Free Republic

Meek crusader against injustice, turned over to his persecutors by cold-hearted functionary.

Just one of those eternal themes.

Funny, when W was President, the “who’s in charge?” question just wasn’t asked.

I was never talking about Stenberg (an entirely different case, and one without much merit, IMHO). Stenberg never even sued.

The Gaskell vs. UK documents are on the NCSE web site. Those are what I was referring to.

I did. All the talk in the world is worth nothing if he can't actually show adverse action towards himself. While there was none, he certainly tried to make bureaucratic normalcy look like persecution. There was clearly adverse action. He was ranked highest of all the candidates (and there really wasn't anyone else close). He was then passed over because of his beliefs. He was asked about those beliefs as part of the interview (What were they thinking? Our EO-AA office would be on us like a ton of bricks for doing that!). The chair of the search committee wrote immediately after they chose another candidate that he was clearly the best candidate and that he was passed over because of those beliefs. The chair of the department told the committee to forget his views on evolution and appoint the best qualified director. I've been on academic search committees more times than I can count. You need to put all the job expectations in the job posting. You can't rank on criteria not in that posting. The post hoc claims that there would be a requirement for interactions with biology teachers weren't even remotely addressed in the posting. I doubt we would ever be given permission to question a candidate on his religious views. If we were, the questions would have to be pre-scripted and narrowly tailored to the advertised job requirements. Vaporous claims that entertaining theistic views about evolution means one can't somehow think properly about science would be discounted, as they will be by the court. Martin has hundreds of highly cited scientific papers; he has a proven record of effective teaching and outreach. My own daughter, who did research with him for three years, was not aware of any opinions he had on evolution, and in my own conversations with him, his usual answer was 'I'm an astronomer, not a biologist'.

Most (though not quite all) of the relevant documents are posted on the NCSE web site. I reference some of the more salient emails in my blog post on the issue. You really should read them and judge this case on its own merits, not on those of other cases.

http://homepage.mac.com/gerardharbison/blog/RWP_blog.html#psk314384235

I do think this is a qualitatively different case from those covered in Expelled. It really amounts to a public university using complete acceptance of every contention of evolution, and complete rejection of even Catholic-style theistic evolution, as a litmus test for hiring in any area of science.

Moreover, it’s being applied selectively. I’ve known some quite distinguished physicists to express critical and often profoundly ignorant sentiments about some biological theories. The snottiness of some physicists about other fields is quite legendary.

Martin Gaskell is not a young earth creationist. His astronomical views are entirely orthodox. In fact, some of his own research has contributed to establishing the currently accepted value of the age of the Universe. As far as being qualified, I can put it no better than the chair of the very University of Kentucky search committee that chose to hire a less qualified candidate

In the end, however, the real reason why we will not offer him the job is because of his religious beliefs in matters that are unrelated to astronomy or to any of the duties specified for the position... If Martin were not so superbly qualified, so breathtakingly above the other applicants in background and experience, then our decision would be much simpler. We could easily choose another candidate, and could content ourselves with the idea that Martin's religious beliefs played little role in our decision. However, that is not the case. As it is, no objective observer could possibly believe that we have excluded Martin on any basis other than religious.

Game set and match.

Few people who know me would accuse me of being open minded or tolerant.

The point is, this smacks of Jacobinism. I would be the first to argue against Martin, were he a biology professor. The point is, he isn’t. He’s an observational astrophysicist, and a very good one. He has no problem with the standard model of the Universe; actually, some of his research strongly supports it. He has some funny ideas about biology, but then I know some atheist physicists who have funny ideas about biology.

My daughter, who’s as atheistic as I am (she made her mind up about this independently; her mother’s Christian) says in three years working with Martin, she had no idea what his views on evolution were. And nor had I, from direct interaction. I knew from friends.He’s English, and they are naturally diffident.

I emailed him today, and he sounded pretty confident. He says it’s not about him, but about policy. And having read the court documents, I think he’s right. If I were UK, I’d settle, and be prepared to setlle high.

Some of you may remember me :-)

I know Martin Gaskell. In fact he was my daughter’s undergraduate research advisor. She is now completing a Ph.D. in Astronomy at Cornell.

He did an outstanding job as advisor to the undergraduate research program here at the University of Nebraska. Many of his students have gone on to pursue doctorates and careers in astronomy. He is not a Young Earth Creationist, and he teaches orthodox astronomy. His religious views, which are pretty mainstream, do not in any way impact his teaching. His only involvement with anything to do with evolution here in Nebraska was that he was faculty advisor to the Intelligent Design club. As a matter of fact, they asked me first (because knowing I was a conservative they thought I must be an evolution-skeptic) and I advised them to talk to him. Undergraduate clubs deserve a faculty advisor, whether or not he wholeheartedly embraces their views.

I am an atheist and an outspoken critic of creationism. At the same time, I think this is a travesty, and I hope Gaskell wins. Gaskell is a fantastic teacher of astronomy; at the university, he was evangelical about his science, not his faith.

There is no place in science for this sort of intolerance.

Don’t think it’s going to work.

And the evidence for this unsupported assertion is...?

Already posted, and supported. Read the thread.

The premise of the article is that what Ann Coulter said should not causing the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth by conservatives and Republicans since liberals and Democrats are never apolegetic about their colleagues who say things that are worse.

So, liberals and Democrats have said things that are worse.

So the article is premised on the contention that Ann Counter has never said anything as bad. I mean, if the things they said are worse, what she said is not as bad, right? That's that thing, you know, logic?

Do you have another point, or was it just for the fun of pushing the post button five times on the same reply? Though I will say this for you; you haven't at all changed my opinion of the intellectual level of Ann Coulter fans.

Thanks. :-)

So, you challenged me, and I gave you the actual verbatim quote, in context. Did you think I wasn't going to be able to do that? Did you think somehow you could pretend she'd never said it?

If you think discussing the assassination of the president is a joke, I suspect you have a rather tense conversation with the Secret Service in your future. It wasn't funny. And it wasn't an accident. I've shown how she does it over and over and over again. And here's another clue; Jon Stewart does not footnote his 'humor' in a pseudo-academic fashion. Coulter claims what she writes is serious. She can't then try to evade responsibility by claiming it was just a joke.

Your attempts at smearing me as a leftist are pathetic.

Sam Hill (I'm not sure why) pinged you to a post directed at me. I am now pinging you to my reply.

I'm not sure why you're pinging mods to your attempt at bullyragging me, but let me give you some advice. If you want to issue a challenge to a college professor, asking him to find a page number for a quotation is pretty silly. It's like challenging an NBA center to shoot a layup. We have a large building we call a library - you may have heard rumors of such things - a thousand feet from my desk.

In the paperback edition of High Crimes of Misdemeanors, top of page 107, Coulter wrote the following

In this recurring nightmare of a presidency, we have a national debate about whether he "did it," even though all sentient people know he did. Otherwise there would be debates only about whether to impeach or assassinate.

It's not as if this is an isolated incident. A few months ago, "We need somebody to put rat poison in Justice Stevens' creme brulee", then tried to laugh it off as a joke. In 2002, she said "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.", and then regretted she had not added "after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters."

Here's a news flash for you and Coulter. We are a constitutional republic, not a banana republic. In this country, we may impeach presidents and judges; we don't assassinate or poison them. We don't kill journalists, not even New York Times journalists. If that's not to your liking, I believe there are still several countries in South America where those sorts of things go on. Maybe you and Coulter can take up residence down there.

I'll tell you something else. Sooner or later, some deranged nut is going to actually kill someone, and then claim they were inspired by Coulter or someone similar. And that will be worth 20 Congressional seats for the Dems in the next election. Clinton made mucho political capital, with far less foundation, by linking Terry McVeigh to Rush Limbaugh, and Rush has never, to my knowledge, said anything even remotely similar to the sort of stuff that Coulter seems to come up with routinely. It's sort of ironic that while people are defending Coulter on this site, some of Coulter's own statements would almost certainly be zotted if they were posted here. You can bet dollars to donuts that if a FReeper called for blowing up the NY Times building, the post and probably the poster would be zotted instantly.

One final thing. I'm not sure why you think it's cute to put scare quotes around 'professor'. My identity is not a secret. It seems to little foolish to complain about how academia is so far left, and then spend your time harassing the few academics who are conservative.

Your Sherlock Holmes example is funny, but it misses the point I was making, which was that while the lack of an explanatory mechanism is a serious absence, a gap in its causal story does not by itself render a research program "unscientific".

A theory that includes an arbitrary prohibition against investigating obvious and major aspects of the theory is an unscientific theory. We don't have such rules in real science. Answering one scientific question always leads to another. If ID happened to be true, something I rank in likelihood with my winning next Saturday's powerball jackpot, you can bet the next thing we'd try to do is figure out who, why, when, where and how. Trying to forbid prior speculation about the issue is a tacit admission that such speculation will lead to a debate about the supernatural, and thus the theory is constructed using political, not scientific considerations.

The reason I used "Darwinism" is because "theory of evolution" is too broad. Theories of evolution are thousands of years old-- it's Darwin's theory that's relatively new.

If you say 'theory of evolution', nobody will be in the least unclear what you mean. I promise.

Another ID research project is, as I understand it, being done at the level of enzymes to determine how sparsely populated islands of a given functional enzyme type are within the greater sea of non-functional polypeptides. The idea is that if they turn out to be sparsely populated, this would serve as a confirmation (not absolute proof) of an instance of hitting the called shot i.e. "specified complexity", while The idea behind Dembski's design filter is to refine it so it doesn't give false positives.

I know of a lot of research being done on this; not by IDers, though. Angela Gronenborn gave a seminar about it at my institution last year, and in fact there was a recent thread here on evolutionary pathways between proteins. The preliminary data don't look good for ID. Most of Angela's mutant proteins, IIRC, had good stable folds; some in fact had equilibria between two or more folds.

Most math types I know think very little of Dembski's work; it's essentially (according to them) a gussied up version of the old Hoyle argument, through which many very large trucks have been driven.

So, one point is possibly incorrect, therefore she is a witch and the body of her work is by implication false?

Nope. The article is premised on the contention that Ann Coulter has never said anything as bad as the worst things a motley collection of liberals have said. But, in fact, Coulter has indeed said something equivalent to what one of them has said. So we have to conclude the article's conclusions are based on faulty premises.

I myself think defending someone, by claiming they're not as bad as the worst I can think of on the other side, is not much of a defense, but that's just me. "Ann Coulter - as far as we know, she has never strangled a puppy!"

So you do agree she mentioned assassinating a Democratic president, and the article is therefore false.

Liberals need to be reminded that Coulter has never mentioned assassinating a Democrat president,

Well, yes she did. In High Crimes and Misdemeanors Coulter wondered if Clinton should be impeached or assassinated.