cloudsoup

You will probably never have heard of Edwin Poots. He is a member of the Board of Governers of Drumbo and Carr Primary School. He is also the Minister for Culture in the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly. He thinks the entire universe is about 6,000 years old.
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The Seattle-based creationist advocacy think-tank, The Discovery Institute tries to respond to the criticism that proponents of creationism and its cousin ‘intelligent design’, which has been called ‘creationism in a fancy suit’, do not publish in peer-reviewed scientific journal by publishing a page of short descriptions of ‘Peer-Reviewed and Peer-Edited’ publications. Things aren’t quite as they seem.

Let’s test the honesty of the Discovery Institute’s list by delving into their claim that a suitable example of a peer-reviewed paper is one entitled Genetic Analysis of Coordinate Flagellar and Type III Regulatory Circuits in which Scott Minnich and Stephen C. Meyer ‘argue explicitly that intelligent design is a better (sic) than the Neo-Darwinian mechanism for explaining the origin of the bacterial flagellum’.

Meyer is a theologian and a founder of the Discovery Institute who has a history of finding scientific support for his peculiar views where none in fact exists. He once presented an annotated bibliography of 44 peer-reviewed scientific articles to the Ohio State Board of Education that were said to significantly challenge ‘Darwinian evolution’. The authors of the papers were contacted, and twenty-six, representing thirty-four of the papers responded, all stating that they disagreed with Meyer’s representation of their work.

Scott Minnich is a Fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Unfortunately for Scott and for the Discovery Institute’s claims for this particular paper, he provided testimony in the Dover Trial (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District), the Federal court case that ruled on teaching intelligent design in high schools.

The damaging part of the proceedings are online.

Q. And the paper that you published was only minimally peer reviewed, isn’t that true?

A (Scott Minnich). For any conference proceeding, yeah. You don’t go through the same rigor. I mentioned that yesterday. But it was reviewed by people in the Wessex Institute, and I don’t know who they were.

and then, slightly later in discussing a different paper:

Q. Unlike your paper, that is a peer reviewed scientific paper, correct?

A. In that — in that sense, yeah. Again, mine is a conference paper, so –

Q. This is a true peer reviewed paper, correct?

A. Correct.

This supposedly ‘peer-reviewed’ paper, then, was ‘conference reviewed’ and Scott Minnich doesn’t know who the Wessex Institute are.

By coincidence I came across the Wessex Institute a few weeks ago while reminding myself of that great hoax on the pretensions of the Social Sciences, the Sokal Affair.

The Wessex Institute of Technology (WIT) is associated with the University of Wales and organised the conference, ‘Design & Nature 2004′ in Rhodes, at which Minnich and Meyer’s paper was presented. As Minnich says, it was the WIT that provided the conference peer review. So what are the WIT’s peer review standards an proceudres?

Here’s an example:

A prior event which may also be compared to the Sokal affair involved the VIDEA 1995 conference, organized by the Wessex Institute of Technology. Professor Werner Purgathofer (Vienna University of Technology), a member of the VIDEA 1995 program committee, became suspicious of the conference’s peer review standards after not receiving any abstracts or papers for review. To confirm his suspicions, he wrote four absurd and/or nonsensical “abstracts” and submitted them to the conference. All were “reviewed and conditionally accepted.”[3] He subsequently resigned from the program committee.

Wikipedia on The Sokal Affair and the Wessex Institute of Technology

You can read more of Professor Purgathofer’s trenchant views on the Wessex Institute here.

The upshot of this one brief investigation, is that the paper, presented to an Engineering conference, was not, as the Discovery Institute wrongly claims, properly peer-reviewed. Anyone care to take a look at the rest of their claims on that page?

Ben Bridges has been a Georgia State Representative since January 1997 and serves on Committees for Banks and Banking, Public Utilities and Telecommunications and Rules. He is an active member of the First Baptist Church in the slightly freaky Alpine Helen (a mountain community with a touch of Bavaria)- which we visited, incidentally, back in 2001.

Alpine Helen, Georgia, home of State Representative Ben Bridges

Unfortunately, Rep. Bridges is tangled up in a little problem caused by the husband of his campaign manager, one Marshall Hall, who has written a memo asking lawmakers to end teaching evolution in state schools because it is a deception that is causing incalculable harm to every student and every truth-loving citizen. The memo points to indispuitable evidence that this evolution thing is a rumour put about by mystical anti-Christian Jews, on the lunatic ‘fixed earth’ website, called after its other obsession – that Copernicus got it wrong and the earth doesn’t go round the sun and isn’t rotating.

Bridges, who unsuccessfully sponsored legislation to require Georgia�s teachers to introduce scientific evidence challenging evolution is reported as saying or the memo,

I agree with it more than I would the Big Bang Theory or the Darwin Theory. I am convinced that rather than risk teaching a lie why teach anything

When Blair was challenged about the faith school in the North-East of England, Emmanuel College, which happily supported fundamentalist evangelicals and young-earth creationists, he said that diversity was necessary in education. That’s such a dumbfounding response that it’s difficult to understand that Blair really did seem to be supporting the teaching of nonsense (that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old) as if stupidity and sense needed equal curriculum time.

He’s now said, The Koran is inclusive. It extols science and knowledge and abhors superstition. Blair himself is an Anglo-Catholic and is married to a Catholic. So here’s my question, to Muslims or Christians: how is your faith not superstition?

Hume argued that superstition and fanaticism are the sources, or causes, of religion. Time for a definition.

Superstition:

a belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge, in or of the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like.

a system or collection of such beliefs.

a custom or act based on such a belief.

irrational fear of what is unknown or mysterious, esp. in connection with religion.

any blindly accepted belief or notion.

Surely, religion is superstition, especially to someone who’s not of a particular religion. As Blair isn’t a Muslim, how can he say Islam abhors superstition? According to the dictionary definition, for a Christian any other faith is just superstition.

State-funded secondary school Emmanuel College hit the headlines when it was discovered that senior staff, including the Head Teacher, promoted fundamentalist creationism.

To teach creationism to children as if it were a serious competitor to science is worse than irrational, it is educationally and morally irresponsible

In March, 2002 a UK secondary school – Emmanuel College, Gateshead – hosted a creationism conference organised by the international fundamentalists AnswersInGenesis. The conference had the support of the Head Teacher, who said it was not an improper focus for the school.

Young-Earth Creationism

The evolution of species through natural selection operating over very long times simply doesn’t happen, say YEC supporters. Starlight was created by God to look as if it had travelled through space for millions of years, although it hadn’t really done so (because the Bible said it hadn’t). Kangeroos and Koala Bears trekked from Mt Ararat in the Middle East to their home in Australia immediately after a worldwide flood 4,000 years ago. Coal beds were laid down at the same time.

In January 2002, AiG publicised a creationism conference to be held in March at Emmanuel, a state school in Gateshead (in the north-east of England).

attempts to reconcile evolutionary theory with the Biblical account of creation strain and distort scripture.

Head Master McQuoid’s support for Young-Earth Creationism shocked people who thought the school should steer clear of what one critic dubbed intellectual dishonesty. Headmaster McQuoid responded that it was fascist to suggest that schools shouldn’t consider YEC.

The Guardian newspaper published an exposé of Emmanuel College and of the extreme beliefs held by some teachers there. The Telegraph joined in, as did The Independent and others. The BBC and Channel 4 ran tv news stories about the affair. The British Humanist Society helped organise opinion and sent its letter of concern to the Prime Minister, signed by such luminaries as Professors Francis Crick, Antony Flew, Richard Dawkins, Lewis Wolpert, Colin Blakemore and others.

To begin with it hadn’t been realised that some of the school’s senior staff were enthusiastic opponents of evolution – and opponents, too, of most of modern anthropology, geology, physics and cosmology.

But we discovered that McQuoid and others from the school had published their strange views for all to read on the website of the Christian Institute.

The Christian Institute

Governors can question science and geography teachers about their treatment of evolution

The Christian Institute, based in Newcastle (very near to Emmanuel College) happens to be chaired by Nigel McQuoid’s predecessor at Emmanuel, John Burn. McQuoid and Burn have contributed a number of essays published on the Institute’s website, where you can read McQuoid’s claim:

attempts to reconcile evolutionary theory with the Biblical account of creation strain and distort scripture

The Institute used to publish essays by others from Emmanuel College but it removed them from the website when the school made the headlines. A spokesman for the Institute said at the time that the essays had been removed temporarily. They haven’t reappeared.

• Steven Layfield, the Head of Science at Emmanuel, wrote:
  

  Note every occasion when an evolutionary/old-earth paradigm (millions or billions of years) is explicitly mentioned or implied by a text-book, examination question or visitor and courteously point out the fallibility of the statement and, wherever possible, give the alternative (always better) Biblical explanation of the same data.

  If you’d like to read more of Layfield’s remarkable essay, you still can, thanks to Google and Andrew Brown.

• Gary Wiecek, a Vice-Principal at Emmanuel has written:
  

  There are Christian scientists who have … provided convincing scientific counter evidences of the Evolutionist’s position.

• Paul Yeulett, a Maths teacher at Emmanuel, wrote:
  

  A Christian teacher of biology, for example, will not (or should not) regard the theory of evolution as axiomatic, but will oppose it while teaching it alongside creation.

So we have a Headmaster who opposes evolution; a Head of Science who urges opposition to evolution; a Vice Principal who thinks that evolution has been convincingly opposed; and a Maths teacher who, again, urges opposing the theory and teaching creationism at the same time.

These four pretend their opinions are scientifically credible. They aren’t. They’re simply a consequence of bizarre religious beliefs.

Responses to Cloudsoup about Emmanual College

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that)

To teach creationism to children as if it were a serious competitor to science is worse than irrational, it is educationally and morally irresponsible

Myth and fairy tale are the stuff of creationism. To dress it up as science is an insult to centuries of human rationalism and to the mountain of evidence that unequivocally places mankind and all other organisms on this planet within a single evolutionary continuum of life. To deny children this marvellous world view is a perversion, particularly from teachers whose role must be to broaden young minds, not fill them with nonsense

Creationism is a puerile lie and comes with the fundamentalist baggage of xenophobia, homophobia, the dismantling of the welfare state … and is an attack on pluralism

The theory that the biosphere was created without evolution, a few thousand years ago, is ruled out by overwhelming scientific evidence. To claim that there are ‘alternative (always better) Biblical explanations of the same data’, which make creationism a reasonable alternative to our best theories of biology and physics, is appalling intellectual dishonesty

Creationism is not science. Evolution theory is. As Karl Popper pointed out, you can tell scientific ideas from non-scientific ones because the former make predictions, and so would be falsified if the predictions don’t hold up. No conceivable fact could falsify creationism – one can always say God made it that way. But, as my teacher Haldane pointed out, a single fossil rabbit in Cambrian rocks would falsify evolution.

The so-called “creation science” is not only bad science it is also bad theology. My friends of faith should base their beliefs on something much stronger than the outcome of a scientific debate on the age of some fossil bone fragment or the details of some obscure enzymic reaction. In the short term the arguments of creationists may seem to be a useful straw to grasp in search for answers of how to teach students civilized behavior or respect for our fellow men, but think ahead of the letdown of your pupils who might come to associate important and valid concepts of morality with flimsy arguments which will continue to wither in the face of new discoveries.