Science journalist Suzan Mazur has been reporting extensively about scientists’ doubts about Darwinian evolution and a forthcoming paradigm shift — a shift that we are assured by the likes of Eugenie Scott is not coming, does not exist, and is simply a ploy by “creationists.” Scott, and dogmatists like her, continue to insist there is no controversy or disagreement amongst scientists about the mechanisms that Darwin championed, namely natural selection acting on random mutation. Mazur’s interviews underscore what we’ve been saying all along. There is a controversy, and it deserves to be heard.
Mazur and those she interviews and covers are not friendly to the idea of intelligent design. In an interesting twist,

these folks find themselves under attack from the Darwinian orthodoxy, but at the same time seem unable to see that they themselves treat pro-ID scientists in a similar manner. Or maybe they see it, but they don’t know how to handle it without seeming to be open to dangerous new ideas.

Mazur was recently interviewed by progressive radio talker Jeff Farias and had some very interesting thoughts about all this. She recounts how her stories about the Altenberg 16 have been received and how some scientists recognize the problems with modern evolutionary theory but insist that it would be better to attack creationists than deal with those issues, and how scientists stick together politically when it comes to funding and publishing.

Suzan Mazur: But part of the problem is “the cycle of submission”, as Lima-de-Faria puts it. Where you’ve got a peer review process to go through. If you’ve got a rather unorthodox theory, but something you see as a solid idea, you may not have much success when you submit it to a journal for approval. Because scientists hang together, they want to secure funding. If they get the endorsement of their peers, then it makes it easier to get funding, etc. Rather than going out on a limb with a new idea, scientists tend to stick with the pack. And science doesn’t advance as much as it could.

Read it all here.