Category: Culture
Cornelia Dean Doesn’t Trust You — But Then Again, She Doesn’t Trust Herself, Either
There’s a disturbing trend for the role of media in a democracy: journalists who don’t trust their profession, the public, or themselves. These days more reporters, editors, and journalism advocates are urging their colleagues to jettison objectivity in reporting and replace it with something they can trust: their blind allegiance to authority.Perhaps no one serves as a better example of this than New York Times science writer Cornelia Dean. Her new book, Am I Making Myself Clear?: A Scientist’s Guide to Talking to the Public, has a gem of a chapter titled “The Problem of Objectivity.” You read that correctly. Here’s a journalist who sees objectivity as a problem. To wit: In striving to be “objective” journalists try to tell Read More ›
Want to Make a Difference for ID? Enroll in Discovery Institute’s Summer Seminars
Academic freedom week is about more than quoting Darwin and maybe watching an appropriate film for the occasion. (No, not that one. That one’s boring. This one.) It’s about the scientists, scholars, journalists, teachers and students who are affected when fear of inquiry rears its ugly head in the debate over evolution. When you hear the stories of ordinary men and women who have been targeted in this battle over an idea, the importance and impact of the debate becomes clear.So you’re informed about the issues — you read the blog, listen to the podcast, get the newsletter, and stay involved in the debate as it continues. What else can you do? If you’re a college or graduate student, you Read More ›
Vandalizing Bookstores and Censoring Books in the Name of Darwin
Just in time for Academic Freedom Day, Feb. 12 (aka Darwin Day), graduate student Michael Barton at Montana State University boasts of regularly going into his local bookstore and purging books critical of Darwin from the science section of the store and reshelving them in the religion section. This past Sunday Barton posted a report about his most recent act of vandalism: Today I moved [Michael Behe’s] The Edge of Evolution and [Benjamin Wiker’s] The Darwin Myth away from the shelve directly under where copies of Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth were, and placed them next to—I just had to—the Adventure Bible and the Princess Bible in the religion section. Whatever Barton claims, his actions constitute censorship, pure and Read More ›
ID The Future Kicks Off Academic Freedom Week With Podcasts on Darwin and Design
It’s that time of year! ID the Future just kicked off a series of podcasts for Academic Freedom Week, taking a look back over the academic freedom stories in the media last year and a look ahead to the current struggles for academic freedom in the debate over evolution and intelligent design. Leading off was today’s interview of ARN Executive Director Dennis Wagner, who discussed with Casey Luskin the expelling of Ben Stein from the University of Vermont, the censorship of Michael Behe’s Bloggingheads.tv interview, and the lawsuit against the California Science Center over their cancellation of the pro-ID film, Darwin’s Dilemma. Stay tuned to the entire series of podcasts this week at IDtheFuture.com.
Primordial Soup? Would You Believe…
Life arose without design or direction from any intelligent agent. Would you believe it did so in a sun-warmed ocean surface? No? Would you believe an earth-heated vent at the bottom of the same ocean? Would you believe an office microwave that hasn’t been cleaned since the Bush Administration? The past week’s startling news of backpedaling from the “primordial soup” theory rang a bell, though I wasn’t instantly able to say whose comedy routine it put me in mind of. Hm, was it Monty Python? ScienceDaily carries the story: For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a “primordial soup” of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the “soup” Read More ›