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To: Right Wing Professor; PatrickHenry
But if I were aware an otherwise talented student had creationist views, I think I'd be obliged to mention it in the letter, and let the admissions committee make up its own mind.

What if you were at a company and were in charge of hiring a scientist? If one came along with top notch credentials and you found out they didn't believe in evolution, I guess you'd have to think twice about hiring them. You would hesitate to hire Dr. Russell Humphreys, a nuclear physicist at Sandia National Laboratories who has had over 20 articles published in scientific journals, Dr. John Baumgardner, the author of the catastrophic plate tectonics theory mentioned in Nature, Dr. Edward Boudreaux of the University of New Orleans, the author of 26 articles and four books on physical chemistry, multiple Nobel Prize nominee Dr. "Fritz" Schaefer the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and the director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia, Dr. Raymond Damadian, the inventor of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Dr. Maciej Giertych, Head of the Dept. of Genetics at the Institute of Dendrology at the Polish Academy of Sciences to name a few. In fact, I assume you'd conclude they were incompetent. Any candidate who believes in evolution with mediocre credentials would be a superior candidate, because they must have a "more scientific frame of mind". You people are really too much with your self deception.

590 posted on 10/09/2002 7:34:49 PM PDT by lasereye
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To: lasereye
What if you were at a company and were in charge of hiring a scientist?

What if you were at a pharmaceutical company and were in charge of hiring a medical researcher instead of a physicist? Oh, my! Your whole diatribe goes up in smoke!

594 posted on 10/09/2002 7:38:47 PM PDT by balrog666
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To: lasereye
You would hesitate to hire Dr. Russell Humphreys, a nuclear physicist at Sandia National Laboratories who has had over 20 articles published in scientific journals

If I were on a search committee in nuclear physics, a candidate's creationism wouldn't weigh too much on my mind, other than to make me wonder what other odd ideas he might believe in. It's irrelevant to the area of research, and at Sandia, he's not going to be teaching freshman students. If the hire were in chemistry (my field), which is closer to biology, a creationist job-seeker would worry me more; such views would be an absolute prohibition, IMO, if the hire were in biological chemistry. As someone else pointed out, you wouldn't hire a Bible-teacher who was an atheist.

By the way, 20 papers isn't exactly productive; if you're looking for a Research God who's a creationist, shoot for a couple of hundred.

Most of the people you cite are similar nonentities. The one exception I'd make is Henry Schaefer, who's a real quantum chemist, and probably has several hundred papers. I can't imagine why he's making what I consider uninformed pronouncements so far outside his field, but he's a bit of a gadfly in it as well.

Damadian, by the way, is a fruitcake who tried to use the courts to steal credit for inventing MRI from its real inventor, Paul Lauterbur . I'm pretty well informed on the details of this case: I succeeded Lauterbur at SUNY Stony Brook. Paul, while a great scientist, is a bit of a slob, or at least his group were slobs; you could practially trace the evolution of his idea from the debris in his lab!

689 posted on 10/10/2002 7:04:39 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
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