Posted on 09/05/2007 8:06:33 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
WACO, Texas (BP)--Baylor University officials ordered the shutdown of a personal website of one of a handful of the school's distinguished professors because of anonymous concerns that the site, hosted on the university’s server, supported Intelligent Design.
Robert Marks, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor, launched a website called the Evolutionary Informatics Lab in June to examine whether Darwinian processes like random mutation and natural selection can generate new information.
Marks' conclusions, as explained on the website, placed limits on the scope of Darwinism and offered scientific support for Intelligent Design.
In July, a podcast interview with Marks appeared on a website run by the pro-ID Discovery Institute, and a week later Benjamin Kelley, dean of engineering at Baylor, told Marks to remove the Evolutionary Informatics website immediately.
"This is a big story, perhaps the biggest story yet of academic suppression relating to ID," William Dembski, a research professor in philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, told Baptist Press.
"Robert Marks is a world-class expert in the field of evolutionary computing, and yet the Baylor administration, without any consideration of the actual content of Marks' work at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, decided to shut it down simply because there were anonymous complaints linking the lab to Intelligent Design," Dembski said.
Dembski himself was at the center of a controversy involving Baylor and Intelligent Design in 2000 when he was removed from his post as director of the school's Michael Polanyi Center for Complexity, Information, and Design after refusing to rescind a statement supporting Intelligent Design as a legitimate form of academic inquiry.
Lori Fogleman, director of media communications at Baylor, told Baptist Press Sept. 5 that the school's objection to the website involves standards by which something can or cannot attach its name to Baylor.
"This isn't about the content of the website. Really the issue is related to Baylor's policies and procedures of approving centers, institutes, products using the university's name," Fogleman said. "Baylor reserves the exclusive right to the use of its own name, and we're pretty jealous in the protection of that name. So it has nothing to do with the content but is all about how one goes about establishing a center, an institute, a product using the university's name."
In response to the dean's order to remove the Evolutionary Informatics website, Marks requested a meeting with Baylor legal counsel to resolve the matter. Six days before the scheduled Aug. 9 meeting, Kelley entered Marks' Baylor webspace and, without his consent, removed all references to the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, according to a timeline Dembski sent to BP.
The Aug. 9 meeting involved John Gilmore, an attorney who advised Dembski in 2000 and now represents Marks, Baylor Provost Randall O'Brien, Kelley and Baylor attorneys including Charles Beckenhauer, chief counsel for the school. Baylor officials asked that Marks add a disclaimer to his website and remove anything that could imply the lab is a Baylor initiative.
"Randall O'Brien signs off on the EIL site going back up and closes the meeting with prayer," Dembski's timeline states.
An Aug. 21 e-mail from Beckenhauer to Gilmore included what the Baylor chief counsel called his "proposed fixes" to the website, which by then existed only as a mirror site, not viewable by the general public. Gilmore responded by saying the matter had been settled at the Aug. 9 meeting with the provost and that Beckenhauer's recommendations were out of line.
On Aug. 30, Beckenhauer told Gilmore via e-mail that "there is now a long trail of information that inappropriately links independent research to the Baylor name," and he said the website issue centered on "misleading representations of your client and his collaborator (Dr. Dembski)."
Research papers that Dembski and Marks wrote jointly were on the website, and Dembski said his connection with the lab had been evident from the start.
Beckenhauer said the Aug. 9 meeting was not meant to be a final agreement, and he expressed concerns that Marks and Dembski had created a "trail of inaccuracies" that would lead people to believe Baylor had given direct support for what in reality was an independent project.
"All the circumstantial evidence points to John Lilley, Baylor's president, as being behind this effort to stamp out ID at Baylor," Dembski told Baptist Press. "The provost was at the crucial Aug. 9 meeting; the president wasn't. Lilley is the only one with the authority to overturn what the provost agreed to at that meeting."
Dembski, in comments to the Southern Baptist Texan newsjournal Sept. 4, underscored the hypersensitivity surrounding Intelligent Design in scholastic institutions these days.
"You have to understand, in the current academic climate, Intelligent Design is like leprosy or heresy in times past," he said. "To be tagged as an ID supporter is to become an academic pariah, and this holds even at so-called Christian institutions that place a premium on respectability at the expense of truth and the offense of the Gospel."
Dembski said he knows of several faculty members at Baylor who support Intelligent Design, but they are mostly younger faculty who don't have tenure and don't speak up on the topic. An old guard at Baylor, he said, supports secularization.
"John Lilley, in attempting to pacify that old guard, and perhaps because of a sense of foreboding about how Baylor might be perceived in the wider university culture if it were seen as supporting Intelligent Design or as even allowing it merely a presence, has therefore decided to come down hard against it," Dembski said.
Intelligent Design "in a sense became a poster child" of what immediate past president Robert Sloan tried to accomplish at Baylor, seeking to rescue the Baptist General Convention of Texas-affiliated school from its slide into secularization before he resigned under pressure in 2005, Dembski noted.
Aside from the hot-button issue of Intelligent Design, Dembski said the way the Baylor administration has dealt with Marks in this case is "inexcusable by any standard, certainly Christian but even secular."
"I've been at MIT, Princeton University, Notre Dame, Cornell, Northwestern and the University of Chicago, and at none of these schools have I ever have witnessed the shameful treatment that Baylor has accorded to Robert Marks," Dembski said.
"... [Marks] was a star in his department at the University of Washington in Seattle for 26 years before Baylor recruited him, and now Baylor is subjecting him to treatment that even so 'liberal' and 'secular' a place as UW would find unconscionable," Dembski added. "Yes, there are academic freedom issues here, but at this point the issue is one of plain decency."
Robert Crowther of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture told Baptist Press the institute is watching the Marks situation from an academic freedom standpoint.
"We're deeply concerned that the administration at Baylor University has really not shown any support for academic freedom or freedom of scientific inquiry in shutting down a website and a research project of one of their distinguished faculty," Crowther said. "We find that very troubling. It does show a certain trend at Baylor."
Crowther said he believes Intelligent Design has become such a controversial issue in academia because of the scientific threat it poses. The Scopes Trial should have settled the issue, he said, but discoveries since then have altered the discussion.
"What has changed is the science. We know things now and there are new discoveries being made all the time that are leading a number of scientists to not just question Darwinian evolution but to actively pursue research into Intelligent Design," Crowther said. "The thing that is driving this really is the science. We wouldn't be having the debate if there wasn't something going on in science that was causing a lot of questions to rise from most of the scientists."
Since this research topic is “evolutionary informatics” - a branch of computer science - and not directly related to biological information you might want to back off. I’m not sure why the very idea of intelligent design is scary but as a computer scientist I know that evolutionary informatics is an exciting field. Approaching it from several viewpoints - including one that resembles the concept of intelligent design - seems wise.
It’s too bad the buzz words are the same. Of course, by the very nature of the science, evolutionary informatics experiments ARE intelligent design as they are initiated, controlled, and observed by a presumably intelligent human researcher. But that’s semantics.
You have to admit it's going to be pretty hard to have a research budget if schools are going to reject grants and return the money whenever they try to do research. And they aren't going to have any laboratories if schools are going to ban people from working because of "embarrassment" (how long did it take CU to get rid of the REAL embarrassment which was that fraud who stole people's paintings and passed them off as his own, Ward Churchill?).
And it's going to be hard to write a "peer-reviewed" article if schools aren't going to allow the research, aren't going to allow trained qualified people to work on or write anything, and the papers are blackballed so that nobody competent is ALLOWED to review them under penalty of expulsion from their field of study.
I guess they have purged enough of the social sciences, now they are coming for the Engineers. That d*mn math stuff just is too much, I guess.
Heresy must not stand.
>>Yet, at every freaking turn, they shut down anything that provides even an inkling of possibility to address their demands…<<
There are all kinds of theories that did not get immediate acceptance. For every Brownian motion that quickly makes sense there is a Debroglie wave length which does not.
This is overcome by presenting indisputable evidence.
The problem with ID, from a scientific point of view is that it basically boils down to a philosophical argument - that the universe is so complex and beautiful that God must have had a hand.
Now, I believe that. But its not science.
And so far, the leading ID people have focused either on claiming conspiracy, or making ludicrous arguments (like irreducible complexity), or just been outright dishonest - like the Discovery Insitute’s attempt to discredit science or the Evolutionaryinformatics attempt to use out of context quotes like the one by David Wolpert when they know that Wolpert thinks Dembski is wrong and dishonest.
That’s not the approach to take if one really believes that they can show the hand of God.
This is very odd to me as a Christian since the bible is clear that faith will always be required and that God almost never provides repeatable proof, except in our hearts.
Methinks thou doth protest too much. You are here...bashing a victim of scientific supression...
And why?
Because Evolutionary Informatics (an information-theory branch of computer science) frightens your weak personal beliefs.
Which is to say: Darwinism is *that* fragile that it must be propped up with lies...and when the lies fail...it's challengers must be personally and professionally attacked.
Darwin's evolutionary theory is biological...so it is telling that you react so strongly to even moderate developments in computer science (information theory).
But react you must, as you are wedded to Darwinism and its offshoots even at the expense of the search for truth.
That a science such as information theory can threaten a *biological* theory like Evolution would be humorous were not the academic climate so clouded by hails to Darwinism.
That's completely backwards. ID explains the origin of data, of design, of life. When a man in a lab inserts a gene into an animal, we have Intelligent Design...we have a new life form such as a pig that produces human growth hormones.
That's science. Moreover, ID is a falsifiable theory. Where there is no bias in a system, there is no ID and can not be any ID.
But the same can't be said for Evolution. There is no published, peer-reviewed criteria for falsifying the Theory of Evolution.
So it's Evolution that isn't scientific because it can't be falsified.
...and because Evolution isn't scientific, it must be propped up by non-scientific means such as shutting down anyone who challenges it.
Hence, the article for this thread. QED.
One interesting aspect here is that Robert Marks’ data, research/methodology, and results aren’t being challenged...
I think you recall the plagiarism incident. It had to do with web statistics. You were called on it almost immediately, and several times thereafter. You posted that as SirLinksaLot. Either you plagiarized, or you have permission from Dembski to publish his work under your name. (Or perhaps you wrote the article that appeared on UncommonDescent.)
There is also an interesting episode regarding Johannes Lerle. It seems an article appeared and went almost unnoticed for two days, then within an hour of its posting on FR, it appeared on Dembski's website. You and I were both pinged to that thread.
I have asked you a number of times a very simple question: Are you Bill Dembski, or do you contribute in any way to his website? You have never given a straight yes or no answer.
I would think first of the person who first published the Blind Watchmaker metaphor.
If I said "Charles," in the context of evolution, would you first think of someone who has contributed little or nothing to the field?
There is a huge difference between observing the intelligent design of current gene manipulation, where we not only observe the process but are quite familiar with the abilities and habits of the science community performing the procedures and assuming the origin and development of all living organisms is based on the same processes.
"That's science. Moreover, ID is a falsifiable theory. Where there is no bias in a system, there is no ID and can not be any ID.
Is your statement "Where there is no bias in a system, there is no ID and can not be any ID." falsifiable? Is bias falsifiable? Is the procedure used to determine bias falsifiable?
Without significant verification that bias cannot occur without intelligence then the lack of bias in a given sample does not falsify intelligent design. Without substantial evidence that whatever procedure used to determine bias cannot produce false negatives, it cannot be used to falsify intelligent design.
You are aware I hope that even if your assumption can be verified it does nothing to support the concept that bias equals ID.
"But the same can't be said for Evolution. There is no published, peer-reviewed criteria for falsifying the Theory of Evolution.
Since the ToE is made up of a number of sub theories and tenets, each of which does have falsifiable criteria it doesn't surprise me that the overall ToE does not have a single falsifiable criterion.
To address your claim I would have to know which tenet or sub theory you feel is not falsifiable. So, what exactly do you feel is not falsifiable?
"So it's Evolution that isn't scientific because it can't be falsified.
You certainly place a lot of significance on the criterion of falsifiability. A theory may need to be falsifiable in principle initially but surely there is a time where after many, many attempts to falsify a theory that falsifiability becomes less important. Is the Theory of Gravitation still falsifiable?
What you have is micro-design. That's not the same thing as macro-design.
Or something like that.
Incorrect. One can have bias without having Intelligent Design, in fact. Gravity will bias a system, for example (i.e. things fall down).
It's the converse that differs. One can't have Intelligent Design without bias.
That's why the lack of bias in a system falsifies ID for said system.
No tenant or even sub-tenant of the Theory of Evolution has a published, peer-reviewed falsification criteria. The entire superset of ToE is unscientific, and has always been unscientific...based upon this glaring and unforgivable, inexcusable omission.
That's fine. Micro-Design proves my point that we have evidence of design all the same.
Ok, I really don't. I go here...
...and then I check out the Journal of Molecular Evolution and see what the many articles have to say.
If the guy wants to be a crank on a subject that he is not educated in or paid to perform or paid to teach- let him do it on his own time and not with the imprimatur of the college that did not hire him based upon his expertise or views upon the subject.
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