Moi? Mentioned in the Waco Tribune? Defending a creationist? I knew that remark would come back to bite me. At least the author misspelled my name, so my shame won’t spread too far (except, unfortunately, that I seem to be more widely cited as “Meyers” than “Myers”). Anyway, it’s a letter by Robert Marks’ lawyer, complaining about Baylor’s decision to shut down Marks’ “evolutionary informatics” web page, and I’m mentioned as supporting him.
In Minnesota, where I live, a well-known biologist and faithful believer in evolution, Professor P.Z. Meyers, has followed what Baylor has done and called for it to reverse itself.
Meyers loathes ID and its proponents and blogs about it, frequently with exceptional humor. It is more than telling — shameful, perhaps? — that Meyers, a self-identified atheist, sees something amiss here that those in power at Baylor cannot or will not.
Yeah, I’m afraid it’s true (except the “faithful believer” part). As long as Robert Marks plainly labels his creationist web pages as unendorsed by Baylor, as long as his remarks are plainly associated with his personal views, not the university’s, they ought to be tolerated. And laughed at, but that goes without saying. That’s the price of academic freedom, that we have to allow the free expression of ideas that we don’t like.
I also sympathize a little bit with Baylor. They’ve got this persistent, obnoxious leech named Dembski who keeps trying to cling to the university, and I can understand how they might get a little overzealous in trying to excise him. It looks to me like they have gotten carried away, though.
Of course, I also experience a little inappropriate glee at the situation. What’s the lesson universities are going to learn from this? If you hire a creationist, you hire a lawsuit-happy twit who is going to embarrass you repeatedly and is going to get crazy crackpot lunacy associated with your academic mission. It doesn’t matter how good he is at his specific discipline, the creationism is going to poison everything.
For another example of embarrassing associations, remember Dembski’s ‘notpology’ to Baylor? Throw away any pretense of apology, Bill. His latest entry was a link to a hideous parody site by one Galapagos Finch (the site seems to consist only of very bad Photoshop jobs where faces are distorted into ugly unrecognizability) expressing resentment that poor Robert Marks was being martyred. That one was very quickly ripped down and tossed into the UD memory hole, but you can still find it preserved in its shameful putrescence at At the Bathroom Wall.
I’m sure hiring committees around the country will take notice of the Dembski style of collegiality.
Your link is missing the l at the end of .html
There’s another guest column in the Trib from a few weeks back over the Marks controversy that I responded to (my response is under the hilarious letter to the editor about clowns teaching gospel).
Bathroom wall? I resent that – we’re the Official UD Mockery thread. Get your church-burning Ebola-boys classification right!
Bob
That’s right Bob…
I see “Notpology” is becoming mainstream.. Reciprocating Bill will be pleased.
PS – Kristine is a Molly-stealing witch.
“Faithful believer” — Argh. Always the bullshit insistence that science is somehow on a par with religious and mystical beliefs.
To them, science is something you “believe” because you want to, something you have “faith” in, and has nothing to do with reason, evidence, scientific method, exhaustive research and corroboration among a worldwide scientific community, or any other sort of real-world support.
Every time I hear “science is just another religion,” it translates in my head to: “Haha, the stuff scientists believe is every bit as mindless and nonsensical and arbitrary as the stuff we religious people believe!”
Dr Dr Dembski is back at The Evolutionary Informatics Lab. Though with the somewhat more correct title “Research Professor in Philosophy” as a real mathematician has joined too.
William Basener, employed at National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. His website sites him as interested in Dynamical Systems, Population Modeling, Topology, Celestial Mechanics, and Anomaly Detection in Hyperspectral Imaging.
The later is explained in a Power Point presentation as “Detection of Man Made objects” by “anomalousness” or how unlikely a pixel is in an image. (Fields vs forests.) We all know that feature detection, especially based on probabilistic methods instead of correlations and causation, in creationist speech becomes “design detection”. Or in pseudoastronomy circles “The Face on Mars”.
His website’s catch-phrase: “”As God Calculates, so the world is made.” – Leibniz, co-discoverer (along with Newton) of Calculus”. And have links such as “My faith in God” and “Why I believe Christianity is reasonable in a Scientific world” under “Other Projects”. I suspect he and Dembski will hit it off fine.
[Hmm. He has a curious interest in modeling societies collapse with population modeling. Two general papers, and one each of Easter Island and Mayan collapses, in progress.]
Tom English seems more and more like the odd one when 3 out of 4 “Evolutionary Informatics” workers are evangelical christians.
Dr Dr Dembski is back at The Evolutionary Informatics Lab. Though with the somewhat more correct title “Research Professor in Philosophy” as a real mathematician has joined too.
William Basener, employed at National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. His website sites him as interested in Dynamical Systems, Population Modeling, Topology, Celestial Mechanics, and Anomaly Detection in Hyperspectral Imaging.
The later is explained in a Power Point presentation as “Detection of Man Made objects” by “anomalousness” or how unlikely a pixel is in an image. (Fields vs forests.) We all know that feature detection, especially based on probabilistic methods instead of correlations and causation, in creationist speech becomes “design detection”. Or in pseudoastronomy circles “The Face on Mars”.
His website’s catch-phrase: “”As God Calculates, so the world is made.” – Leibniz, co-discoverer (along with Newton) of Calculus”. And have links such as “My faith in God” and “Why I believe Christianity is reasonable in a Scientific world” under “Other Projects”. I suspect he and Dembski will hit it off fine.
[Hmm. He has a curious interest in modeling societies collapse with population modeling. Two general papers, and one each of Easter Island and Mayan collapses, in progress.]
Tom English seems more and more like the odd one when 3 out of 4 “Evolutionary Informatics” workers are evangelical christians.
One thing that occurs to me is that this one person is basically dooming the department. I know I’d never apply for grad school or a position at a department which had that problem, as I don’t want that stain on my CV, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you see the current dept members’ CVs turning up in a lot of search committee inboxes soon.
Honestly, I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a movement for everyone to list the NCSE on their CVs along with the usual organizations, as an unobtrusive indication that they aren’t a crackpot. It’d make it a lot easier to ensure these crackpots never get hired in the first place.
“As long as Robert Marks labels his…web pages as unendorsed by Baylor…”
I think this remark is not as neutral nor as innocent as it may sound. If you ask what “endorsement” by a University might mean, and how such “endorsement” might formally obtain, you are, I think, going to end up at either end of a spectrum: The University, an association of scholars, “endorses” whatever (any of) those scholars hold (especially the ones who have been granted tenure); or, conversely, the University, an administrative entity, cannot and does not “endorse” any scholarly position.
In other words, “endorsement” is the logical antithesis of censorship, and a University, it seems, cannot have one without the other.
Dembski seems to be complaining that Baylor censored him and Marks in some significant sense. How would a “not endorsed” statement fix such censorship?
David Horowitz is on C-Span right now, whining about defending academic freedom (from those evil liberals who think that “brown” people are children and treat minorities from that stand point) for the next half hour. I had never paid attention to him before, but he went on a rant about being called a racist just because someone asked him why he is an angry white man even though the goopers have won the presidency five times in the last five elections. It went downhill from there. It’s probably too late to call in. :^(
Dembski really is a small, petty little man isn’t he?
Maybe some other academics at Baylor could write essays saying what they think about evolutionary informatics and put them on their personal pages, and Baylor could reqiure Marks to display prominent links on his page. That would seem to me to be bending over backwards to protect academic freedom.
Cowardly ones might just write “not my field”, but that would affect their own reputations in the wider world, wouldn’t it? (to the extent it wasn’t true, of course).
And if the downside of this is that some of the people rely on Marks for their own academic progression, that’s also an issue of academic freedom to be addressed.
Even, Baylor (or more probably a specific Baylor academic) could set up a sort of “Marks is an idiot” page and make links to views outside Baylor as well as inside.
Poxy: For “endorse” read “spend money on”.
Congratulations! An evolutionist that ‘defends’ academic freedom. Wow! – that is nice to see, and a ‘turn for the books’. I see a movie coming… perhaps “Not Expelled”?
Academic freedom is overrated. It’s used as an excuse for professors to get away with actions which would get them fired in a nanosecond in the real world.
If professors think academic freedom is such a great intellectual idea- then why don’t they fight for the same rights for their students?
(I’m being deliberately controversial here- but I believe in freedom for all, not just for the few.)
I’m not going to worry about whether PZ’s way is best or if Baylor’s was. Likely they’d just whine if Marks had to put in a disclaimer, but probably not as much.
What I really wanted to say is that while one unamusingly bad Photoshop “parody” link is gone, another one is there:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/richard-dawkins-weighs-in-on-the-removal-of-baylor-professors-id-website/
If they could ever be funny I don’t think I’d mind, at least not much (even though they’d be more effective then). They seem unable to move past their ressentiment, however, and are perpetually laughing at virtual butchery and maimings. ID is an untruth, of course, but that it’s always a nightmare, and never a pleasant dream of heaven, shows that JAD is right, their God is dead (I believe he really says God “might be dead,” like it matters). And they, indeed, feel free to do whatever they wish in consequence of that fact.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Corkscrew (#11):
Of course in our (US) capitalistic society, one’s “endorsement” means little unless one spends money on that which is endorsed (and vice-versa). But in academia, I have read on ScienceBlogs, one is expected to bring in “independent” money in order to get tenure and one is expected to keep bringing in independent money thereafter.
If a professor builds the stadium, recruits the players, maintains the field, and so on, it seems churlish, if nothing else, for the University to say “you can’t use our ball.”
If Baylor wants to claim that the web apparatus that Marks was using as a “lab” is in no way connected to any “overhead” fees it charges Marks on grant moneys Marks brings in, then I’d like to see Baylor’s accounting, which must surely involve miracles or lies or both.
Again: Either the University is a loose association of scholars whose academic freedom permits them to say almost anything and to say it under the aegis of the “University,” with no implication that any scholar “endorses” any other’s utterance, or else the “University” is a corporation whose Board and executives have the right to control anything and everything uttered by any one of its employees, in which case it isn’t “Professor Smith’s” class in Onomatopoeia in ASL, it is “The University’s” class, and Professor Smith is hired to say what the University wants said.
The best thing to do is suffocate him with duct tape, and then carefully remove him with tweezers.
Galapagos Finch is a cool name, though. I bet Atticus woulda named one of his kids that if he’da thought of it.
No, he is dead. And you are a “prescribed” idiot for not noticing. :-)
No, he is dead. And you are a “prescribed” idiot for not noticing. :-)
Perhaps you’d like to review the dogmatic state of evolutionary theory.
BTW, it turns out this John Hugh Gilmore guy previously represented Dembski during his dispute with Baylor over the Polanyi Center.
Funny how this whole business keeps coming back to the door of Wild Bill …
Calling a person a leech, even D., is not very nice, P.Z.
I agree with Jack. Unlike Dembski, the leech is a honorable creature.
Our place is called After the Bar Closes, not At the Bathroom Wall. And the post is preserved on the Official Uncommonly Dense Discussion Thread, not the Bathroom Wall thread.
And here I thought PZ was just being all ironic and passing forward the tradition of misspelling/misremembering a name.
Hope it was a joke. Otherwise it’s a Casey Luskin-level error.
I apologize Peez. That was off-sides. ;-)
Because everyone values their own freedom, but few value the freedom of others.
Marks’s lawyer:
It is more than telling — shameful, perhaps? — that Meyers, a self-identified atheist, sees something amiss here that those in power at Baylor cannot or will not
I must be missing something, perhaps because I have not achieved Atheist Buddha Nature. But why on earth should it be surprising that an atheist defend academic freedom? (At least Marks’s lawyer has the grace to be ashamed at his own surprise!)
Caledonian @26,
Because everyone values their own freedom, but few value the freedom of others.
I cannot tell you how refreshing it is to see a libertarian paraphrasing Rosa Luxemburg.
I never visited BRITES before. That site is funny, just as OE is a cool spot for teens to discuss ID. On the other hand, it’s a good thing that WAD is playing around with Photoshop now. He’ll need another skill set, since he’s actively digging his own grave as an academician. He’ll also have to learn that an alternate screen name isn’t the key to anonymity.
As for “endorsement”, I think that Baylor would be justified in their concern that a link to them, or a page running off their server, or even a header like Marks had which said he was a professor at Baylor and implied that the Informatics Lab was supported by Baylor, would cause people to assume endorsement. Plenty of lawsuits have been filed and won by people or organizations who found some other individual or organization using their names or implying a connection in a way that negatively impacted the original name holder. If they don’t endorse or support someone or something, they shouldn’t be obliged to host that person or thing on their site or servers. If they find that their name is being used to lend credibility to something they don’t support, they have a right to challenge its use. I don’t know what Dembski’s issue is, except that he’s not getting his own way.
Dr.D: I think a Blake’s 7 quotations page had the best advice for you that I’ve heard: “On Earth, it is considered ill-mannered to kill your friends while committing suicide.”
You’re not on Earth. Oops – my bad.
The problem with restricting what professors do is that if you wish to tell professors what they can and can’t work on, I would think lots of people would think twice at spending better than ten years of their potential income-earning years working at minimum wage (grad school, postdoc, and asst.prof.) to then get a job making not a whole lot of money to do what industry is better funded to do (and by people who are better paid to do it). If schools want that kind of control (with someone else’s money, no less), then they ought to either pay higher salaries or decrease the barriers to being a professor. In the meantime, I’m sure lots of people will give a lot more thought before going to Baylor as a professor.
It seems as if Dembski is showing his true face. No wonder he wouldn’t testify at Dover without having his own lawyer.