The story of the Robert Marks debacle has now made the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education. If the account is accurate, I’m going to do something you’ll only rarely see: I’ll take the side of the creationist.
The problem is that Baylor was more than a little ham-fisted in intruding on Marks’ academic freedom. Marks is promoting this bogus idea of something called “evolutionary informatics”, and he admits that he is doing it on his own time (which leaves Dembski, his colleague, dangling without any legitimate connection to Baylor; if Marks is doing it on his own time, what is he doing hiring Dembski and granting him office space on campus?), and that he had a web page promoting it. The web page is the bone of contention; it seems to have advertised a non-existent Baylor connection, and they had meetings to clear that up.
At that meeting, Mr. Marks agreed to terms outlined by Baylor to remove
any wording on the Web page that implied that Mr. Marks’s work in
evolutionary informatics was associated with the university, Mr. Gilmore
said. When those conditions were met, the evolutionary informatics page
was to be allowed back online, he said. But after the meeting, Baylor
officials asked for further changes beyond what both parties had agreed
to, according to Mr. Gilmore, and the Web page remains offline.
I categorically reject Marks’ whole philosophy and I’d probably call him delusional, but … it is the professor’s job to talk freely about wacky ideas if he wants. A web page that can be shared (and laughed at) is a reasonable part of the commitment to public communication, and I don’t think Baylor should restrict it. Even if the professor is a bit of an embarrassment, and the subject is a sore spot for the university.
The creationists shouldn’t take joy in this, though. You know, Baylor and other universities are going to be even more reluctant to take on faculty with ID/creationist leanings after this: they’re learning that they really stink up the joint.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. If we got rid of every university wack-job, Ann Arbor would have to plant more corn.
Hey, even SciAm printed an article by Duesberg.
i think dembski should be given ample opportunity and funding to conduct research into id. i can’t think of a better way to expose id for the scientific fraud it is than to force it to do science. does id have any instrumental value, or is it just taxi cab bollocks? let’s find out, give the man some rope.
I’d agree – if what Gilmore says is true. But if Gilmore is Marks’ lawyer (as seems likely from the section of the article available without a subscription) we certainly can’t rely on that. The ID movement has a history of dishonesty.
The problems with supporting pseudo-science on Univer$ity dollar$ are 1) opportunity co$t- why $pend money to $upport fraud when those same monie$ can go to legitimate research, and 2) limited re$ource$- at a time when basic research budget$ are sliced and diced by administrators who prefer applied research, not to mention increased labor, equipment, and overhead cost$; why should monie$ be spent on moonbeams?
I agree with PZ, if I read him right. First, Baylor (and most universities) let faculty set up their own personal web pages on university servers. Pulling Marks’s from the Baylor server, and forcing him to put a disclaimer on it, is a form of censorship. Second, although Marks probably violated university policy by hiring Dembski as a post-doc (his third or fourth, I think) while Dembski had a full-time job at another school. Also, pulling the entire outside grant from Marks and returning it to the grantor went too far: Marks should have been able to hire a qualified post-doc. But I blame most of this on Dembski, who has tarnished Marks with his juvenile stunts and obvious bridge-burning at Baylor during the Polanyi Center dispute.
~#^% (#2) says, :
“i think dembski should be given ample opportunity and funding to conduct research into id. i can’t think of a better way to expose id for the scientific fraud it is than to force it to do science.”
I tend to agree – let ’em knock themselves out…but not with money from legitimate scientific sources. (Its too sparse for legimate research as it is). They can get all the funding – and I’d wager a pretty wicked amount – from wealthy private sources who would like to see their precious beliefs vindicated (certainly not “tested”).
But they wouldn’t know where to begin. And if they DID manage to dream up some “experimental study”, you can bet that they would interpret the “results” as favorable to their preconceptions. If any legitimate cast-iron-stomach scientists independently then decide to test their conclusions by repeating the “experiment”, the resulting clash of “Yes it does!”/No it doesn’t!” would be most entertaining.
In THAT strange case it would be authentic science falsifying bullshit “science” in a direct manner for all to admire.
Sure: Let ‘er rip, but not on our bucks. Let the money come from those who like to invest in entertainment and commercial media tripe. Dembski couldn’t possibly complain that they were underfunded.
Paul King (#3) says, “The ID movement has a history of dishonesty.”
The simplicity of that understatement is AWESOME.
Hey, its not all bad news for the ‘Intelligent’ designers, it looks like they’re finally getting some research results.
http://tinyurl.com/2mtstx
The Templeton Foundation (“Funding initiatives for spiritual information through science”) ought to be right on this issue. However, they’ve been reluctant to back ID “research” because nobody has ever submitted testable proposals. Clearly, Dembski can counter that little problem.
From what I can tell, however, other than rather mundane secular claims about the value of spirituality, all the testable proposals they’ve taken on have been research washouts. So, like good scientists, instead of putting aside the hypothesis that there are spiritual truths and moving on, they’ve decided to focus on interviewing scientists who are spiritual and asking them gee, how do you manage it? See? Connection between religion and science. Stop the presses.
Dembski and Marks have been working on this project since the spring of 05, and they’ve produced three papers, all of them pure crap. Like the rest of Dembski’s “work”, his evolutionary informatics is utterly lacking in substance, and is useful only for conning gullible IDists. The presumption that they’re actually doing science is, unfortunately, false.
peter irons:
Of course it is, but it is censorship well within their legal right. The university is not obligated to provide a personal web page, and depending on their Terms of Service they may have the right to remove any page they don’t approve of. Certainly if a prof’s personal page were extolling the virtues of man-boy love, or lynching of blacks, or the assassination of abortion doctors, one would want the university to disassociate itself from those views, no? The university is not preventing Marks from expressing his views, merely expressing his views on their servers.
Baylor University’s Web Site Publishing policy says, in part:
Relevant? Maybe.
I think no. 5 could be the cincher.
Indeed, it seems to be Dembski’s participation that doomed this project. Marks already had some reviews of his evolutionary informatics concepts on his personal faculty pages (see here and here.)
But apparently adding the name of a known crackpot to the mix set off some alarms in the administration.
From my chair #2 looks operative. ID is fraudulent is it not?
#3’s bit about political partisanship, too, may well apply.
As I noted before, Marks has a page with religious material marked “Apologetics” under his name on Baylor’s site. And Marks still offers “Evolutionary Computing” as graduate research opportunity at Baylor.
The evidence so far, such as it is, could be construed as Dembski’s crackpot behavior (directly or indirectly) triggering the separation of the EILab material to an independent site, whether it was good or bad to do so.
[I would go for excluding ID on Baylor’s regulation as “obscene”, but that is me. :-P]
Btw, Marks doesn’t seem to have any experience with genetic algorithms or other evolutionary models. He has mainly published about neural networks.
The closest I can come is his coauthoring of a paper on swarm intelligences (swarm agent behavior), published this year in an IEEE publication.
But nothing on population dynamics, evolutionary algorithms, or even search algorithms outside network training.
As I noted before, Marks has a page with religious material marked “Apologetics” under his name on Baylor’s site. And Marks still offers “Evolutionary Computing” as graduate research opportunity at Baylor.
The evidence so far, such as it is, could be construed as Dembski’s crackpot behavior (directly or indirectly) triggering the separation of the EILab material to an independent site, whether it was good or bad to do so.
[I would go for excluding ID on Baylor’s regulation as “obscene”, but that is me. :-P]
Btw, Marks doesn’t seem to have any experience with genetic algorithms or other evolutionary models. He has mainly published about neural networks.
The closest I can come is his coauthoring of a paper on swarm intelligences (swarm agent behavior), published this year in an IEEE publication.
But nothing on population dynamics, evolutionary algorithms, or even search algorithms outside network training.
So, I hook up with a local university here in Dallas, teaching practical law for citizens, including that bit of First Amendment law dealing with creationism and whether it can be taught. I ask you to collaborate with me on a project for which I get a grant, on whether it’s legal for a teacher to teach intelligent design — you do the biology and keep it in line, I do the law.
Do I need to take you on as a post-doc, or wouldn’t it work better if you stayed at your place at UM Morris and we listed you as a prof from there?
There’s something else going on in that story that has not yet seen the light of day.
The “partisan politics” forbids endorsing political candidates but not political issues. The university as a tax exempt non-profit can’t allow its resources to be used for that without risking tax problems (the same with the commercial stuff on web pages).
Number 5,
is very vague and possibly an infringement on academic freedom. One can see quite accurate info being discrediting to a university. I suspect U. Michigan would like to erase last week’s football game for instance.
Supposedly the Templeton Foundation withdrew a solicitation for ID grant proposals because no one ever filed one.
@18; why would endorsing a political candidate be unacceptable, but pushing a political stance be okay? That’s not a rhetorical question; I don’t see the principle that allows the two to be distinctly separated.
No. 5 is iffy, but I think sneaking a creationist lab onto the campus passes the lemon test.
Has somebody told Ben Stein about the way that Robert Marks has been EXPELLED by the militant atheists at Baylor?
I hear that a film is being made about it.
To us the irony (modern sense of the word) is hilarious, but to the True Believers that’s a sober assessment of the situation. Did you see the comments under the forged letter at UD before they were taken down? Sca-ry. These people think anyone slightly less extreme than themself is an extremist in the other direction. Baylor’s faculty and administration might as well be agents of the antichrist.
The problem with IDers doing research is not just sucking funding from proper science. What happens when they want to publish? They submit to proper, peer reviewed journals and get panned, cue cries of persecution, of big science trying to subvert ‘The Truth’ etc. If they get published in any peer reviewed journal they shout their success from the rooftops and for evermore it gets cited at you in every debate, regardless of whether it has been refuted or not.
“…Baylor officials asked for further changes beyond what both parties had agreed to, according to Mr. Gilmore….”
I’d stay out of this until there’s some proof beyond Mark’s lawyer’s word that Baylor officials did anything of the kind. The ID’s track record for weaseling is pretty near perfect. My guess is, Mark tried to slip something in after the agreement and the Baylor officials’ demand for “further changes” was asking him to take it back out again. That’s about the level at which the ID crowd typically functions.
“Btw, Marks doesn’t seem to have any experience with genetic algorithms or other evolutionary models. He has mainly published about neural networks.”
In a brief look into Marks’ publications, my attention was drawn to a 5-star-reviewed work on Amazon. The first 5-star reviewer I Googled turned out to have been someone for whom Marks served as thesis advisor. Not even an acquaintance with Marks was hinted at in the review. The review is years old, and this is the only Marks publication rated on Amazon, so my strong guess would be Marks is aware of the review and has not asked his former student to disclose the relationship.
A very small thing, to be sure, but it does make me want to approach any assertions about the Baylor matter with the attitude that evidence must precede belief.