Sunday, January 27, 2008

Expelled

I ran across the site for an interesting documentary that is coming out this April: Expelled. This documentary, hosted by Ben Stein, examines how the scientific community is treating those of its members who question Darwinian evolution. I'll you to explore the website on your own if you're curious about some of the details. One story, though, particularly disturbed me, since my alma mater is involved.
The full story can be found here. To summarize: Iowa State University has denied tenure to a professor of Physics and Astronomy (Guillermo Gonzalez) for co-authoring a book called The Privileged Planet. He never taught this material in class, and all of his work was first-rate. Yet, he was denied tenure for "unsatisfactory progress." Based on the evidence that I have seen, it appears that Iowa State is attempting to silence scientific inquiry out some of sort of fear of mixing science with religion.
(Note to ISU President Geoffory: Any hope you might have had of me supporting Iowa State University has been shot to pieces. I will not support an institution that works to quash scientific debate by denying high quality scientists tenure. I would have expected something like that from the University of Iowa, but certainly I thought ISU would be more fair-minded.)
So, when this documentary comes out, go visit it, and take your friends, evolutionist and non-evolutionist. The whole point of the documentary--and the goal of Intelligent Decision scientists, I might add--is to re-examine and debate ideas that we once thought were correct and now may well be wrong. Isn't that what we're supposed to do in science? I guess that's only true as long as we stay away from anything that suggests we humans are not the ultimate beings in the universe...

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