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Nature‘s “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” Reviewer, Adam Rutherford, Calls Guillermo Gonzalez “crap scientist”

ID Proponents Need Not ApplyNature recently carried a glowing review of “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design” which uses strong language to attack ID: “Judgment Day gracefully avoids ridiculing intelligent design for the pseudo-intellectual fundamentalist fig-leaf that it is.” Rather than make any attacks against the reviewer, Adam Rutherford, I’ll just let Mr. Rutherford speak for himself: “were I in a position to offer Guillermo Gonzalez tenure, I would deny it for the precise reason that his, yes, religious views about purpose in the universe explicitly mean he is a crap scientist.” (emphasis added)

Rutherford continues:

Guillermo Gonzalez has been denied a physics post by his university. Quite right: you cannot believe in ID and call yourself a scientist. So farewell, I hope, to the scientific career of Guillermo Gonzalez. … I know that, were I in a position to offer Guillermo Gonzalez tenure, I would deny it for the precise reason that his, yes, religious views about purpose in the universe explicitly mean he is a crap scientist, regardless of his ability to generate valid data. … As a vocal supporter of the demonstrably unscientific guff that is intelligent design, Gonzalez displays ignorance of the scientific process, and appears to wilfully [sic] defy it. And for that reason, he neither deserves the use of the facilities of a university to conduct scientific research, nor the privilege of teaching the next generation of scientists.

(Adam Rutherford, “Wrong by Design“)

It’s worth mentioning that Rutherford’s review came out a week before the “Judgment Day” documentary was released. How did he get the opportunity to view such a pre-screening? Someone inside Nature or PBS must have hand-picked Rutherford to view a sneak preview of the documentary. Apparently these are the views of those who are chosen to review PBS documentaries in the world’s top scientific journals.

Casey Luskin

Associate Director and Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Casey Luskin is a geologist and an attorney with graduate degrees in science and law, giving him expertise in both the scientific and legal dimensions of the debate over evolution. He earned his PhD in Geology from the University of Johannesburg, and BS and MS degrees in Earth Sciences from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied evolution extensively at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. His law degree is from the University of San Diego, where he focused his studies on First Amendment law, education law, and environmental law.

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