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.
You don't but you were quick to dismiss the only person willing to be quoted for attribution because he was not a "disinterested observer".
And I don't know the all the facts either which is why my first post to you was posed as a question and not a statement. If Coddingtons remarks have been faithfully reproduced then my question will become a statement.
That's why I don't give him the benefit of the doubt - he's not a disinterested observer. If he's telling the truth, there's plenty of time to find it all out in the inevitable discrimination case, so I'll wait for that, when there's some real fact-finding going on.
Time to go change the alternator belt in my fossil of a jeep.
....so that we can destroy their careers as well.
Is that how it works in the world of insurance?
A fossil alternator belt could cause even more trouble. They really are all they're cracked up to be.
The universe itself could be conscious. Who are we to say it is not?
Have you ever been interviewed for a news story? Dan Rather is honest and competent compared to most.
Bad map. Go sit in the corner.
Rather cryptic. Spit it out js.
By the way, have you found the wrongness in my statement to physicist yet?
Which post to Physist? (Number???)
I was merely commenting that it is sane not to talk to reporters under most circumstances.
We shall see what happens but the fact remains, only one person was quoted for attribution and that person knows this is headed to a court of law. Government employees do not have to pass a religious test. Whane it gets to the court we'll find out just waht went down.
Several days ago you commented on a thread to myself and Physicist wondering why I posted something if I knew it was wrong. I asked you what I wrote that was wrong.
You must have missed it. It's not important but you can find it by self searching if you want.
There are several things being asserted on these threads that I think are wrong, but I can't recall if any apply to you. So I will shotgun it, and list my peeves. If none apply to you, I appologise.
I'm sure there are more, but that's a start.
Try somebody else.
The problem is that the entire concept of ID lacks any scientific credibility. The inductive method cannot test such an idea. And if it could, then what was the origin of the designer. Failing to account for that means that ID fails to account for the origins of life. ID postulates that someone designed life, but that life, beign a product of design and of the designer, must ultimately come from the designer's origin. ID just puts off the answer of where life came from. It doesn't answer it.
That is a circular arguement. Bioengineering is performed by people who are the product of evolution. Therefore, something biopengineered indirectly came into existence from something that did evolve and, therefore, owes its existence to evolution. The problem, like I've mentioneed before, is that ID does not answer the questions of the origins of life. It passes those questions onto a designer whoes origins are not questioned. Bad science.
In any case bioengineering is intelligent design. No getting around it, by circling or otherwise.
I've realized how ID is the opposite of a theory.
Creationists find a flaw in evolution theory and automatically assume that proves their theory.
That's not how a proof works.
ID is a falsification of random evolution. If random evolution is falsified what does that mean?
That evolution contains non-random elements.
(Sorry, just popping in.)
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