Adminstrative

There have been some developments that have finally precipitated my decision to start 1 experimental forum and 2 experimental creationist blogs. The most important catalyst for my decision being I got invitation to make presentations to university students for which they can get homework credits for attending, and I needed an internet presence to supplement what they learn in the presentations. The decision was also was peripherally connected to some of the reader complaints about creationism being overemphasized at UD and some desire to have an ARN/ISCID-like discussion forum for conversations that may require weeks to conduct. UD and EvolutionNews (ENV) blogs are what I consider advocacy blogs for ID. People come to these blogs for a variety of reasons. Read More ›

A lot of premier discussions at UD recently do not bring up google hits, but other sites which reference discussions at UD come up on google. This seems odd and deliberate. I cannot say for sure but this seems suspicious. A comment by fryether (still trapped in the moderation queue, which I have no authority to release) said: As an IT Professional, I am shocked that if you look up “uncommon descent” on google the only reference to the actual site is behe.uncommondescent.com along with a plethora of anti-ID sites. Compare the results to the BING and you see a huge difference. No I make no money off of bing. I don’t even use it myself. Although I might start Read More ›

I’ve discovered some features of UD software that I wasn’t aware of and may be of help to all the 30 or so UD authors. It has been a pleasure to assist the News desk for the past week while Denyse worked on another project. I now appreciate how time consuming the task is. In the process of assisting the News desk, I discovered that if a UD author clicks “News” in the category list, then that article will automatically scroll beneath the featured articles when a new article is posted. I want to apologize to VJTorley and other authors since I did not fully realize how the “News” category automatically scrolls past featured articles like VJTorley’s Scala Naturae article. Read More ›

In a previous post, I misidentified Mathgrrl with another anonymous contributor to Uncommon Descent, and accused Mathgrrl of making uncivil and ungentlemanly remarks on a certain evolution forum. It now turns out that this identification was incorrect. I would like to apologize to Mathgrrl.

With the new technical enhancements behind the scenes on Uncommon Descent, we are now able to add individual blogs.  That said, we are happy to announce that the first individual blog we have added is that of Dr. Michael Behe.  All of his previous posts from his Amazon blog have been imported to his UD blog.   Dr. Behe plans to post on his new blog in the future. If you haven’t read his previous posts, you can now do so more conveniently.  We hope you enjoy it, and find it useful.  I have added a permanent link to his blog under “Intelligent Design Links.” Address:  http://behe.uncommondescent.com

As of tomorrow (Friday, November 14th), Barry Arrington assumes the leadership of UD. After more than three years at the helm, I’m finally stepping down. I expect I’ll still be posting here occasionally, but my energies will go more and more into technical ID research. Robert Marks and I continue to crank away at papers and have finally cracked the peer-review barrier in the information sciences with a paper on conservation of information (stay tuned at www.EvoInfo.org for a formal announcement). Barry has organized UD as a non-profit corporation and plans to take UD in some new directions that will increase its readership, sense of community, and impact. Take it away Barry!

Many of you are wondering why the UD adminstration decided to take an aggressive stand promoting the McCain/Palin presidential ticket. There are two reasons. The first is that both Senator McCain and Governor Palin are on record supporting “teach the controversy”. Senator Obama is on the record against it. Our goal is not to vanquish the Darwinian narrative by legal chicanery. That’s a tactic our opponents employ. Our goal is to let young people in public schools hear both sides of the argument in a religiously neutral manner and thus stop the early indoctrination into the Darwinian narrative by presenting it in a vacuum devoid of criticism or alternative hypotheses. The second reason is that our opponents in the academic Read More ›

The Akisment spam filter is acting up and holding up a lot of comments it shouldn’t be blocking. If your comment doesn’t appear right away where in the past it had then it’s the spam filter. Every single one of my comments are being held up in it. So are about a dozen other members’ here. Don’t ask why because I don’t know why… It hiccups like this occasionally and goes away soon. I suspect it gets noticed and fixed at Akismet during normal working hours so it’s more prone to become a bothersome issue on weekends.

I deleted this thread because I found the comments offensive. Let’s keep postings and comments germane to ID. Addendum by DaveScot: For the same reason I deleted the “Sterling Example of Anti-Religionists” thread due to many complaints that it was offensive. I want to extend my apologies for my own vulgar contributions that many found to be offensive. When I find myself among the crude and vulgar I tend to participate at the same level rather than rise above it as I should.

I put a fix into the WordPress program code for this problem. Please let me know here if it’s still a problem for anyone.

Kudos to whoever is responsible for the new look of Uncommon Descent! I know that you guys put a lot of work into maintaining this site and I’m sure that this new look will make the site even easier to navigate. The Scubaredneck