Month: July 2005
Columnists Need Schooling on Textbook Definition of ID
Mark Franek had a piece in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer showing off his ignorance on intelligent design. Here’s his attempt to describe ID: “The basic tenet of intelligent design takes about five seconds to teach – the mechanisms of life are so complex that they could have only been orchestrated by a supreme power – but the implications of this belief are better taught and served in a religion or philosophy class, or better yet, in a place of worship.” He’s right, his definition of ID would be better suited for a religion class. But, that’s not the standard definition of ID and is in fact a definiton that we reject outright.
The Privileged Planet Co-Author Strikes Back
Last week a colleague of Guillermo Gonzalez’s had a decidedly nasty letter published in the Ames Tribune. Rather than address any of the scientific arguments raised by Gonzalez and co-author Jay Richards in their book The Privileged Planet, this letter writer instead pens an ad hominem diatribe full of misinformation and falsehoods. The Ames Tribune has published Gonzalez’s response. While the letter tries to make out all ID supporters as ultra right-wing zealots — even to the point of comparing ID scientists to the Taliban — Gonzalez points out:
Dembski Hits the Nail on the Head
CSC senior fellow William Dembski’s blog about an article in The New Scientist’s recent issue on intelligent design paints the perfect picture of the exact problem ID proponents and Darwinian skeptics face with almost all media. Reporters sometimes wonder why CSC fellows don’t immediately stop whatever they’re doing and spend hours answering their questions and trying to explain our side of the issue to them when they call.
Flunking Journalism Ethics 101: NYT Allows News Reporter to Write Op-Ed on Evolution Controversy
You’d think that after the Jayson Blair scandal, the New York Times would be exceptionally careful about questions of journalistic ethics. Why, then, is the Times allowing a reporter who regularly covers the evolution controversy on its news pages to ALSO write opinion articles on the same subject? Cornelia Dean has written a number of news stories for the Times about the the controversy over evolution, including one about the Kansas science standards and another one last weekend about the Catholic church and evolution. But the day after Dean’s news piece appeared about Catholics and evolution, a commentary by her promoting evolution appeared on the op-ed page of the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania! In this op-ed, Dean advised evolutionists Read More ›
New Info about Ohio Grad Student Persecuted by Darwinists
Over the past month, Darwinists have been waging a vicious campaign of defamation against Ohio State University science education doctoral candidate Bryan Leonard. (For more information about Leonard’s situation, see here.) Mr. Leonard’s doctoral dissertation defense has been put in limbo after certain Darwinist professors alleged that his research was “unethical” because it involved teaching students about scientific criticisms of Darwin’s theory, an approach called for in Ohio’s official science standards! Darwinists have variously claimed that members of Leonard’s doctoral committee were improperly selected, that Leonard engaged in “unethical” research, or that he taught his students intelligent design. According to members of Leonard’s dissertation committee, however, all of these charges are false. Two members of the committee have just issued Read More ›