Posted on 03/16/2009 2:11:18 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The New Scientist had a story by their book editor Amanda Gefter called "How to Spot a Hidden Religious Agenda". Today, it was pulled from their web site; the explanation being that they "received a complaint about the contents of the story."
You can still find a copy here, and we've copied the text until we find out what caused them to pull the story. Here's the opening:
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As a book reviews editor at New Scientist, I often come across so-called science books which after a few pages reveal themselves to be harbouring ulterior motives. I have learned to recognise clues that the author is pushing a religious agenda. As creationists in the US continue to lose court battles over attempts to have intelligent design taught as science in federally funded schools, their strategy has been forced to... well, evolve. That means ensuring that references to pseudoscientific concepts like ID are more heavily veiled. So I thought I'd share a few tips for spotting what may be religion in science's clothing.
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Here's some of the code words Gefter says give away a book's closeted ID agenda.
1. Scientific Materialism 2. The invocation of Cartesian dualism 3. Misguided interpretations of quantum physics (also a "New Age" giveaway) 4. The terms "Darwinism" or "Darwinist" (scientists refer to "evolution" and "biologists") 5. Referring to natural selection as "blind", "random" or an "undirected process"
Gafter concludes by saying, "It is crucial to the public's intellectual health to know when science really is science. Those with a religious agenda will continue to disguise their true views in their effort to win supporters, so please read between the lines."
We have no idea what caused this story to be pulled, and we can provide the full text if it becomes newsworthy.
Here’s another link related to the above story :
http://blog.newhumanist.org.uk/2009/03/whats-going-on-at-new-scientist.html
Monday, 16 March 2009
What’s going on at the New Scientist?
Last week we had Turkey’s leading science magazine being forced to spike a story on Darwin, but could we now have a similar story somewhat closer to home? The blogosphere is awash with news that the New Scientist have pulled a piece from their website entitled “How to Spot a Hidden Religious Agenda”, in which their book reviews editor Amanda Gefter explains the key signs she looks out for when deciding if a “science” book is in fact a creationist tract. At the URL where the article was, all that remains is the message, “New Scientist has received a complaint about the contents of this story. It has temporarily been removed while we investigate. Apologies for any inconvenience”, along with the 643 comments the article must have received before it was pulled.
The Skepticism Examiner give details of what was in the article, including what must have been the opening paragraph:
“As a book reviews editor at New Scientist, I often come across so-called science books which after a few pages reveal themselves to be harbouring ulterior motives. I have learned to recognise clues that the author is pushing a religious agenda. As creationists in the US continue to lose court battles over attempts to have intelligent design taught as science in federally funded schools, their strategy has been forced to... well, evolve. That means ensuring that references to pseudoscientific concepts like ID are more heavily veiled. So I thought I’d share a few tips for spotting what may be religion in science’s clothing.”
So what’s the story behind this? PZ Myers is unimpressed, calling it “ridiculous”:
“I am troubled by the apparent knee-jerk retraction of a legitimate article that is critical of creationism simply because there was a ‘complaint’ (I’d also be concerned if a creationist article was yanked with such ease—more speech, not less speech, is the answer to the idiocy of these yahoos). I hope New Scientist isn’t going to be catering to the whims of popular, uninformed nervous nellies. That kind of timidity is not appropriate to a journal that has ‘Scientist’ in its title.”
Could the New Scientist really be catering to creationist whims? Could it really have reacted to a few creationist complaints by pulling an article? Let’s be honest, this has to be seen as pretty unlikely. Anyone out there accusing them of cowardice or suggesting that the creationist hordes now hold sway over one of the world’s most respected science magazines (and people are suggesting this – just Google blog search “New Scientist creationism”, and look at posts like this) should probably stop and think for a moment. Perhaps the complaint was of a legal nature, in which case the magazine will have a policy of removing the piece while it is investigated. By a “complaint about the contents of this story”, the New Scientist won’t just mean that someone wrote in and said they disagree because creationism is actually right. In all likelihood the “complaint” will have had legal implications that will have had to have been addressed by removing the article, at least temporarily. It’s what any publication would have to do.
Anyhow, if the New Scientist is so scared of creationists, why is it currently carrying this article on the Turkish magazine controversy?
Update: The message at the article’s URL has actually changed now to:
“New Scientist has received a legal complaint about the contents of this story. At the advice of our lawyer it has temporarily been removed while we investigate. Apologies for any inconvenience.”
As I said earlier - less a case of caving in to creationism, more a case of sensibly heeding legal advice.
BTTT
And if someone brings you a photo of a living dinosaur burn the evidence quickly, lest their ulterior motive be enhanced
UPDATE:
Too bad they're 150 years late.
Anything showing the complexities of the DESIGN proving it could only have been created is an "ulterior motive" to this unqualified to edit anything person, who shows his "ulterior motive" in his first sentence; which is, "no matter how far fetched and nonsensical, as long as it says "evolution" it's ok."
>4. The terms “Darwinism” or “Darwinist” (scientists refer to “evolution” and “biologists”)
Wait, a biologist is “someone who studies [the science of] life”, there is nothing said about evolution, creation, morality, or anything else in that definition.
So then, if you’ve planted stuff, fermented stuff, or otherwise had to take care of a pet, you are in some sense a biologist. {You have to study/observe in order to do.}
{Sure, your studies mayn’t be deep, but that wasn’t said either.}
TRUE!!!
I guess you didn't read this very carefully either. It's not a case of caving to "creationism" it's a case of caving to the religion of "evolutionism".
A photo of a living "millions of years old" dinosaur, that would be something to see. Who'd want to burn that? Certainly not a creationist. An evolutionist maybe...
I have often found in a person professing atheism or militant secularism actually a burning desire in the person to deny, for lack of a better term, a judge. To deny the judge, to not be deemed as “wrong” or “evil” for something the person almost certainly did as a young man or woman. Margaret Hoover, delightful looking RINO that she is, said that women don’t want their actions of driving a fork in the fetus’ developing skull to be seen as wrong, sarcastically, I would add “What kind of self-righteous person would think sticking a fork in a baby’s head is wrong? Can’t we all just get along without the whole “judging” thing” but I digress.
In short, a non-believer is usually someone who has done great harm to someone else and is simply trying to avoid the judge.
In fairness, approx. 1-2 % of non-believers are actually just that, they don’t believe.
Let me put it this way, how would one falsify evolution and, if you can't, then is it really science any more than Intelligent design is?
Good luck!
You mean “qualify” evolution, don’t you?
Not sure what you are referring to.
Not sure what to make of New Scientist. They run really sloppy articles whenever sexual morality is involved. And sexual liberationists always win.
They even botched an article on incest, in which they pushed for repeal of anti-cousin incest laws. They claimed all scientific evidence was on their side, but only argued based on genetic evidence, not mentioning the sociological findings about the destructive clannishness of cousin-marrying peoples.
And of course they are deaf to appeals to non-utilitarian ethics, such as the claim one should try to extend affinity to others through marriage.
New Scientist writers generally don't realize their philosophical commitments have nothing to do with science.
Now that you've had a good look imagine the pro-evolution biologist up in front of his class arguing that "evolution is not a directed process ~ it's not like natural selection is going to go one way or another ~ it's simply going to select for characteristics that best fit the needs of the species in that environment at that time".
Voila, you'd had New Scientist deluged with protests from everyone in the world who has to teach evolution.
Ergo, the hidden religious motive of the writer of the book ~ to destroy New Scientist for publishing articles favorable to evolution.
Boy oh boy is that ol'gal gonna' get it!
So far all living systems are imperfect replicators, and new genetic variations arise as a result.
If selective pressure had no ability to shape the allelic frequency of a population, then evolution through natural selection would be falsified.
So far all populations subjected to selective pressure have changed in allelic frequency in response to this pressure such that heat stress selects for heat resistance, cold stress selects for cold resistance, antibiotics select for antibiotic resistance, etc, etc.
Evolution is a highly falsifiable theory.
So far all data collected has supported the theory.
To most people that is pretty good evidence; one reason why both the current and previous Popes have signed on to this theory being the most likely explanation for human origins.
It's like the best that can be done at this time is to create more thought experiments (which are not formal proofs), and chip around the edges of the exceedingly complex cellular systems.
One thing that could be done to resolve the conflicts is to do what was done with the poor old atom ~ just give up on the idea that there's a single overriding principle involved and accept that there are multiple forces and particles at play, many that we can't see or sense, and take it from there.
Did you realize we just the other day had reported to us that the TOP QUARK had been found! Took about 200+ years to get around to that one.
There are scientists who continued to "do science" without ever having seen the proof of the conjecture. At the same time I don't believe anyone has found a "magnetic monopole" ~ and proof of that item used to be considered "crucile to a full understanding of physics". Guess it isn't.
There will be no “final proof”.
There will continue to be thousands of scientists who utilize the theory to explain and predict literal mountains of data.
Biology has never been a more productive field in terms of information and applicability.
Much of this information and applicability is directly attributable to the use of the theory of evolution through natural selection of genetic variation.
On the other hand, evolution needs all of those studies to instruct the biologist in how evolution might proceed (as with a disease causing body that we need to find some weak spot for ~ such as was just done with cold germs).
Fur shur, none of us are going to live long enough to OBSERVE DIRECTLY "evolution" in any of the higher organisms, and probably not in the lower organisms either. Our species might not even last long enough to directly observe any such thing. At the same time we know we've had some serious gene changes in the last 6000 years ~ milk drinking in Western Europeans and rice eating in East Asians.
We are still the same species.
As you yourself pointed out, evolution has had a dramatic impact on the human race as we have spread across the globe, although you somehow want to temporally limit that to the last six thousand years; we have been here as modern humans for around for around 100,000 years at least.
Typically, Creationists are proposing 100,000 years of human evolution only took 6,000, a rate almost 17 times as fast; all while simultaneously claiming to not “believe” in evolution.
Those aren’t the parts of evolution that creationists doubt, but I suspect that you already know that. They doubt that those mechanism are sufficient to explain the existing diversity of life. As such, their search for falsification looks toward finding traits or transitions between species that cannot be explained through a reasonable evolutionary explanation. For example, I think the idea of looking for irreducable complexity is a good idea, even if none of the examples presented so far have been compelling. Of course I think you made your point by addressing my point, rather than going off on a rant, even if you did end with an appeal to authority. ;)
Conjugal visits and getting over a bad cold ARE NOT evolution. So, no, watching bacteria do their thing is not to watch "evolution in action". Besides, for all that activity, we haven't come up with a new bacteria species that's been created from a different one ~ they can still do their stuff with each other and it works.
The genes for controlling the production of heme, a precursor of hemoglobin, now have 82 alleles. 1 is commonly found in doggone near everybody. 81 of them are found in a small percentage. These are believed to have arisen during the Ice Age in populations living furthest North or nearest the margins of the ice itself.
Then there are the 500 or so genes that have been "modified" in some manner to allow human beings to consume vast quantities of rice. These genes are found mostly in the Far East.
Yet other genes have been modified to allow people to eat such poisonous substances as wheat, barley and rye! We can track when and where that process began with ARCHAEOLOGY, and consequently it's possible to develop a pretty good time-line for exogenous information to creep into the genome itself (in some manner yet to be determined).
Indeed. It seems that humans are a fount of new genetic information. Hard to square that with the notion that we started as just two individuals and nothing but “genomic degeneration” happened from that time on. But then again intellectual consistency isn’t something Creationists value apparently.
The "evolutionists", on the other hand, imagine vast stretches of absolute stability in genome platforms with occasional revolutions affecting thousands of genes.
Somewhere in there is an opportunity for exogenous factors to come into play ~ the W.D.Fard imagined the Evil Doctor Yakub created "white folk" (at one extreme), and at the other extreme, they landed in their space ship and let the children out to play sex games with the natives.
Well, whatever ~
The patterns of similarity and divergence we see in animal genomes is exactly what one would expect given the observed rate of mutation and Kumura’s neutral mutation theory.
Unfortunately he lives in a universe where the frequency of occurrence of water purity is invariable ~ that is, onece a year.
The other 365 days a year are utter chaos with all sorts of thing dropping in and contaminating it. Alas, he's not measuring those things.
Even if he turns to random sampling and picks every Nth year rather than every year he'll get the same result. No doubt he will congratulate himself on having moved into random sampling.
Determining the rate of background mutation in genes is much like the problem faced by the owner of the pier. Unless he is able to do that on a continual basis (literally catching every gene as it mutates ~ for whatever reason ~ he'll never notice that his sample selection algorithm is terribly wrong ~ if it is wrong).
I suggest that the stability of the genome among mammals is sufficiently great that any background mutation rate we might infer from the most randomly selected samples of genes probably doesn't give us a correct reading of the mutation rate.
bump
You either have to say the time wasn't that long, mutation rates are not what scientists observe them to be, or that genomic comparisons are not showing what they show.
Except that there is plenty of evidence that six or seven million years is a drop in the bucket of the amount of time life has existed on Earth.
Observed mutation rates are more than sufficient to explain the divergence of DNA in disparate species.
And genomic comparisons appear as precisely what one would expect from divergent populations exposed to random mutation and evolutionary constraint.
There was a flury of mutation a few thousand years ago involving hundreds of genes in the space of a few generations ~ that was to eat and digest rice ~ and before that in a different place, a similar flury of mutations that allowed some humans to consume dairy products into adulthood.
Those genes have remained rather stable since.
This is "punctuated equilibrium" on a small scale ~ but it sure as the devil puts a hole in the thesis that all change is a consequence of normal background change rates.
We have a large scale example of this still to be explained ~ the Cambrian Explosion. That was widespread, affected everything and everybody worth knowing, and makes more sense considered as the emptying of a bilge tank than as the result of a steady change rate in genes.
Gene changes are incorporated into a population at widely disparate rates.
For example, the frequency of mutations in the proximal element to the lactase gene, stopping the gene from shutting down after infancy; are equally likely to arise within any population.
Only after a population domesticates animals that give milk as a food source would there be any selective pressure to increase the prevalence of this mutation within the population.
Follow?
Earlier (Younger Dryas) we had a very small population of apparantly Caucasion people who were cut off by the Dryas in Northern Norway for a bit over 1,000 years and they came up with at least 3 different genes for disposing of excess iron in their diet (eating seals does that to you). The only other population to do this were Eskimos (with similar mutations in the same genes) and they did that within the last 3,000 or so years.
No other tribes in the same background group as the Eskimos has done so ~ yet, there are huge numbers of people involved including all Yakutz descendants (American Indians, Japanese, Manchurians)
Well if this is so then Dawkins's Blind Watchmaker is an ID book.
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