Posted on 10/06/2002 8:16:21 AM PDT by hispanarepublicana
Professor rigid on evolution </MCC HEAD>
By SEBASTIAN KITCHEN </MCC BYLINE1>
AVALANCHE-JOURNAL </MCC BYLINE2>
• Criteria for letters of recommendation: http://www2.tltc.ttu.edu/dini/Personal/ letters.htm
• Michael Dini's Web page:
http://www2.tltc.ttu. edu/dini/
On the Net
Micah Spradling was OK with learning about evolution in college, but his family drew the line when his belief in the theory became a prerequisite for continuing his education.
Tim Spradling said his son left Texas Tech this semester and enrolled in Lubbock Christian University after en countering the policy of one associate professor in biological sciences.
Professor Michael Dini's Web site states that a student must "truthfully and forthrightly" believe in human evolution to receive a letter of recommendation from him.
"How can someone who does not accept the most important theory in biology expect to properly practice in a field that is so heavily based on biology?" Dini's site reads.
Dini says on the site that it is easy to imagine how physicians who ignore or neglect the "evolutionary origin of humans can make bad clinical decisions."
He declined to speak with The Avalanche-Journal. His response to an e-mail from The A-J said: "This semester, I have 500 students to contend with, and my schedule in no way permits me to participate in such a debate."
A Tech spokeswoman said Chancellor David Smith and other Tech officials also did not want to comment on the story.
At least two Lubbock doctors and a medical ethicist said they have a problem with the criterion, and the ethicist said Dini "could be a real ingrate."
Tim Spradling, who owns The Brace Place, said his son wanted to follow in his footsteps and needed a letter from a biology professor to apply for a program at Southwestern University's medical school.
Spradling is not the only medical professional in Lub bock shocked by Dini's policy. Doctors Patrick Edwards and Gaylon Seay said they learned evolution in college but were never forced to believe it.
"I learned what they taught," Edwards said. "I had to. I wanted to make good grades, but it didn't change my basic beliefs."
Seay said his primary problem is Dini "trying to force someone to pledge allegiance to his way of thinking."
Seay, a Tech graduate who has practiced medicine since 1977, said a large amount of literature exists against the theory.
"He is asking people to compromise their religious be liefs," Seay said. "It is a shame for a professor to use that as a criteria."
Dini's site also states: "So much physical evidence supports" evolution that it can be referred to as fact even if all the details are not known.
"One can deny this evidence only at the risk of calling into question one's understanding of science and of the method of science," Dini states on the Web site.
Edwards said Dini admits in the statement that the details are not all known.
Dini is in a position of authority and "can injure someone's career," and the criteria is the "most prejudice thing I have ever read," Seay said.
"It is appalling," he said.
Both doctors said their beliefs in creationism have never negatively affected their practices, and Seay said he is a more compassionate doctor because of his beliefs.
"I do not believe evolution has anything to do with the ability to make clinical decisions — pro or con," Seay said.
Academic freedom should be extended to students, Edwards said.
"A student may learn about a subject, but that does not mean that everything must be accepted as fact, just because the professor or an incomplete body of evidence says so," Edwards said.
"Skepticism is also a very basic part of scientific study," he said.
The letter of recommendation should not be contingent on Dini's beliefs, Edwards said.
"That would be like Texas Tech telling him he had to be a Christian to teach biology," Edwards said.
Harold Vanderpool, professor in history and philosophy of medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, said he has a problem with Dini's policy.
"I think this professor could be a real ingrate," Vanderpool said. "I have a problem with a colleague who has enjoyed all the academic freedoms we have, which are extensive, and yet denies that to our students."
Vanderpool, who has served on, advised or chaired committees for the National Institute of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, said the situation would be like a government professor requiring a student to be "sufficiently patriotic" to receive a letter.
"It seems to me that this professor is walking a pretty thin line between the protection of his right to do what he wants to do, his own academic freedom, and a level of discrimination toward a student," he said.
"It is reaching into an area of discrimination. That could be a legal problem. If not, it is a moral problem," Vanderpool said.
Instead of a recommendation resting on character and academic performance, "you've got this ideological litmus test you are using," he said. "To me, that is problematic, if not outright wrong."
William F. May, a medical ethicist who was appointed to President Bush's Council on Bioethics, said he cannot remember establishing a criterion on the question of belief with a student on exams or with letters of recommendation.
"I taught at five institutions and have always felt you should grade papers and offer judgments on the quality of arguments rather than a position on which they arrived."
Professors "enjoy the protection of academic freedom" and Dini "seems to be profoundly ungrateful" for the freedom, Vanderpool said.
He said a teacher cannot be forced to write a letter of recommendation for a student, which he believes is good because the letters are personal and have "to do with the professor's assessment of students' work habits, character, grades, persistence and so on."
A policy such as Dini's needs to be in the written materials and should be stated in front of the class so the student is not surprised by the policy and can drop the class, Vanderpool said.
Dini's site states that an individual who denies the evidence commits malpractice in the method of science because "good scientists would never throw out data that do not conform to their expectations or beliefs."
People throw out information be cause "it seems to contradict his/her cherished beliefs," Dini's site reads. A physician who ignores data cannot remain a physician for long, it states.
Dini's site lists him as an exceptional faculty member at Texas Tech in 1995 and says he was named "Teacher of the Year" in 1998-99 by the Honors College at Texas Tech.
Edwards said he does not see any evidence on Dini's vita that he attended medical school or treated patients.
"Dr. Dini is a nonmedical person trying to impose his ideas on medicine," Edwards said. "There is little in common between teaching biology classes and treating sick people. ... How dare someone who has never treated a sick person purport to impose his feelings about evolution on someone who aspires to treat such people?"
On his Web site, Dini questions how someone who does not believe in the theory of evolution can ask to be recommended into a scientific profession by a professional scientist.
May, who taught at multiple prestigious universities, including Yale, during his 50 years in academia, said he did not want to judge Dini and qualified his statements because he did not know all of the specifics.
He said the doctors may be viewing Dini's policy as a roadblock, but the professor may be warning them in advance of his policy so students are not dismayed later.
"I have never seen it done and am surprised to hear it, but he may find creationist aggressive in the class and does not want to have to cope with that," May said. "He is at least giving people the courtesy of warning them in advance."
The policy seems unusual, May said, but Dini should not be "gang-tackled and punished for his policy."
The criterion may have been viewed as a roadblock for Micah Spradling at Tech, but it opened a door for him at LCU.
Classes at LCU were full, Tim Spradling said, but school officials made room for his son after he showed them Dini's policy.
skitchen@lubbockonline.com 766-8753
Then to what was Lauterbur referring in his 1972 paper?
A new imaging technique called zeugmatography is disclosed which takes advantage of induced local interactions to overcome the wavelength-dependence limitation of normal imaging systems.
As I am inclined to trust the opinions of institutions that have posted their information openly more than the opinions of someone with a viewpoint opposite to the person he is belittling.
Please don't apologize for being objective or honest. I encourage you to continue doing what you're doing.
but it doesn't look to me like that's the case. You had said that the letter itself showed that these scientists were saying to themselves things that they wouldn't say to the general public, and the general was reasonably asking specifically what it was you were referring to.
Actually I said "The letter along with Kitcher's response demonstrates some evolutionists will say one thing to the general public and quite another to their peers behind closed doors." Here it is Kitcher implying one thing is said to the public and another behind closed doors. Why? Politics. The book *Darwin's Enigma* lists additional and similar situations, one of which I briefly mention in post 931.
But if I might venture to answer that question myself, I do think it's highly significant that they would intimate that the fossil record provides an unreliable support for the theory of evolution. You certainly wouldn't get that impression from talking to VadeRetro, that's for sure. And it's also, as I see it, not the impression that the general public receives at all from the scientific establishment.
Well said.
Hey - I'm far from perfect and won't even contemplate walking on water. It could be my tone hinted at something I didn't and don't realize. I greatly appreciate posts like yours - they help in keeping me objective.
Gee! Even the cop who arrested him calls him "Dr. Hovind" in the police report. You have to respect that those diplomas cost money to print and mail.
Microscopes, telescopes, other techniques that are limited by diffraction. This isn't a problem in MRI, and Lauterbur, a physical chemist, spent quite some time worrying why not. Damadian, an MD, would not even have understood Lauterbur's concern.
"Weaver notes that specialization develops only part of a man, and a man partly developed is, in a philosophical sense, deformed. Thus, one who is philosophically deformed is the last person to whom one should look for knowledge of basic principles, or for enlightenment about solving the problems of human societies. Another philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, remarked more than 60 years ago that, beginning with the Renaissance, "in each generation the scientist, through having to reduce the sphere of his labor, was progressively losing contact with other branches of science, [and losing contact] with that integral interpretation of the universe which is the only thing deserving the names of science, culture, [and] civilization."
"The 18th and 19th centuries witnessed the rise of the positive sciences, and with this an intensification in skepticism about God and the claims of traditional religion, especially among the educated classes. This inclination became most marked after the publication of The Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man, by the naturalist Charles Darwin. Darwin ascribed man's immediate ancestry to the anthropoids, supposedly through a process of gradual evolution. Man was no longer a creature made in the image of God, but merely a natural extension of certain lower forms of life, a refined gorilla, as it were. It was these circumstances, and this intellectual milieu, that led philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to declare that "God is dead" and to predict the rise of new and terrible manifestations of barbarism in the century that was to come. As he put it, "For ... we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of ... there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth." The non-believer Nietzsche would agree wholly with the Christian believer Dostoyevsky about one thing: Without faith in God, all horrors, all of man's worst nightmares, would become possible. And so they did."
"What men... believe---really does matter."
Note how absent the leading scientific and technical organizations are from the accolade list.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, right.
Right. Go get a textbook on optics, if you don't understand the point.
I joined nobody. Stop trying to use your writing style to include me in something to which I'm not a party. You know I responded directly to general_re. By posting in the same thread do you "join" every single evo here? I didn't think so.
Take this 
No take two - you show less objectivity than any other poster. Maybe if you showed the slightest hint of objectivity I'd be tempted to read more of your posts. See, that can cut both ways. Now please knock off the obfuscation.
There is hardly a question of why that would be.
Even today, when Mr. Lauterbur discusses his Eureka moment, he says that he happened to be present when a student "was doing some studies of tumors." He doesn't mention that the student was repeating Dr. Damadian's experiment. For his part, Dr. Damadian says credit for inventing the MRI goes to "me, and then Lauterbur," though he thinks both of them should get the Nobel Prize. Mr. Lauterbur claims sole credit.
All this helps explain the long delay of that article from the National Academy of Sciences. It took four years from draft to finished product, longer than any other article in its series (devoted to explaining basic scientific research to the public). And it was revised at least twice before the latest revision because of "the Damadian problem," as someone close to the publishing process confessed.
Note who claims sole credit.
(I also do NMR, albeit not medical imaging, incidentally)
I should hope so, since you are a chemist.
general_re has demonstrated proficient reading and comprehension skills...I think it's more prone to worldview, bias, etc.
I really like general_re and the other evos here. I won't list additional names as I don't want to forget anyone. I think they're intelligent, creative and have a great sense of humor. Some of them are fellow believers. I don't want to alienate any of them even though some occasionally pull stunts I find irritating.
Great read. Thanks.
Better than good! The following pulled from here
... Now, Morpheus says, Neo has two choices. If he takes a blue pill that he is being offered, he will forget about the matrix and go back to his illusory but relatively safe and predictable life. Take the red pill, however, and you will see the world as it really is. The trade-off is clear: comfortable fantasy or harsh reality? What would you choose, and why?So I tell evos to take the red pill. ;-)
They would like a monopoly ...
No, wait!Bringing disrepute on Young Earth Creationism is like bringing disrepute upon pyramid schemes.
No, wait!So when do they discover that there are transitional fossils?
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