Michael Behe speaks on bloggingheads.tv affair

Addendum to my two posts below, here's Michael Behe's side. He notes:

...and John emailed back that he himself requested the video to be pulled because people thought he was too easy on me, which was supposedly contrary to that old Bloggingheads spirit. I find that quite implausible (other shows on the site feature discussions between people who agree on many things). Rather, I suspect the folks at the website weren't expecting the vitriolic reaction, began to worry about their good names and future employment prospects, pictured themselves banished to a virtual leper colony, panicked, and folded.

Behe is correct. The producers do prefer some disagreement (participants refer to this injunction), but it often doesn't crop up. I would say that the majority of diavlogs don't exhibit much of an adversarial spirit. The problem was the lack of adversarial spirit and the content, that is, the crankery. When historian of science Ronald Numbers had a discussion with Paul Nelson, a Young Earth Creationist, it was in an anthropological spirit. In contrast McWhorter verged on advocacy.

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So a friend of mine started IMing me about how crazy the John McWhorter & Michael Behe diavlog was on bloggingheads.tv. I was a bit surprised since there is no such diavlog, either on the bloggingheads.tv website, nor in their podcasts (which is where I usually am made to be aware of them).…
You are probably familiar with the Bloggingheads website. The site, founded by Robert Wright, features conversations between various bloggers, journalists and scholars on whatever issues it amuses them to talk about. The site has long featured scientists among its participants. Two recent…
Just a quick follow-up to the previous post, as I finished watching the whole Behe-McWhorter exchange. Notes: 1) McWhorter is an atheist, and implies he's always been an atheist (or at least not a theist). 2) He's really impressed by Michael Behe's arguments, to the point where he might assent to…
I've always rather liked Bloggingheads — at least the idea of it, with one-on-one discussions between interesting people. It flops in execution often, since some of the participants wouldn't recognize reason and evidence if it walked up and slapped them in the face with a large and pungent haddock…

Can't comment on the previous thread, so...

John McWhorter?!? The linguist!?! Who got the idea of letting him talk about biology?

The one I'm talking about has done great work in linguistics. I just don't expect a linguist to know a lot about biology, and neither should Bloggingheads.tv.

<headshake>

By David MarjanoviÄ (not verified) on 20 Sep 2009 #permalink