ID Supporter Has Wikipedia Page Erased

Okay, this is just snotty.  Günter Bechly is a palaeontologist who was at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany.  Recently, Dr. Bechly came out in favor of Intelligent Design.  For this crime, he has had his Wikipedia erased.  According to David Klinghoffer, at Evolution and Science Today (used to be Evolution News and Views):

Our distinguished paleontologist colleague Günter Bechly was erased from Wikipedia after he came out as a proponent of the theory of intelligent design. That, in turn, was after he had already been pushed out of his curator role at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany, for the same reason. The editors at Wikipedia obscured their treatment of Günter, a world-class expert on dragonflies, by claiming his heresy on ID had nothing to do with the decision to excise him. Instead, they innocently proclaimed that it was due to the realization that he isn’t “notable” enough for the online encyclopedia.

I’ve already pointed out the problems with this contention, and noted that the editors of Bechly’s page and of the grossly distorted Intelligent Design page itself make little effort to hide the ideological axes they grind. There’s little mystery about what happened to Dr. Bechly, or to another ID advocate, Walter Bradley at Baylor University, whose Wiki entry was shredded to near nothing. This is one way the scientific consensus on evolution is maintained, by threatening dissenters. For a scientist, having your accomplishments erased is the ultimate punishment. Wiki editors meanwhile indulge atheist nobodies with extensive biography entries.

Aside from Klinghoffer's usual histrionic bluster about silencing people who disagree with “Darwinism,” (Ken Ham, Henry Morris, John Morris, Stephen Myer, Michael Behe and, yes, even Klinghoffer, himself, have Wikipedia pages) the timing is very suspicious.  Additionally, if you thought he was well-known enough to have a Wikipedia page, why is he suddenly not so?  His page needs to be restored. This just makes Wikipedia look bad and smacks of censorship.

Discovery Institute Weighs in on the Mississippi Academic Freedom Bill

On the website Evolution News and Views, Sarah Chaffee of the Discovery Institute attempts to distance the position of the DI from that of young earth creationists—a position I have not known them to take up to this point.  She writes:

In most states where academic freedom bills for science education are considered, it's the critics who are wrongly claiming that the bills would authorize the teaching of creationism.

But if media accounts from Mississippi are accurate, it appears that at least some legislators who support academic freedom legislation wrongly think it would permit creationism. The Mississippi legislature is currently considering HB 50, which was taken virtually verbatim from Discovery Institute's model academic freedom bill for science education. The language of the bill clearly does not authorize the teaching of creationism. It does not even authorize the teaching of intelligent design. Unfortunately, some of the bill's sponsors apparently think otherwise.

To clear up the confusion, Discovery Institute has sent a letter to the Mississippi House Education Committee explaining what the language of the bill would really do and asking the Committee either to drop the bill because of the inaccurate statements put out by some of its sponsors or to make clear that the legislature understands that the bill does not protect creationism.

This is a critical stance for the DI because, while they have always hidden behind the “academic freedom” legislation as being good for academics in general (when in fact, the central premise behind the vast majority of the academic freedom bills has been to bring creationism in through the back door) they have never explicitly endorsed young earth creationism, likely because they know that academically, it is a scientific non-starter and cannot be separated from a narrow, early 20th century misreading of the early chapters in Genesis.

The letter is produced in the post and has the stark admission that the current Mississippi bill was drafted used a model bill for academic freedom that came from the DI, itself.   There are problems with how evolution is presented in the letter, however.  The DI still seems focused on the role of mutation and natural selection, without considering all of the other ways in which evolution acts.  This is especially evident in their continued use of the partial Lynn Margulis quote in which she argues that mutations don't create new species.  Of course they don't.  But in combination with genetic drift, flow, selection and a host of other mechanisms, they provide one part of the puzzle to how new species form.

I will be curious to see how this bill fares, now that the mask is off regarding its proposal and also how this letter from the DI is received. 

David Klinghoffer, Evolution and Conspiracy Theories

Give David Klinghoffer credit for tenacity, or what Linus van Pelt called “mule-headedness.”  Not content to link Hitler and the Discovery Channel gunman to “Darwinism,” he now does so with the 9-11 conspirators in a new post for Evolution News and Views called “Darwinism and 9/11 Conspiracy Theories.”  He starts out innocently enough, describing the 9/11 conspiracy theories and how they were debunked by Popular Science.  He even has a serviceable definition of conspiracy theorism:

The tendency, hardly limited to the faculty fringe, is to want to repudiate the intuitions of common sense in favor of recondite alternative understandings. These purportedly expose the true, secret inner workings behind the façade of society and nature and, in the process, cast the very sources of our intuition in the most sinister light. This is the essence of conspiracy-thinking.

He comments at length about a story in Slate by Jeremy Stahl, in which Stahl argues that it is very hard to dispel a conspiracy theory because those accepting it simply think you are part of the conspiracy. Then he drops the hammer:

What I found striking about the first installment in the Slate series, by Jeremy Stahl, is the parallels with what we know about the thought and writings of Evolution Truth activists: our ever-loving friends in the Darwin Lobby. You may recall the news of a few months back that Glenn Branch, deputy director of the Darwin-lobbying National Center for Science Education, had collaborated with 9/11 Truth conspiracist James H. Fetzer in editing a special number of the journal Synthese on "Evolution and Its Rivals. That issue of the journal became so notorious for the incivility of its contributions that a whole fracas broke out and made the pages of the New York Times."

Interestingly, in typical DI fashion, the supplied link doesn't go to the New York Times.  It goes to an article by Casey Luskin, who then supplies the link in paragraph five of his article.  In that article, Mr. Luskin also notes that James Fetzer is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.  That charge sticks like glue: James Fetzer's ideas are whackadoodle with regard to this issue and his ideas have been rebutted very soundly. But then Klinghoffer writes this:

When he burst on the scene a century and a half ago, in the Eric Hufschmid role, Darwin offered precisely a conspiracy theory: a radical overturning of common sense, in this case the understanding that nature reflects design. That was replaced now with an unseen and unseeable material mechanism that simply and comprehensively explained how everything we thought we knew about life's development was totally wrong.

This is nonsense. It would only be true if Darwin was the first one to come up with an evolutionary scenario for the diversity of life. He wasn't. Evolutionary scenarios exist as far back as John Ray and Darwin's contemporary, Jean Baptiste Lamarck and his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had their own.  Darwin didn't introduce a conspiracy theory, he illuminated one of the growing questions of biology: how did populations change over time.  He simply provided a mechanism.  The only reason Klinghoffer thinks that it is a conspiracy theory is that he has bought into one of his own: that evolutionists are covering up the fact that evolution has no empirical support.  As long as he continues to believe that evolution has no empirical support, then anything they write is part and parcel of this conspiracy theory.  It doesn't matter how much evidence there is.  It is like trying to explain something to someone while they are  holding their hands over their ears and saying “La la la, I can't hear you.”

He writes:

Once posited, it tells a story that accommodates any observation. This is the brilliance of paranoia. Though Meigs cites Marxism and fundamentalist creationism as parallels, Darwinism offers one just as apt. Whatever nature brings forth can be squeezed to fit the effectively unfalsifiable Darwinian mold, which always turns out to predict, in retrospect, whatever is found.

Interesting. Why does he not include intelligent design in this list? All he has to say is “God did it that way.” It does not matter what the observation is, that is just the way He did it. It is foolproof. This has been the constant roadblock for supporters of ID since its inception.  It is completely unfalsifiable.  There are no hypothesis tests you can run.

It is amazing that Klinghoffer, who plainly does not understand basic predictive historical science, would state that evolution is unfalsifiable when it clearly is (If we found a human skull in mesozoic strata or dinosaurs in the Cambrian, the party would be over for evolution), and miss the fact that ID is not.There is a conspiracy theory all right.  It is just not the one that Klinghoffer envisions.