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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 12/04/2007 : 15:19:36 [Permalink]
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This is just more of the Big Lie that ID creationism, like Christendom itself, is being persecuted, and is under sustained attack by the secular forces supposedly ruling the most religious large nation in the world.
Personally, though I am unconvinced his tenure committee decided this way with Gonzalez, I believe that even holding that ID is a "scientific theory" is such extreme mystical antiscience that anyone in the sciences who holds to that belief should have their scientific mentality questioned. Denial of tenure, and the extraordinary privileges which it confers, is reasonable.
This is not the same as denying tenure to scientists who simply believe God created the heavens and the earth. So long as they do not claim that ID Creationism (or any other mystical nonsense) is science, this is and should be protected as religious freedom.
But the ID Creationists go that extra step into pseudoscience, making a claim that faith and unreason is equivalent to reality-based science. As educators, this should be considered in evaluating them as scientists.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 12/04/2007 15:20:05 |
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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
 Posted - 12/04/2007 : 17:20:35 [Permalink]
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The press release is, as the author in your link, Davd, notes, curiously weak. I say curiously only because while ID may be incredibly vacuous, the DI people do seem to be pretty shrewd in the PR department. (If only that whole "Wedge Document" thing didn't get out!)
It seems to me that the tenure review thing was a lost cause. That is, once he was denied tenure, some sort of PR campaign by the DI against ISU wasn't suddenly going to make some faculty members change their mind.
In light of this, then their PR campaign should have been directed towards the public at large, and and angle simply should have been something along the lines of "here's yet another example of mainstream science being too afraid of ID's challenge to the establishment" and that's that. At the very least, they could have turned it into a fund raising tool. |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
Posted - 12/04/2007 : 18:54:35 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Cuneiformist
That is, once he was denied tenure, some sort of PR campaign by the DI against ISU wasn't suddenly going to make some faculty members change their mind. |
The DI is taking their appeal to the Board of Regents. Considering that Dembski posted the home addresses and phone numbers of Baylor's Board of Regents in an attempt to get his way with them, something tells me that ISU's board is going to be less than impressed with anything coming from the DI.
They're also claiming a possible lawsuit, but what could foster a "hostile work environment" more than using the courts to bully your way into a privileged position on faculty?
Of course, the person we haven't yet heard from is Gonzalez. Does he want the DI going to bat for him this way? Seems that his best interest lies in finding a job, and the more he lets the DI pull stunts at ISU, the less likely anyone else will make him an offer.
Edit: It is Gonzalez who plans on suing, so he's trotting right along with the DI. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
Posted - 12/04/2007 : 19:03:12 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dave W.
Originally posted by Cuneiformist
That is, once he was denied tenure, some sort of PR campaign by the DI against ISU wasn't suddenly going to make some faculty members change their mind. |
The DI is taking their appeal to the Board of Regents. Considering that Dembski posted the home addresses and phone numbers of Baylor's Board of Regents in an attempt to get his way with them, something tells me that ISU's board is going to be less than impressed with anything coming from the DI. |
True. I'm not sure of the power of a Board of Regents to force a department to reconsider a tenure review. My guess is that at a large state school like ISU, that power is greater than at an elite private university. That said, the DI's contradictory case for why there should be another review is not in their favor.
They're also claiming a possible lawsuit, but what could foster a "hostile work environment" more than using the courts to bully your way into a privileged position on faculty?
Of course, the person we haven't yet heard from is Gonzalez. Does he want the DI going to bat for him this way? Seems that his best interest lies in finding a job, and the more he lets the DI pull stunts at ISU, the less likely anyone else will make him an offer. |
Indeed. I think a comment on your link noted as much. Gonzalez is almost certainly not going to get rich as a professor in an astronomy department. But it's a pretty sweet job with great benefits and job security, and one wonders if part of him wishes this flap would go away so he could quietly try to seek employment at another university and give tenure another go around. |
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Hawks
SFN Regular
Canada
1383 Posts |
Posted - 12/07/2007 : 20:21:42 [Permalink]
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From UcD:
| The key thing to rememember is that the scientific consensus then becomes self-perpetuating, because anyone who challenges the orthodoxy gets Gonzalized (a new term I've coined which is similar to being “Borked” in politics). |
Not quite, but when muppets and pigs in space make fools of themsleves, they can get Gonzolized!
...
Was that too obscure? |
METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
It's a small, off-duty czechoslovakian traffic warden! |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 12/07/2007 : 21:38:30 [Permalink]
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Negative!
But then, I can recite/sing the intro song (and quite a few others they did back in the day...)
"Its time to play the music, its time to light the lights, its time to meet the Muppets on the Muppet Show tonight!"
Man.... that brain cell could surely be filled with something more useful... 
Of course, my favorite muppet is Animal.
Drum Battle! Animal vs Buddy Rich. Crazy!
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 12/13/2007 : 13:50:48 [Permalink]
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Of course, my favorite muppet is Animal.
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Mine too! I also liked Floyd, although he didn't get much play.
Dave, I don't think it's as bad as it's going to get. I think that the day is not far off when noone in serious academia will even acknowledge the existence of Dembski's little idiotcy.
Everywhere they've turned, they and their supporters have been all but laughed out of town, and deservedly so. They have no science and their philosophy is a joke, and you can't build upon failure.
Just the other day, I read of another post-doc being asked to resign from Wood's Hole for refusing to regard evolution as a fact. UD got sand in their skivvies over that one as well, and it won't make an iota of difference. PZ had something on it at the Panda's Thumb.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 12/13/2007 : 15:52:48 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dave W.
Right here, too, filthy.
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I'd forgotten about that..... Basking yet again in the sweet bliss of ever encroaching dementia.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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moakley
SFN Regular
USA
1888 Posts |
Posted - 12/13/2007 : 17:27:56 [Permalink]
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Digging through all of the links here, PT and elsewhere I wound up here. I found the following and just got pissed. The press release linked in the OP didn't include it. I wonder why.
Gonzalez listed The Privileged Planet, his book about intelligent design, in his tenure review file. “How can he and the DI claim that it was improper for ISU to consider the material he asked them to review?” Dr. Gregory Tinkler, of Iowa Citizens for Science, asked. “He invited his colleagues to consider his work on ID. His department and the scientific community have examined ID, and found that it isn't science.
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 was Gonzales thinking. Did he expect the tenure committee to consider this piece of work and have some kind of religious epiphany? Idiot. And now he and the lying SOBs at the DI are simply being foolish.
Proverbs 10:18 He that hideth hatred with lying lips, and he that uttereth a slander, is a fool.
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I wonder what role hatred plays, to what extent. |
Life is good
Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. -Anonymous |
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Hawks
SFN Regular
Canada
1383 Posts |
Posted - 12/13/2007 : 20:24:02 [Permalink]
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| The ISU made one MAJOR mistake when they initially denied that Gonzo's involvement with ID had anything to do with him being denied tenure. Claiming that the correlation between habitability and discoverability (for planets in the universe) means that the universe was designed to be discovered (a la "Priviledged Planet") should be a major reason to be denied tenure in it's own right. |
METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
It's a small, off-duty czechoslovakian traffic warden! |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 12/14/2007 : 05:08:48 [Permalink]
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Gonzalez has a tenure of sorts; he is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute. This means that he can drift off into the less-referenced footnotes of history with Dembski, and the rest of the science hacks -- you know; those footnotes that grad students look up just for shits & giggles.
I find it sad that this young man's promising career was destroyed by the idiocy of ID and the intellectual swindlers who promote it.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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Gonzalez' tenure (or lack thereof)
