Ha ha, fooled you!
The Discovery Institute has just issued this on their blog, the inaccurately named Evolution News and Views:
According to CSC senior fellow and leading ID theorist William Dembski, what follows is:
"[A] big story, perhaps the biggest story yet of academic suppression relating to ID. Robert Marks is a world-class expert in the field of evolutionary computing, and yet the Baylor administration, without any consideration of the actual content of Marks's work at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, decided to shut it down simply because there were anonymous complaints linking the lab to intelligent design."
Read on if you care at all about academic freedom and protecting the right of scientists to freedom of scientific inquiry.
So Dembski takes a step down in status, returning to the place that canned him once already. He comes crawling back as a postdoc, and is somehow surprised when the University doesn't want to see him around anymore? Shocking. Who does that??? When you're a professor and you want to do research, you do it in your lab. If you can't do it in your lab, you go on sabbatical so you can bring it to your lab someday. Then you get grants to fund said work in your lab. If your institution won't support said work, you find one that will hire you. But stepping back into a postdoc is like going back to trade school for something you're already certified to do. And there but for the grace of God go I.
Is this really about academic freedom, or is it about the University not wanting to deal with some flunky they already pink-slipped? Because if it's the former, the DI is basically admitting that even devoutly Christian schools, like the esteemed Baylor University, don't find Intelligent Design stealth creationism to be very compelling. Methinks if the DI's strategy is actually to win people over, throwing the egomaniacal Dembski under the bus on this one might be a better option.
I mean really. Can you say "I'm hell bent on using you for the affiliation" any more clearly?
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This is a fascinating post! It could not have been expressed better.
Baylor University ought to be proud to be associated with one of the world experts on Flash animation fart noise soundtracks.