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.
O.K. Maybe he wasn't lying. I was a member of creationist group myself for awhile, as a friendly critic and observer. However the guy sounds pretty flakey. I thought I was reading output from the Chomskybot for a few sentences. But then I'm easily irritated by anyone who prattles about being "in the postmodern predicament". I'd have to either run away or, if trapped, surrender myself to catatosis.
Agreed. It's also stupid. There's no basis for getting worked up about this, particularly over a arm-waving "fluff piece" like the Meyer paper. It's not like ID is going anywhere. It'll always be fluff and armwaving.
Let 'em get their occasional journal paper. If every once in a great while one is substantive and useful, all the better. Save the smack downs for when antievolutionists go after the secondary school and undergrad curricula. If they want to try to do real science, then stand back and let them try. (Be polite and don't laugh out loud.)
INTELLIGENT DESIGN [John Derbyshire] Either before, after, or while reading my article on Intelligent Design in YOUR SUBSCRIPTION COPY OF NRODT, you might want to read David Klinghoffer's piece in Opinion Journal.
Incidentally, a little back-story to my piece: I showed it round to some academic biologists before signing off with NR editors on it. One of these professionals objected that I had used the phrase "I.D. theory" at one point. Whatever you may think of I.D., she pointed out, it's not a theory. After some cogitation I agreed, and asked the editors to drop the word "theory."
I mention this because there is a school board in Georgia (Cobb County, IMS) that has had stickers put on all its biology textbooks to the effect that standard-model evolution theory is "not a fact, but a theory." This is of course correct! Facts are what scientists observe; theories are the arguments they cook up to explain the facts they have observed. The fact (wait a minute... yes, it's a fact) that the Georgia school board thought it was striking a blow against its enemies by mandating a statement that every one of those enemies would cheerfully agree with, shows the gulf of misunderstanding that exists in this area.
But while indeed the standard model of evolution is not a fact, but a theory, then I.D. is not a theory, but only a critique of a theory. Not necessarily anything wrong with that, but let's at least keep our terms straight.
I would like to see some scientifically literate school board somewhere mandate stickers in biology textbooks stating that "INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS NOT A THEORY, BUT A CRITIQUE." Then we might be getting somewhere with this dismal business.
And now, Part Two:
INTELLIGENT DESIGN [John Derbyshire] Following my earlier post, some readers have e-mailed in arguing that David's Opinion Journal piece demonstrates that there is a determination on the part of learned scientific journals to keep I.D. proponents out of their pages.
Well, I should certainly hope so! I hope they will also keep out of their pages proponents of the Flat Earth theory, the Hollow Earth theory, the phlogiston theory of combustion, the theory of the Four Body Humours, and the tooth fairy theory.
Not everything that anyone can think up is worthy of inclusion in a scientific journal. Speaking personally, if I were to open my copy of, say, The Astronomical Journal (supposing I were a subscriber, which I am not) and found myself looking at an article that took UFO abductions seriously, I would cancel my subscription at once.
Lay people don't realize how many pseudoscientific cranks there are out there. The world is swarming with them! A couple of years ago I published a book about an unsolved math problem. You wouldn't believe some of the mail I got -- weird, weird stuff, written in all earnestness, claiming to have solved that problem by dint of techniques from bibliomancy to yoga.
Let me tell you, the world is teeming with lunatics armed with iron conviction and reams of theoretical justification for their crackpot notions. Scientists see themselves as working to expand a little clearing of light, of reason, in a vast chittering black jungle of superstition and madness. Is it any wonder they are defensive?
Science, and its peer-reviewed journals, need solid defenses, constantly manned. I would rather scientists were over-scrupulous about what they let in than otherwise. After all, as numerous examples (e.g. continental drift) have shown, a sound theory will eventually get recognition, however wacky it might seem at first sight.
Nobody knows all this better than working scientists -- which is why (see my current NRODT piece) scientifically-trained I.D.-ers like Michael Behe know better than to submit I.D. pieces to respectable journals of real science. Posted at 02:44 PM
Sounds like the Derb has a written yet another must-read piece.
Oh, he should have been fired as editor for publishing it, no doubt. Irrespective of the content, it wasn't a scientific paper; it was polemic.
Journal editorships are odd positions. They're usually not tied to one's regular job, but they're sufficiently prestigious that often one's employer will give one leave from other duties to act as editor.
You've confused the science world with the circle of folks that Sternberg is pretending he has nothing to do with.
Good post.
Technofascism gone wild?
You're not loopy enough to actually believe that, I think. Or was your seventh grade English teacher a "fascist" because she didn't automatically give everyone an A?
Think again, I call'em as I see'um and what I see here is a tendency toward forceable suppression of those that ain't thinking "right". Or was your seventh grade English teacher a "fascist" because she didn't automatically give everyone an A?
No the proper analogy would be if my seventh grade English teacher was figuratively stoned by her colleagues for having the temerity to accept a paper from me at odds with the NEA. Of course the NEA wasn't a force when I was 10 so thats neither here nor there.
If this editor let in an article on ID into a scientific journal, he should be fired. He has lost touch with what science is all about.
What if it's just a crappy paper, and the guy's in trouble because his job was to keep crappy papers out?
You miss this part??????????
So says Sternberg, who is not exactly a disinterested, neutral outsider.
Is bioengineering intelligent design? Can allele frequencies be changed by a mechanism other than RM/NS, namely a mecahnism that directs?
So Sternbergs a liar?
How would I know? We have two conflicting stories, and not enough information to know what went on behind closed doors, so I'm content to wait to hear more. We do know, though, that this paper blows chunks, which does not speak well to Sternberg's editorial abilities.
OK, what is science all about?
Why not?
We both now why, they have been advised by Counsel to keep their yaps shut because if Mr Coddington did what Mr Sternberg says he did, he is in deep kimchi.
Lawyers tell their innocent clients to say the same thing - don't talk to reporters, especially reporters composing a hit piece.
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