Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Granville Sewell vindication latest in string of recent defeats for Darwin lobby … straw in the wind?

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Bio_Symposium_033.jpg
credit Laszlo Bencze
Journal’s apology story here.

It wasn’t like this years ago. I remember Rick Sternberg writing to me mid-decade, about how the Smithsonian honchoes were, at that time, holding meetings to decide his fate. The problem was: They had to get rid of him because he doubted the Darwin lobby’ theories, but had broken no rules. They did, of course, get rid of him, and that time with impunity.  When a film, Expelled, was made, pulling a number of such incidents together, some of the very people who helped engineer the witch hunts loudly denied that they had taken place.

I remember the gifted young astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, a specialist in habitable planetary zones, denied tenure at Iowa State. It was probably due  in large part to the attacks of an atheist religion prof. Gonzalez just couldn’t believe what had happened to him.

So, when I was talking to Granville Sewell recently, and saw that he  was radiantly confident that he would receive an apology, because there was a legal agreement, I was a bit concerned. Having – from years of covering this beat – much more experience than hope, I warned him: The Masters of the Universe are “science,” and as such, are above the law and exempt from common decency.

Well, glad to be wrong on that case!

But is the Darwin lobby’s “maximum suppression” strategy actually starting to fail? Consider some recent events:

Gonzalez got a new observatory at Grove City College and continues to publish in the literature.

Another astronomer, Martin Gaskell, received $100,000 in damages

Despite an online petition and threatened boycott, the Darwin lobby never got the journal Synthese to withdraw its criticism of unscholarly attacks on the reputations of Frank Beckwith and Larry Laudan. Indeed, their continued protests resulted in a none-too-favorable story in, of all venues, the New York Times, as well as a fuller explanation that revealed that – apart from anything else – Barbara Forrest is manifestly not an expert in the ID controversy, as is claimed.

And now this – an apology and damages to mathematician Sewell. It’s almost as if the Darwin lobby can’t get away with destroying a person’s career any more just by broadcasting  “He doubts us.” Thoughts?

Comments
I think of your "straw in the wind" as a my "alpha-particle effect". When in high school, we build "cloud chambers" from petri dishes containing an alcohol-soaked towel, placed on a block of dry ice. Then when a chip of radium paint, from a glow-in-the-dark clock dial was placed in the petri dish, little streaks of condensation indicated where an alpha particle had left. The clouds drifted to the bottom of the dish, and new ones appeared above them, giving the mysterious feeling that the petri dish was filling up with tracks. Our teacher told us to examine the tracks closely, and sure enough, the end of the track had a thicker appearance than the beginning. "Cloud droplets form as the alpha particles ionize air," he said, "and they ionize air better the slower they are going until they come to rest." So when my 2-year olds were particularly noisy, I told my wife that this was the "alpha-particle effect", they got very loud just before narcolepsy stopped them in their tracks. And this seems to be true of radical Islam, gnu atheists, and Darwinbots. They all make the most noise, just before they go extinct.Robert Sheldon
June 9, 2011
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I hate to be too harsh here but let's face it, anybody who still believes in any naturalistic evolutionary theory is a fool. It's taking longer than I thought it would for the insanity and inanity of evolutionary theory to become apparent but it's happening. If I were a betting person I'd say that in another two or three decades neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory will be ridiculed as the biggest crock of "scientific" er, hogwash of all time. It's really philosophical hogwash, but that's another story.tgpeeler
June 8, 2011
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Mrs O'Leary: Important news, though not on a happy subject. The attack-dog, censoring evolutionary materialism lobby is being exposed for what it is up to. GEM of TKIkairosfocus
June 8, 2011
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