One reason the right is more successful than the left is that the right sticks together so well. Less than five days after I excoriate Lawrence VanDyke for his incompetent review of Beckwith's apology for Intelligent Design, his friends on the right have enlisted The National Review on-line to come to Mr VanDyke's defense...sort of. I say "sort of," since there is no actual response to the merits of my criticism, which are here (for some reason, NRO failed to link to the actual criticisms).
Further criticisms are here.
A useful, critical review of the standard arguments on behalf of Intelligent Design and Creationism is available from Scientific American: "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense."
An invaluable watchdog group that monitors the Intelligent Design scam artists is the National Center for Science Education; their site has much useful information.
Finally, an easy way to get educated about the actual state of the biology and science is this splendid site by a Minnesota biologist, Dr. P.Z. Myers.
Anyone educated about this debate knows that VanDyke and Beckwith (an NRO contributor, I've learned) have cast their lot with pseudo-science and intellectual dishonesty. Academic freedom does not, contrary to NRO, protect scholarly shoddiness; my posting documented the shoddy scholarship, and the unsupported, and unsupportable, claims. By failing to respond on the merits, NRO fails to engage the actual issues. (Might the failure to address the content or merits have something to do with the fact that the author of the NRO piece is Beckwith's graduate student at Baylor? See here)
Academic freedom protects the right of Beckwith et al. to cast their lot with pseudo-science; it protects my right to call them on it. It also protects my right to express the view that pseudo-science and scholarly incompetence are, as I put it, "an inauspicious beginning for an aspiring law teacher." Although I'm amused by how much power NRO thinks I have, the fact is I have an impact on hiring at Texas, and that's about it, except to the extent I am asked to evaluate candidates in legal philosophy by other law schools.
NRO seems particularly exercised by this line, which it italicizes:
"And let none of the many law professors who are readers of this site be mistaken: Mr. VanDyke has perpetrated (intentionally or otherwise) a scholarly fraud, one that may have political and pedagogical consequences."
The italicized portion is alluding not to consequences for Mr. VanDyke (what would "pedagogical" or "political" consequences be for him?)--I would have thought that obvious--but to the consequences for public school education and battles over science education by handing the ID scam artists a new weapon in their arsenal: a favorable review of one of their key texts in the Harvard Law Review. Already, as this site reports, this public relations victory is being exploited by the proponents of pseudo-science. Thousands of hours were spent by dozens of Texans like me this past summer and fall defeating the efforts of the ID scam artists to destroy science education in Texas; in a great victory, the Texas State Board of Education rebuffed Beckwith & co., sizing them up for the proponents of pseudo-science that they are. If the reader detects I'm a bit irritated with Mr. VanDyke, perhaps it is because I'd rather not spend significant portions of my time defending the integrity of science education for my children. Mr. VanDyke has made my job and the job of all those who want high standards in education a bit harder.
Mr. VanDyke has injected himself in to a serious political debate by misrepresenting in a prestigious, professional publication the state of the relevant science and empirical evidence. Mr. VanDyke must own his words and own the consequences of those words: he is a professional, publishing in a professional journal. Those consequences include the likelihood that the vast majority of educated readers, knowledgeable about the relevant science, will be astonished that the Harvard Law Review could publish such slipshod work and will likely take a dim view of Mr. VanDyke's scholarly competence. They are correct, in my view, to draw those conclusions.
As my current and former colleagues know, I'm an impossible academic "conservative": I favor high standards and am a relentless opponent of faddish bullshit (postmodernism, cultural studies, etc.). I also know that most conservatives--at least those in the legal academy--are strong believers in sound science and in Darwin's theory of evolution, in particular. They have as little patience for the tripe Mr. VanDyke is serving up as I do. For some reason, the NRO is different; this is not the first time they have cast their lot with pseudo-science. I fear it won't be the last.
UPDATE: I got a good laugh out of Pharygula's no-nonsense assessment of this business: "The real issue here is that certain ignorant ideologues have made it their goal to impose bogus science on our nation's classrooms by legislative fiat. And what's more, they have a petulant pity-fest when anyone tells them that their agenda is a crock."
FURTHER UDPATE: More sensible comments on this tempest in a teapot here. And another excellent resource on the ID scam here.
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