proposed by other researchers. But, using his remarkable gift of scientific exposition, Dawkins painted the abstruse concept so clearly, and drew out the logic of its problematic premises so brightly, that it quickly became evolutionary orthodoxy.

Dawkins pushed the old idea in new directions. He argued that genes shape not only the body of an animal, but also its external environment: the imagined genes that move a beaver to build a dam are working for their own survival no less than the genes that shape the beaver’s tail. Even human thoughts were fitted to the Procrustean mold. He coined the word “meme” to denote fragments of ideas, such as cultural fads or music lyrics, that might replicate within brains like genes in a cell. And into the disreputable category of meme he firmly placed religion, calling it a virus of the mind.

With the big questions of life and mind supposedly solved in principle, Dawkins has in the past several decades abandoned research, and turned instead to persuading society of the correctness of his views. It was for Dawkins that computer software billionaire Charles Simonyi endowed the Oxford Chair of the Public Understanding of Science, freeing Dawkins to write newspaper articles, produce films, and travel the world to spread the meme that, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pointless indifference.” A stark message, certainly. But true, thinks Dawkins, and he will not shrink from saying so.

The God Delusion, which deals more with philosophy than science, has been panned as amateurish by academic reviewers. Yet even a Roman Catholic intelligent design proponent like myself, who thinks Dawkins’ conclusions follow much less from his data than from his premises, has to admire the man’s energy and determination. Concerning those big questions, Someone once advised us to be either hot or cold, but not lukewarm. Whatever the merit of his ideas, Richard Dawkins is not lukewarm.

Posted by Michael Behe at 1:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Darwinists sometimes make a highly suspect argument along the lines of, “don’t change evolution education because you’ll divide the community.” Most school districts presently teach only the scientific evidence which supports Darwinian evolution and nothing more on this topic. Does that satisfy the public or divide them? In fact, polls consistently show that Americans want more than just the pro-evolution side of the story taught in schools. A 2005 Harris poll found that 82% of Americans want alternatives to evolution taught. A 2006 Zogby poll corroborated that statistic, finding that a supermajority of Ohio adults want both scientific evidence for and against evolution taught, and 75% of Americans want intelligent design taught alongside evolution. In both polls, under 20% wanted only the evidence for evolution taught. It appears that the status quo goes against what the vast majority of Americans want. This seems like a likely candidate for what is causing community division. Ironically, a recent law review student note in Georgetown Law Journal suggests that the intelligent design be outlawed because it is “deeply divisive”:

“This Note has attempted to analyze recent intelligent design controversies in their broader social context. In so doing, this Note has shown the deeply divisive nature of intelligent design proposals. The divisiveness of intelligent design policies points to a dangerous trend in which certain communities may be actively turning away from the wider culture, exacerbating existing divisions, and creating new ones.”

(Kevin Trowel, “Divided by Design: Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, Intelligent Design, and Civic Education,” 95 Georgetown Law Journal 855, 894 (March, 2007).)

As a matter of public policy, Discovery Institute opposes any effort to mandate or require the teaching the theory of intelligent design by school districts or state boards of education. Recognizing the potential for sharp conflict in this area, Discovery Institute believes that a curriculum that aims to provide students with an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of neo-Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theories (rather than teaching an alternative theory, such as intelligent design) represents a common ground approach that all reasonable citizens can agree on.

(David K. DeWolf and Seth L. Cooper, “Teaching About Evolution in the Public Schools: A Short Summary of the Law”)

Moreover, many ID-proponents most certainly find evolution and religion compatible. For example, pro-ID Dover-expert witness Michael Behe was a completely satisfied Roman Catholic and a Darwinist before the data persuaded him that intelligent design was the better answer. For Behe, this has nothing to do with rejecting a scientific viewpoint to salvage a religious viewpoint. Contra Trowel, I have never heard of a single ID-proponent who claims to “rejec[t] the idea that science and religion can coexist.” (For another error, Mr. Trowel relies on Ken Miller and Judge Jones to assert, “Instead, intelligent design offers only a ‘negative argument against evolution’,” which is another false claim. I always thought good scholarship described a viewpoint by quoting its proponents, but I guess it’s easier to quote the misrepresentations of critics.)

Poor Mr. Trowel. As a law student, he probably read the Dover ruling and thought that it was accurate and has no idea how badly he’s been mislead about ID. (I should note that law schools always teach students to critically analyze judicial rulings, so his reliance upon Kitzmiller isn’t completely acceptable.)

Conclusion:
The facts show that Americans don’t want only the pro-evolution scientific evidence taught. They want the scientific evidence both for and against evolution presented in schools. It seems more likely that pro-evolution-only policies are a greater cause of community strife because they go against what Americans so clearly desire. So who’s the one advocating “divisive” policies here?

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Florida state legislature has passed legislation that would allow school districts that excell to have unprecedented control over their own schools, textbooks and curriculum.

"When you have a district that exceeds the state's requirements and expectations, they must know something," said Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, the proposal's leading proponent. "We're going to allow them the flexibility to keep improving."

Allowing school districts to choose textbooks that are not on a state-approved list prompted fears. One lawmaker said the proposal would allow schools to buy science books espousing the theory of intelligent design, a teaching that credits the creation of the world to an intelligent being rather than evolution, while remaining silent on subjects such as the Holocaust or black history.

The history of science standard had encouraged students to learn about such tragedies as the eugenics movement and the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment. But studying the misuses of science was apparently too much of a downer for the Darwin-only crowd, so they rewrote the standard to ensure that students would be exposed only to the triumphs of science in history. When asked to defend this Orwellian rewriting of history, the main backer of the change offered phony excuses.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 9:47 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In speeches in Washington and Philadelphia this week, Discovery Institute senior fellow and former political science professor John West has begun his program to describe the way Darwinism gave birth to the eugenics movement, and he is getting some attention. Protests are expected, but it won’t do any good for Darwinists to huff and puff about West’s linkage of Darwinism and the eugenics movement that sterilized scores of thousands of Americans deemed unfit in the early decades of the last century, the concurrent rise of the abortion movement and the extermination of hundreds of thousands of supposed social undesirables by the Nazis in Germany. Indeed, the replies given by the Darwinists in the Crosswalk article were anticipated—and rebutted—by West in his speech.

The Darwinists hate the claim of linkage to eugenics, but they cannot refute it. It is in the historical record. Eugenics was the “consensus science” of the time (attention, Chris Mooney). John West’s research is thorough and impeccable. His lectures are laying out the facts—the official publicity documents, letters, speech quotations, state and federal legislative testimony and court rulings showing that eugenics was not just connected to Darwinism, but derived from Darwin’s own work (in The Descent of Man), his cousin’s coining of the term eugenics and the work of several generations of Darwin’s followers. It was reflected in the Hunter’s high school biology text—the one in the Scopes Trial which afterwards enjoyed continued wide use in America, though you never hear that part of the Scopes story.

Instead of pretending to wax indignant at the association of Darwinism and eugenics and launching the standard personal attacks, Darwinists should offer someone to debate West about this topic. Let’s get it on national television in a fair and polite confrontation. As a pure academic exercise, as I say, the record is very clear.

OR Darwinists could simply acknowledge that eugenics is an unfortunate chapter in the history of their cause.

However, if they do that, the question will arise, what about the re-emergence of modern eugenics in the bioethics issues of today? You see, this historical topic is absolutely relevant.

Posted by Bruce Chapman at 3:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Who were the Neanderthals? Were they ape-like primitives with low intelligence, or were they more like us—perhaps nearly identical to modern humans in both body and mind? Biology textbooks often portray Neanderthals as unintelligent versions of modern humans. For example, this graphic from Biology: The Dynamics of Life (pg. 483, 2000 ed.) portrays Neanderthals as stooped primitives struggling kill a giant bear using clubs, spears, and incompetently, a burning stick:

But according to a recent article in the Washington Post, Neanderthals may have been virtually indistinguishable from modern humans in terms of both their appearance and intelligence. A lead author on the study declared that "we would understand both to be human. There's good reason to think that they did as well." The article reports that this recent study "concluded that a significant number [of skeletons] have attributes associated with both Neanderthals and the modern humans who replaced them." Paleoanthropologist Erik Trinkaus also tries to dispel the myth that Neanderthals were unintelligent brutes: "Although Neanderthals live in the public imagination as hulking and slow-witted 'Alley Oops,' Trinkaus and others say there is no reason to believe they were any less intelligent than the newly arrived 'modern humans.' Neanderthals were stockier and had larger brows, sharper teeth and more jutting jaws, but their brain capacity appears to have been no different than that of the newcomers." In fact, Neanderthals had an average brain size which was slightly larger than that of modern humans. Perhaps it's time to stop seeing Neanderthals as a primitive species—a popular icon of evolution—but rather as a sub-race of our own species.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:05 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)