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Prof Denied Funds Over Evolution Evidence
radarsat1 writes "The Montreal Gazette today reported that a professor at Montreal's McGill University was refused a $40,000 grant, allegedly because 'he'd failed to provide the panel with ample evidence that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is correct.' Ironically, the grant was for a study into the detrimental effects of intelligent design on Canadian academics and leaders." From the article: "Jennifer Robinson, McGill's associate vice-principal for communications, said the university has asked the SSHRC to review its decision to reject Alters's request for money to study how the rising popularity in the United States of 'intelligent design' - a controversial creationist theory of life - is eroding acceptance of evolutionary science in Canada."
Whatsamatta with you, you say we all have to read it and no link? I have rectified this. http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2005/images/12/20/kitzmille r.pdf
The SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) is not a backwaters school board stacked with religious fundamentalists. It is a mainstream, government-monitored agency that hands out almost $300mm per year of social sciences funding. Only 40% of applications get approved. In this case, it looks like they were justified in rejecting his application. Indeed, it looks like Alters is being a bit of a publicity-hunting suck. From another source:
Eva Schacherl, a spokeswoman for the council, said Wednesday the multidisciplinary committee was not convinced the proposal's scholarly approach was sound or that it would provide objective results on the question.
"I just want to underline that it is not correct to suggest that the funding proposal was not accepted because the council or the committee had doubts about evolution," she said.
"We understand the way the committee's comments were transcribed or written down or summarized could have misled him and we really regret that the note sent to him gave the impression that the committee had doubts about evolution. That was really not what the committee intended."
Schacherl noted the council has funded other research projects on evolution and gave $175,000 to Alters last year for a three-year project on concepts of biological evolution in Islamic society.
In short, just because you have the right idea doesn't mean you automatically get funding for a flawed study.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Don't want to read a 139 page PDF document? Skip to the delicious summary on page 136, including these choice quotes:
The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board's ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.
[...]
To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.
[...]
The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial.
Point by point, oh foolishly self-ignorant one:
... as evolution is.
... there are gaping holes in the theory of evolution you could drive a truck through
Intelligent design, when
Not even close. Evolution is a fact. The various hypothesis as to how it functions are layed out in a format that can be examined against the evidence available as to their validity. Furthermore they can make projections, like say, if humans create new carbon-based chemicals, the biota will adjust in time to consume them. Guess what? Nylon ingesting bacteria.
Mighta helped if you offered one, but I'll make do. Evolution basically states that organisms will change over time. We have literally tons of fossil evidence which explicitly supports this idea. If you have further thoughts, you might at least make them less vague.
He freely admitted that evolution could not explain complex organs like the eye.
Why, oh why do creationists keep trotting out lies like this? Not only did he not say that (provide complete context, not quote snippets), we currently have on this planet various life forms which exhibit the states of the eye's evolution. In fact, we have various life forms which show that the eye is not only capable of being evolved, it is capable of being evolved in a number of ways.
My point here is NOT to advocate ID, or the dismissal of Darwinist theory.
Uh, bullshit. If that were so, you wouldn't have made the false claim about the lack of evidence, for instance.
When you continue to insist you are right about something you can't prove, what you have is not a theory anymore - it's a religion.
Excellent, you've just described ID. Since there is emperical evidence for evolution, arguments against its very existence reek of a religious point of view that holds a book written thousands of years ago as being more correct than one's own eyes.
I personally believe that the answer to this is somewhere in the middle.
Just for your edification, there is no middle ground between goddunnit and the world works with its own mechanisms. Not in any manner that can be examined at least. And that is the fundamental deciet of the ID'rs, that the "theory" of ID can be examined. A noteworthy point is that they are incapable of coming up with a manner with which it can.
But it's just a theory - I could be wrong.
Much like ID, not it in a scientific sense. You are wrong because of your refusal to examine the evidence and frame a logically sound, yet falsifiable hypothesis. No more.
A bit of background for those who are not familiar with some of the common academic research funding bodies here in Canada.
SSHRC is for the funding of Social Science and Humanities research, which includes things like literature research. A good friend of mine who is working on her Ph.D. in English has an application in for an SSHRC grant.
NSERC is for the funding of scientific and engineering research.
There are a few critical points to understand about these two funding organizations:. NSERC has way more money than the SSHRC. Scientific and engineering researchers typically have no problems getting the funding they need, whereas social science and humanities researchers can have a really hard time getting anything from the SSHRC. The SSHRC just doesn't get much money, and has to be stingy in doleing it out to ensure they get the best bang for their buck.
As such, it is entirely possible that the reason for the SSHRC denying this grant would be because the grant application was simply incomplete.
From my perspective as someone who has lived in three Provinces (and who has been to all the rest, with the notable exception of Newfoundland), Intelligent Design is a complete and total non-starter here in Canada. If it weren't for /. and exposure to US-based news services, I doubt I'd even have heard about it. There is no political movement here to stop the teaching of evolution in schools, no court cases, nothing. To most Canadians, it's just another of those idiotic ultra-conservative American things that occurs from time to time, and not something the vast majority of Canadians want any part of.
While I personally think this research would be interesting, it is quite possible that the SSHRC has more pressing areas of research to handle, such as the serious social problems in native communities. With only so much money to go around, there are inevitably going to be very worthy projects which get rejected for funding. The trick for a researcher is to look elsewhere for the funding they need to get their research completed and published.
Yaz.
Your viewpoint is common among those Christians who appreciate science and aren't aware of the fundamentalist political motivations for ID. My father, for example, put it in more or less the same terms: "Intelligent Design" just means that evolution occured, and that it occured was God's will. From this view, where science is the "how" and God is the "why", "Intelligent Design" is just putting a name to the concept and shouldn't affect one iota the scientists doing evolution research (whether those scientists are religious or not), because it makes zero new scientific claims.
Of course creating a word for the harmony that can exist between science and religion is not the reason ID was created.
The whole point of Intelligent Design is to be an alternative to evolution, to replace it with a theory that (very) superficially* does not seem to be religious in nature. ID is supposed to discredit evolution, and leave open the possibility of Creationism, and to even allow Creationism (its nature covered by the thin veneer ID offers) to be taught in public schools without violating the 1st Ammendment.
ID was created to destroy the "heretical" teaching of evolution, and as such people with views like yours (and mine, and my father's) are diametrically opposed to the true supporters of ID. It is the thin end of the wedge intended to drive fundamentalism into our schools and "secular" scientific teaching out.
ID is a political movement with political goals, and a rational attempt to reconcile ID's statements with the scientific facts of evolution is contrary to those goals. So while I agree 100% with your view, you must take great care in using "Intelligent Design" to describe it, because you will be misrepresenting yourself.
* ID proponents may tell you that ID does not necessarily mean the Christian God or any other god did it, and maybe it was space aliens. They're lying to conceal ID's religious basis. The whole argument of ID is that something like the human brain could not have developed from natural processes, so some other intelligence must have made the brain. By ID's central hypothesis, that other intelligence could not have arisen from natural processes. Simple induction tells us that however long the sequence of Designers, the original Designer must therefore be supernatural. Everyone intuitively understands this, especially the fundamentalist backers of ID, but they have to pretend not to in order to avoid that annoying Separation of Church and State.
The enemies of Democracy are
ID is part of a strategy called The Wedge, which was leaked in a memo from the Discovery Institute. The Wedge strategy is to undermine the naturalistic approach to understanding the world in favour of a supernaturalistic interpretation. There is a major problem with this: a supernaturalistic world view precludes the practice of science. The chain of cause and effect is broken because at any point one can claim that God intervened and rendered your data meaningless. This is precisely the strategy of pseudo-scientists, frauds, and psychic con-men when they fail any scientific challenge to their claims--they assert that hidden causes of a psychic or supernatural nature intervened to render the tests meaningless.
The battle between ID and Evolution is a defence of science. If creationists intentionally put God in harm's way to advance their cause, then God will bear the brunt of the scientific argument. This happens only because creationists deliberately define God in such a way as to conflict with well established scientific facts--as an Interventionist Creator. They do this with a specific political agenda in mind. The outcome of this for moderate religionists will be one of two defeats. Either their religion will come to be held in ridicule and contempt, or the creationists will win the argument and America will fall into decline and ruin as it loses its scientific and technological competence. The second defeat would be much worse than the first, because then, an external power, probably an atheistic one, will get to sing the tune their descendants dance to.
In the late 60's conservative think tanks came up with the Silent Majority, the moderate bulge which did not take part in the radicalism of the 60's. This in turn became the Moral Majority. A large proportion of the population still sits silently and allows ignorant demagogues to speak for them, even though they do not actually share the view of that extreme fringe. They simply have not taken the time or effort to understand what they really believe, or the consequences of those beliefs. Unfortunately, the vast majority of so-called believers no more understand their faith than they do science.
So, to all those self-proclaimed moderates out there, quit wasting your time arguing with atheists and wake up to what's being said in your name. It's your ass that's going to end up in a sling. Christianity is being hijacked for political purposes, corrupting both politics and religion. There's a great line in Hannah and her Sisters: "If Jesus could hear what was being said in his name, he would never stop throwing up!"
We really don't care what you believe, as long as you don't try to peddle bullshit to children too young and naive to know better. There is such a thing as the truth, and truth happens to be on the side of the evolutionists, with as much certainty as human beings are capable of (and yes, the Bible too is the work of human beings--it has our greasy finger prints all over it.) At one time Christianity meant an allegiance to the truth, which is why so many Christians became scientists--they preferred to get their knowledge first-hand from nature, rather than passed from hand to hand to hand ad nauseum through scripture. If Christianity has not sunk to the depths of invertebrate relativism, prove it!
We're waiting...
The Big Bang theory predicts that the early universe was a very hot place and that as it expands, the gas within it cools. Thus the universe should be filled with radiation that is literally the remnant heat left over from the Big Bang, called the "cosmic microwave background radiation", or CMB.
The existence of the CMB radiation was first predicted by George Gamow in 1948, and by Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman in 1950. It was first observed inadvertently in 1965 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The radiation was acting as a source of excess noise in a radio receiver they were building. Coincidentally, researchers at nearby Princeton University, led by Robert Dicke and including Dave Wilkinson of the WMAP science team, were devising an experiment to find the CMB. When they heard about the Bell Labs result they immediately realized that the CMB had been found. The result was a pair of papers in the Physical Review: one by Penzias and Wilson detailing the observations, and one by Dicke, Peebles, Roll, and Wilkinson giving the cosmological interpretation. Penzias and Wilson shared the 1978 Nobel prize in physics for their discovery.
The rest of the story is at NASA's Cosmolology 100 site.
For a fascinating and very readable book-length account read Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh.
Insert witty sig here.