Some of us have called for Francis Collins to resign from the woo-laden BioLogos Foundation before taking up directorship of the National Institutes of Health. Not that he heeded our call or anything, but he’s gonna step down. Let’s hope this leads the whole ghastly foundation to crumble.
From an article in the latest Nature:
The BioLogos Foundation has confirmed that Collins would step down from his role there before taking up the reins at the NIH. It’s the right move, says Varmus. “Discussion about the foundation and his involvement with it could readily become a distraction from the business of running the NIH,” he told Nature.
That’s a relief.
If he’d just say that minds evolved without there being any reason to believe that miracles were involved, most of my concerns about him in his new position would be gone.
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Somebody get the hankies for the accommodationist co-authors, Im sure the tears are flowing.
Good for him. I wish their spokesman didn’t use the “distraction” excuse, but that’s a minor quibble.
This is great. I just put the finishing touches on my R01 grant proposal to study the mystical properties of waterfalls. Easy Street here I come!
Maybe Stephen Meyers will become the successor and show how Baal’s autograph ended up on a chromosome.
Except the DI goes apoplectic at the mention of theistic evolutionists, and set up their own web site to counter BioLogos….but perhaps Meyer can write another letter to the Boston Globe about it.
It is clearly the rational thing to do for Collins. Is it too much to hope that he will admit that moral intuitions and the mind are evolved, rather than specially created?
As I said in another post on this site, this is actually NIH formal policy. No one can participate in intellectualk, political or financial concerns that have even the appearance of conflict with their function. This is true for all NIH employees: administrators, scientists, everybody. The rule was applied retroactively to shares in biotech companies, etc. and you need to have everything you write reviewed and approved, even if it’s an personal blog entry. Certainly, Collins could have asked for an exception. But he would have looked extremely bad if he had.
Yes Athena, you said it right here.
The troll we know as Santitafarela bet that he would NOT resign right over here.
I guess Santi is wrong yet again. No surprise there!
My way of being in the world does not view Santi as a troll, but rather more of a meta-postmodernist philosophy type, who sees himself as the ‘loyal opposition.’ I may be in the minority in this view, but I think that he sometimes makes valid points while trying to keep us honest and civil.
I disagree with him plenty, and am not a Woody Allen fanboi, and don’t think that Santi is particularly funny in his longwindedness, but I just can’t label him a troll at this point.
When I made this point about Collins and added that I knew of the NIH rule because I had been offered a Branch Chief position, he told me that I was “full of it”. I believe that makes him a troll of the first magnitude. Worse, it actually makes him a person of bad faith, since he won’t let facts stand in the way of his pre-conceptions.
From Wikipedia:
Yes, Santi passes everyone of these tests in addition to Athena’s note of “won’t let facts stand in the way of his pre-conceptions”.
Yeah that looks pretty trollish, or at least rude.
So I punished him by gloating. Nyah nyah.
Methinks that M&K will be upset by this retreat away from woo.