Tag: Politics
“Free Thinkers” at the University of Arkansas Don’t Think You Should Be Free to Form Your Own Opinion on Evolution
Last Thursday night I spoke at the University of Arkansas for an Academic Freedom Day Event. The crowd was civil with a good mix of both ID-friendly folks and ID-skeptics. The Q & A was generally harmless but the most amusing question of all came from a very nice gentleman with a local “Free Thinkers” group who asked me a ‘how dare you’ type question, arguing that because the “consensus” or “thousands” of scientists oppose ID, so should I. Here’s a little snippet of what I said in reply: “ID is a minority scientific view. But you owe it to yourself to examine the issue for yourself and come up with your own viewpoint. And if the consensus is right, Read More ›
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 ›
Over 500 Scientists Proclaim Their Doubts About Darwin’s Theory of Evolution
“We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.”