Posted on 01/28/2005 6:50:34 AM PST by Heartlander
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| The Branding of a Heretic |
By: David Klinghoffer The Wall Street Journal January 28, 2005 |
Original Article
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The question of whether Intelligent Design (ID) may be presented to public-school students alongside neo-Darwinian evolution has roiled parents and teachers in various communities lately. Whether ID may be presented to adult scientific professionals is another question altogether but also controversial. It is now roiling the government-supported Smithsonian Institution, where one scientist has had his career all but ruined over it.
The scientist is Richard Sternberg, a research associate at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington. The holder of two Ph.D.s in biology, Mr. Sternberg was until recently the managing editor of a nominally independent journal published at the museum, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, where he exercised final editorial authority. The August issue included typical articles on taxonomical topics--e.g., on a new species of hermit crab. It also included an atypical article, "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories." Here was trouble.
The piece happened to be the first peer-reviewed article to appear in a technical biology journal laying out the evidential case for Intelligent Design. According to ID theory, certain features of living organisms--such as the miniature machines and complex circuits within cells--are better explained by an unspecified designing intelligence than by an undirected natural process like random mutation and natural selection.
Mr. Sternberg's editorship has since expired, as it was scheduled to anyway, but his future as a researcher is in jeopardy--and that he had not planned on at all. He has been penalized by the museum's Department of Zoology, his religious and political beliefs questioned. He now rests his hope for vindication on his complaint filed with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) that he was subjected to discrimination on the basis of perceived religious beliefs. A museum spokesman confirms that the OSC is investigating. Says Mr. Sternberg: "I'm spending my time trying to figure out how to salvage a scientific career."
The offending review-essay was written by Stephen Meyer, who holds a Cambridge University doctorate in the philosophy of biology. In the article, he cites biologists and paleontologists critical of certain aspects of Darwinism--mainstream scientists at places like the University of Chicago, Yale, Cambridge and Oxford. Mr. Meyer gathers the threads of their comments to make his own case. He points, for example, to the Cambrian explosion 530 million years ago, when between 19 and 34 animal phyla (body plans) sprang into existence. He argues that, relying on only the Darwinian mechanism, there was not enough time for the necessary genetic "information" to be generated. ID, he believes, offers a better explanation.
Whatever the article's ultimate merits--beyond the judgment of a layman--it was indeed subject to peer review, the gold standard of academic science. Not that such review saved Mr. Sternberg from infamy. Soon after the article appeared, Hans Sues--the museum's No. 2 senior scientist--denounced it to colleagues and then sent a widely forwarded e-mail calling it "unscientific garbage."
Meanwhile, the chairman of the Zoology Department, Jonathan Coddington, called Mr. Sternberg's supervisor. According to Mr. Sternberg's OSC complaint: "First, he asked whether Sternberg was a religious fundamentalist. She told him no. Coddington then asked if Sternberg was affiliated with or belonged to any religious organization. . . . He then asked where Sternberg stood politically; . . . he asked, 'Is he a right-winger? What is his political affiliation?' " The supervisor (who did not return my phone messages) recounted the conversation to Mr. Sternberg, who also quotes her observing: "There are Christians here, but they keep their heads down."
Worries about being perceived as "religious" spread at the museum. One curator, who generally confirmed the conversation when I spoke to him, told Mr. Sternberg about a gathering where he offered a Jewish prayer for a colleague about to retire. The curator fretted: "So now they're going to think that I'm a religious person, and that's not a good thing at the museum."
In October, as the OSC complaint recounts, Mr. Coddington told Mr. Sternberg to give up his office and turn in his keys to the departmental floor, thus denying him access to the specimen collections he needs. Mr. Sternberg was also assigned to the close oversight of a curator with whom he had professional disagreements unrelated to evolution. "I'm going to be straightforward with you," said Mr. Coddington, according to the complaint. "Yes, you are being singled out." Neither Mr. Coddington nor Mr. Sues returned repeated phone messages asking for their version of events.
Mr. Sternberg begged a friendly curator for alternative research space, and he still works at the museum. But many colleagues now ignore him when he greets them in the hall, and his office sits empty as "unclaimed space." Old colleagues at other institutions now refuse to work with him on publication projects, citing the Meyer episode. The Biological Society of Washington released a vaguely ecclesiastical statement regretting its association with the article. It did not address its arguments but denied its orthodoxy, citing a resolution of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that defined ID as, by its very nature, unscientific.
It may or may not be, but surely the matter can be debated on scientific grounds, responded to with argument instead of invective and stigma. Note the circularity: Critics of ID have long argued that the theory was unscientific because it had not been put forward in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Now that it has, they argue that it shouldn't have been because it's unscientific. They banish certain ideas from certain venues as if by holy writ, and brand heretics too. In any case, the heretic here is Mr. Meyer, a fellow at Seattle's Discovery Institute, not Mr. Sternberg, who isn't himself an advocate of Intelligent Design.
According to the OSC complaint, one museum specialist chided him by saying: "I think you are a religiously motivated person and you have dragged down the Proceedings because of your religiously motivated agenda." Definitely not, says Mr. Sternberg. He is a Catholic who attends Mass but notes: "I would call myself a believer with a lot of questions, about everything. I'm in the postmodern predicament."
Intelligent Design, in any event, is hardly a made-to-order prop for any particular religion. When the British atheist philosopher Antony Flew made news this winter by declaring that he had become a deist--a believer in an unbiblical "god of the philosophers" who takes no notice of our lives--he pointed to the plausibility of ID theory.
Darwinism, by contrast, is an essential ingredient in secularism, that aggressive, quasi-religious faith without a deity. The Sternberg case seems, in many ways, an instance of one religion persecuting a rival, demanding loyalty from anyone who enters one of its churches--like the National Museum of Natural History.
Mr. Klinghoffer, a columnist for the Jewish Forward, is the author of "Why the Jews Rejected Jesus," to be published by Doubleday in March.
Discovery Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan, public policy think tank headquartered in Seattle and dealing with national and international affairs. For more information, browse Discovery's Web site at:
http://www.discovery.org.
A life long and world renowned atheist, Flew worked with some of the worlds leading professionals and came to the conclusion that it's impossible for life to have evolved from chemicals and there appears to be a higher deity in the design of life.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science has a position paper on this issue: Intelligent Design and Peer Review. Excerpts:
Stephen Meyer, the author of the paper, is Director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (DI/CSC), the primary institutional advocate of ID. He earned a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University. He is also University Professor of the Conceptual Foundations of Science at Palm Beach Atlantic University, a theologically conservative Christian institution.The editor for the issue of the Proceedings in which the Meyer article appears was Richard Sternberg, Research Associate in the Department of Systematic Biology (Invertebrate Zoology) of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. He is also a Fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID), which promotes intelligent design, and serves on the Editorial Board of the Baraminology Study Group, a creation science group. Given these associations, Dr. Sternberg would appear to be, at very least, an advocate for "intelligent design" and critical of standard peer review processes as they bear on the scientific assessment of the "intelligent design" hypothesis.
The external reviewers of the paper are unknown.
Can't the Smithsonian just follow the historic ritual and burn him at the stake already?
What a surprise.</sarcasm>
Why not? Personally, I think it's time to see who the reviewers were....
Or if the reviewers were....
What we do know is that the reviewers disagreed with the conclusions of the paper. That might have been a red flag to a careful editor.
I'll bet they turn out to be Henry Morris, Duane Gish, Michael Behe, and Ken Ham. I think that the creatards have taken over the Biological Society of Washington...
I subscribe to a school of biological thought often termed “process structuralism.” Process or biological structuralism is concerned with understanding the formal, generative rules underlying organic forms, and focuses on the system architectures of organisms and their interrelationships. Structuralist analysis is generally ahistorical, systems-oriented, and non-evolutionary (not anti-evolutionary). Both creationism and neo-Darwinism are, in contrast, emphatically historicist with one positing extreme polyphyly (de novo creation of species) and the other radical monophyly (common descent). Since the structuralist perspective runs somewhat perpendicular to the origins debate, creationists and evolutionists tend to see it as inimical to their positions. The truth is structuralism has little at stake in the origins issue, leaving a person like myself free to dialogue with all parties. For this reason, I frequently discourse with ultra-Darwinians, macromutationists, self-organization theorists, complexity theorists, intelligent design advocates, theistic evolutionists, and young-earth creationists without necessarily agreeing with any of their views.Structuralism does, however, provide an important perspective on the origins debate. Structuralists' lack of commitment to an historical theory of biology allows them to explore the historical evidence more objectively. Moreover, because they focus on formal analysis, struturalists are far more open than neo-Darwinians to the powerful evidence for continuity within species (forms) and discontinuity between and among species. They also allow themselves to wonder about the cause of the amazing repetition of forms across the biological world rather than being forced by prior commitments to accept a major neo-Darwinian epicycle known as "convergent evolution."
- Dr. Richard M. v. Sternberg
I'm glad I'm in physics. :P
We're a much more laid-back lot.
This is Sternberg's version, but even so it supports my statement that the reviewers disagreed with the paper's conclusions. Normally, a paper that is published to stir up controversy would be labeled as such.
Again, the problem with ID is not that it is wrong, but that it can't be proven wrong.
If ID wants respectability, do som research that demonstrates that design is possible. Show how you can predict the effects of an allele change on the individual organism, the species and the ecosystem. After all, "cause and effect" are the mantra of ID.
And Noam Chomsky focuses on generative rules in language, with equal success. Chomsky abandoned generative grammer some years ago.
If you propose that there are generative rules you need to demonstrate at least one.
I followed the standard peer review process, sending the paper to four qualified scientists, three of whom agreed to review it. The reviewers' comments were provided to Dr. Meyer who made changes in the paper accordingly.
Then, since there is so much controversy, and a career is allegedly being ruined, we need to know what those comments were and what changes were made as a result.
Ah. Those must be the thousands of credentialed scientists who are, year after year, in ever-increasing numbers, flocking to the banner of ID. Known as the flockers.
Can you imagine what a psychologist could do with this scenario? We see the insecure antagonists bullying, exhibiting paranoia, assuming the role of thought police, and having a collective panic attack. A little further investigation might reveal thumb-sucking and bed-wetting.
Ha ha. Yup, you got it, alright.
William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States, ex officio, Chancellor
Richard B. Cheney, Vice-President of the United States, ex officio
Thad Cochran, Senator from Mississippi
Bill Frist, Senator from Tennessee
Patrick J. Leahy, Senator from Vermont
Sam Johnson, Representative from Texas
Robert T. Matsui, Representative from California Ralph Regula, Representative from Ohio Hanna H. Gray, Professor of History and former President of the University of Chicago
Anne d’Harnoncourt, the George D. Widener Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Manuel L. Ibáñez, President Emeritus and Professor Emeritus, Texas A&M University in Kingsville, Texas
Walter E. Massey, Physicist and President of Morehouse College in Atlanta Roger W. Sant, chairman emeritus and cofounder of the AES Corporation and chairman of the board of The Summit Foundation
Alan G. Spoon, managing general partner in Polaris Venture Partners, former President of The Washington Post Company
Patricia Q. Stonesifer, co-chair and president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Wesley S. Williams Jr., of Washington, D.C., Partner in the law firm of Covington & Burling
We should contact the Board members. Certainly, Sen. Frist and Sen. Cochran should be sympatric
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