There were four articles yesterday—very similar in content—about the hiring of Intelligent Design advocate Guillermo Gonzalez at Ball State University. And they give us a bit of new information.
Here are a few snippets from “Intelligent hire?” (good title!) by Colleen Flaherty in Inside Higher Ed, who contacted Gonzalez for a statement about his hiring:
In an e-mailed statement, Gonzalez said he was “very happy” to be working at Ball State, and that he had assured faculty and administrators there in interviews that he would not teach intelligent design – just as he hadn’t at Iowa State. That institution denied him tenure, he added, “not because of poor academics on my parts, but for ideological and political reasons.”. . .
Well, at least we know Gonzalez has abjured teaching ID in the classroom, but he’s still playing the martyr card, despite the fact that there is ample evidence that the tenure denial was based simply on lack of scholarship, including an absence of research funding. As the article notes, “Iowa State has said that Gonzalez’s tenure denial, and the vote to uphold that denial following his appeal, was based on his academic record.”
Were I Gonzalez, I’d keep quiet about my “martyrdom” and lack of tenure, for all it does is call attention to his failure.
. . .Gonzalez and his supporters say he was rejected there in part due to his 2004 book, The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery, which argues that there’s evidence in the Earth’s design that it is unique within the universe. “For some reason our Earthly location is extraordinarily well suited to allow us to peer into the heavens and discover its secrets,” reads its synopsis. That’s contrary to the widely accepted science on the Earth’s location.
Moreover, Gonzalez called the controversy surrounding his hire “artificial,” and “largely generated by one activist blogger who is not an astronomer” – presumably Coyne.
You don’t have to be an astronomer to see the problems with The Privileged Planet, and as for “artificial controversy,” well, all I did was note that Ball State had hired a Discovery Institute fellow at the same time that one of their own ID advocates was under investigation. That’s not artificial, but reality; and if anyone’s responsible for calling this to people’s attention, it’s the news outlets.
We also hear what Gonzalez will be teaching, and another welcome affirmation that he’ll keep ID out of the classroom—even though he still accepts it.
. . . Gonzalez will teach introductory-level astronomy courses on the tenure track next semester and continue his research in astrobiology and stellar astrophysics, again keeping intelligent design out of the classroom.
But, he said, “My view that there is evidence of design in physics and cosmology (the type of design I have written about) is not out of the mainstream; a number of cosmologists and physicists hold to this view.”
Some disagree. David Southwood, president of the Royal Astronomical Society and professor of physics at Imperial College London, said he’d reviewed Privileged Planet for a publication and found it interesting “in the way that many books about unlikely facts are.” However, he said, “I found the notion that we were put on Earth specifically to discover bizarre and unscientific.”
Continuing, he said, “My fundamental concern with Gonzalez’s analysis of things that he sees as planned and I see as coincidence is whether he can take a truly scientific view. There were no counterexamples as I recall.”
Ball State then affirms its opposition to ID and the fact that it’s inappropriate for science courses. But if course, it was considered appropriate for a science course by Hedin and his chairman. The statement below suggests that Ball State will take Hedin’s course out of the science curriculum:
A Ball State spokeswoman said said the university hired Gonzalez – who previously taught at Grove City College in Pennsylvania – by normal hiring standards, and that Ball State agreed with numerous academic societies that intelligent design is “not appropriate” for science courses. “Although it might find its place in appropriate classes and contexts including – but not limited to – religion and philosophy courses,” Joan Todd added.
As always, my view has been that a). Hedin should not be fired, b). Gonzalez’s hire was strange (how many physicists are looking for jobs?, but Ball State had a right to hire him based on his record, c). Gonzalez has no right to teach ID in the classroom, and Ball State would do well to keep an eye on him, and d). research on Intelligent Design is not scientific scholarship, since it’s a discredited and religiously-based form of science with no evidence to support it. Therefore a university is within its rights to deny someone tenure if they try to use ID work as evidence for “scholarship.”:
While supporters of intelligent design like to describe it as a credible theory, most scientists disagree. “Intelligent design has been discredited by science,” said Jerry Coyne, a professor of evolution and ecology at the University of Chicago who writes about evolution and creationism in education on his blog, Why Evolution is True. “But if [Gonzalez] wants to talk about it in his writing and speeches, he has a right to do that. But he can’t pass that stuff off in a university classroom. He doesn’t have the right to get tenure working in discredited science.”. . .
. . . [Hector] Avalos agreed. “I would not deny him a job just because of his [intelligent design] views, especially if he is doing good work outside of his [intelligent design] interests,” he said. “I believe other scientists and scholars at Ball State should render a final opinion of his work or his ability to do science at his university.” He encouraged scientists at Ball State to voice their opinions about intelligent design as a viable scientific theory.
Hector Avalos is an interesting chap: a former child evangelist and Pentecostal preacher who is now a Professor of Religious studies at Iowa State University and a big opponent of creationism. As Wikipedia notes in his bio:
Avalos is an internationally recognized opponent of neo-creationism and the intelligent design movement, and is frequently linked to Guillermo Gonzalez, an astrophysicist and proponent of intelligent design who was denied tenure at Iowa State University in 2007. Avalos co-authored a statement against intelligent design in 2005, which was eventually signed by over 130 faculty members at Iowa State University. That faculty statement became a model for other statements at the University of Northern Iowa and at the University of Iowa. Gonzalez and Avalos are both featured in the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008).
*****
The reporter for the Des Moines [Iowa] Register is named, curiously, Tom Coyne, though he’s no relation (he interviewed me yesterday). Gonzalez is of local interest because he became notorious for being denied tenure in Iowa; Coyne’s piece is called, “Intelligent design debate over former ISU professor resurfaces.“
The only bit the differs from the other news is this:
Robert Kreiser, senior program officer for the American Association of University Professors, said he found it surprising that a university would have two cases that appear similar in such a short span, although he said he doesn’t know what discussions went on in each instance.
The Gonzalez hiring appears to pit professional competence against academic freedom, Kreiser said.
“He has the freedom to carry out the research that he judges to be appropriate, but his colleagues have the freedom as well, and indeed the responsibility, to assess his research in terms of norms of the profession,” Kreiser said.
That’s a shot across the bow! At any rate, I too, am a bit suspicious that somebody sympathetic to intelligent design haunts the halls of Ball State University. But of course I have no hard evidence for that beyond the presence of both Hedin and now Gonzalez at BSU.
This next bit of the Register was something I asked Tom Coyne to emphasize in his piece, since I’m often—and wrongly—accused of trying to cost Hedin and Gonzalez their jobs. I hope the Discovery Institute sees this, because they can’t really lie about the issue if statements like this are in a newspaper. On the other hand, maybe they can, since lying is their habitual behavior.
Jerry Coyne, an ecology and evolution professor at the University of Chicago who said he first complained to Ball State about Hedin’s class, said during an interview Tuesday that he doesn’t think either Hedin or Gonzalez should lose their jobs.
“I just think they need to keep religion out of science class. That’s my only mission,” he said.
There’s a report at Fox News, too, but it’s word-for-word identical to Tom Coyne’s piece. Pity he didn’t get credit at Fox for having written the story. Coyne’s story also appears on ABC News, where it will get more exposure.
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That’s Baihu adding his contribution to the subject. Or maybe he’s just taking the opportunity to complain to the world that he has not yet been served breakfast….
b&
Tell him to catch his own breakfast. 🙂
I would, but I gotta work this morning…by the time I could take a break to take him for a walk, not only would he be gnawing on my leg but the temperature’d be in triple digits….
b&
How one can be skilled in astronomy and still think that the universe was created for us is beyond my cognitive abilities.
If Intelligent Design is to be taught in philosophy classes then my faith in philosophy is on thin ice.
Isn’t philosophy supposed to be about looking for intellectual approaches to difficult questions about the real world?
Or is it fast becoming a load of so called “sophisticated” mumbo-jumbo?
“How one can be skilled in astronomy and still think that the universe was created for us is beyond my cognitive abilities.”
Yeah, mine too. I once did a back of the envelope calculation of the % of the solar system which is habitable. The answer obviously depends on how you define “solar system” and “habitable,” but the anser I got was something like 1E-28%. How could anyone think that a system is designed for us when life can only survive in 0.0000000000000000000000000001% of it is beyond me.
Oh, it’s far worse than that.
To any appreciable rounding figure, the Universe is simply empty space. There’s nothing there.
Of the stuff that’s there, the overwhelming majority of it isn’t even anything that a human could even theoretically personally experience: dark matter and dark energy.
Of the small fraction of the material universe that is baryonic matter, basically 100% of it is in stellar-scale objects — stars, star remnants, black holes, and interstellar molecular clouds. And most of it’s just stars.
Of the negligible fraction of baryonic matter that’s left over, almost 100% of it is in supermassive, Jupiter-style planets.
Of the remaining fraction of an afterthought of a remainder, everything is tied up in the mass of rocky planets
Of the insignificant fraction of rocky planets in their star’s habitable zone, an insignificant number will have a composition and chemistry and orbital properties and the rest conducive to the evolution of multicellular life — and, even then, said life is a negligible portion of the planet’s mass and restricted on pain of horrid death to an infinitesimally-paper-thin shell of the outer surface of the planet.
Of the basically zero planets with multicellular life, only those which’ve been around for at least a few billion years or so will have had enough time for said life to evolve intelligence and technology.
Of that practically-nonexistent number, only a single one will ever have a human walk on its face.
And, even on this planet, if you were to pick a random spot on the surface and drop a random naked human on it, said human would be practically guaranteed excruciating death in a matter of days if not much, much less.
And we’re supposed to believe that all this has somehow been personally and intelligently and lovingly crafted just for us because we’re the most important thing there is in the Universe?
Pull the other one….
Cheers,
b&
But I’m here, so goddidit? LOL
Pass the bacon.
Actually, instead of bacon this morning, I thought I’d do the Irish oats with pork sausage thing from that other discussion…that okay with you? Or do you still want a side of bacon to go with it?
b&
I prefer bacon over sausage but if you are hosting, it’s your choice. I am close to lunch time here. Salad with tuna.
For the whole bacon and sausage thing, check out:
http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2485
http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2486
No reason to limit things by creating a false dichotomy. It doesn’t have to be a zero sum game.
You can have sausage AND bacon! (if you want)
Yes, that’s the other angle: instead of arguing “so much space for us, we must be the point” a theist can argue “such low probabliity we would have any space at all, we must be the point.”
Some folks will hypocritically argue both sides, depending on the situation. Let’s ignore them for the moment. A reasnoable counter-argument to either of those is to point to other organisms that have a larger or smaller range, respectively.
If the first argument (look at all our room!) is evidence of design for humans, then it must be better evidence of design for an organism that has a wider range, because they have more space. An example would be some bacteria that can live in a wider environmental range.
If the second argument (so improbable!) is evidence of design for humans, then it must be better evidence of design for an organism that requires more stringent conditions. An example might be some human parasite or virus – they need a universe that has all the same stringent physical conditions we need, plus they need us.
Whether you go lots of space or highly improbable, neither argument can really provide a credible argument for human-focused design, because we are too middle-of-the-road in terms of organisms.
I believe Neil DeGrasse Tyson also made that observation. Consider this:
Oceans – roughly 2/3’s – you’re dead in seconds not minutes, and you definitely ain’t making it to the 2 minute mark.
Antarctica – 5th largest continent; again dead in minutes regardless of season.
Arid landscapes – might make a day if you can find a rock to crawl under, otherwise, doom awaits you.
Extreme north – While Inuit and others survive, but only because of the migration occurred before it turned into such a brutal landscape. Moreover, it is a society thing, you ain’t making it alone without significant technology. A day in the summer is possible, a minute in the winter is generous.
Montane environments – see above two. Extreme cold and extreme heat are features of the mountains as well as limited food resources. Probably survive a day or two in summer, maybe even a week. But you got to eat and marmots are smarter than most hikers.
Wetlands – how long you last depends on how well you can get water to drink.
By the time you get to littoral shelves and riparian environments where survival is relatively easy, you’ve eliminated 99% of the land mass. So if the earth was “designed” for us, the designer is incompetent. Then again given that our backs are incredibly balky, our sinuses are a plumber’s nightmare, and other features of our body feature design flaws worthy of a Microsoft beta. Perhaps the designer is not a single entity but a committee, complete with marketing and sales force input.
Almost total agreement.
I would only note that, if you make it alive and unharmed to the surface of the ocean and if you’ve head introductory swimming lessons and if you can keep your wits about you, for the most part you’ll be just fine until you die of dehydration (which will take a while). And most people can do the dead man’s float indefinitely — assuming they know that that’s what they should be doing while awaiting rescue. (Temperature permitting, of course, but most of the ocean surface is usually at a reasonable temperature.)
Cheers,
b&
Two words: wave height. As a participant in USAF survival training, I only went through the pool drop training. (10 meter drop in flight suit and life vest) I am told that the ocean training is far more interesting, that waves often exceed 3 – 5 meters in height. Your dead man float is all too true in those conditions – namely you will be dead. Humans are not very buoyant, and will sink far enough in those conditions. Moreover, exposure and shock will set in quite rapidly in any water below 70+ degrees, which is any ocean above 25 degrees latitude.
I stand by my guess, that without a life vest, pick an ocean, any ocean, any latitude, and you are dead by 1:59 in 99% of the cases.
You forgot to say ..westerner in taliban controlled area ..less than a minute.
If anyone is interested, there has been an equation put together by Sara Seager to be used in parallel to the Drake Equation in assessing any life in the universe.
http://io9.com/what-a-brand-new-equation-reveals-about-our-odds-of-fin-531575395
That should be assessing likelihood of finding any life I was being all shorthanded.
“Interested!” [/throws hand in air]
Seager is good. I would quibble about the details (of course), but the result is exciting. Maybe TESS + JWST can fish those worlds out for us!
Oh, and thank you!
You’re welcome 🙂
How could anyone think that a system is designed for us when life can only survive in 0.0000000000000000000000000001% of it is beyond me.
Isn’t that precisely the point of The Privileged Planet?The ‘against all odds’ idea that our blue marble here in a little old corner of the universe is actually able to support life/advanced civilization?
That’s a lot of space and time for one species that can’t survive a fraction of a second in most parts of it.
I’d say that qualifies as Unintelligent Design and whoever designed it must be bonkers.
I don’t think you can get away with teaching ID in public education, period. You can teach about ID, but you can’t teach ID.
Similarly, you can teach about Christianity, but you can’t teach Christianity.
As such, ID is really only suited for topics such as the history of science or current affairs or political science or anthropology or abnormal psychology or the like.
Cheers,
b&
Agreed.
Considering the American political landscape atm, it belongs in political science as an example of how religious ideas can get mixed up with politics and politicians.
What I don’t understand is, are there no other qualified astronomers/astrobiologists to fill the position? How is he the best candidate?
There is still some hope for fair journalism.
I thought anyone who was denied tenure could consider their academic career to be over.
Gonzales is either very lucky to get a second chance, is incredibly gifted and we haven’t seen it, there aren’t many physics PhDs looking for jobs or someone at BSU screwed up.
I usually vote for the screw up rather than conspiracy.
Maybe cheaper than someone else too and BSU didn’t count on his hire coming to light?
Not getting tenure is not a career ender, but it almost always moves you down the food chain. That is, unless it was a very close call. Unless I’m mistaken, from the 50’s to the ’80s, Harvard didn’t tenure anyone in chemistry at all – always hiring senior faculty from elsewhere. It was so routine that there was basically no stigma attached to it at all. They denied tenure to an inorganic chemist, Geoff Wilkinson, who later (1973) won the first Nobel prize in the inorganic chemistry since Alfred Werner won it in 1913 (Wilkinson’s work at Harvard is specified by the Nobel committee as the justification for the award) – though Fritz Haber’s ammonia synthesis is arguably in the same field too.
Back to Gonzalez’s tenure decision – JAC actually understates the stupidity of Gonzalez playing the martyr card. Any other assistant professor in a top 50 school in physics, chemistry, biochemistry, or biology with Gonzalez’s publication record and lack of any federal or other extramural funding would be so overwhelmingly rejected for tenure that he would never dare to claim his tenure decision was “political”. He really has a lot of gall – Iowa State probably coughed up a a few hundred thousand bucks in start up funding that Gonzalez just wasted.
In some sense this is true: he chose to spend his time writing a trade book rather than performing research and getting grants. Had he been able to do both (feed his ID hobby while raking in large mainstream research grants), I imagine his tenure decision might have turned out differently.
I have no idea whether BSU fashions itself more of a teaching university or a research one, but if its the latter, I can see trouble ahead.
Pity the poor students: Who wants to be taught serious science by someone who is clearly not at the cutting edge of the discipline and entertains all sorts of nonsensical ideas. Shame on BSU.
It’s like being taught to sing by a tone-deaf singer
I know the sentiment you’re going for, but it’s not a very good example of it.
The best music teachers usually aren’t all that noteworthy as performers, and the best performers generally aren’t great teachers.
To be a great music teacher, you have to be able to analyze what your students are doing and communicate to them how to do what you want them to do. Sometimes it’s quick and easy to communicate by example, but there are lots of other means. And, even then, the example needn’t be a very good example; it can be an over-emphasized caricature, even.
And, on the flip side of the coin…there’re plenty of great performers who’re dumber than a sack full of hammered mice. They know how to do that one thing well, but they haven’t a clue how they do what they do.
One might hope that it’d be like having a lawyer argue for a client whom she’s personally convinced did whatever the accusation says…but we have a robust legal system that depends on lawyers vigorously representing their clients’s interests, and she can reasonably trust the court to sort it all out so long as she doesn’t do anything unethical or illegal herself.
Instead…this is like having a Flat Earther teach geography. Sure, anybody can memorize a bunch of facts you’re supposed to rattle off for the students to repeat, but if you’re convinced that there’s an edge to the world there’s just no way to explain, for example, great circle navigation routes.
Or it’s like somebody who rejects irrational numbers teaching Calculus, or a young-Earth Creationist teaching geology, or an alchemist teaching quantum mechanics, or any other variation on the blithering fucking idiot teaching rocket surgery theme.
Cheers,
b&
Gonzalez needs a PR agent. In addition to proclaiming, ad nauseam, that he was fired for his ID beliefs (despite evidence to the contrary), he actually characterizes Jerry as “an activist blogger”. Not only do these proclamations call attention to the fact that he was let go from Iowa (affecting his career further) but it also shows him to be whiny and incapable of accepting responsibility for his own actions. He is lucky to have this chance at BSU so he should just stop talking!
I hope the wider dispersal of this article is seen by a larger audience, especially people unfamiliar with the Discovery Institute and their political agenda. I suspect the wider population doesn’t understand their motivation (Wedge Document) and this may wake people up!
Prof Avalos was one of my absolute favorites at ISU. His classes were AMAZING. I took Religions of the World or something like that with him and it was hands down my favorite course.
Indeed.
His book, “The End of Biblical Studies”, is superb.
“For some reason our Earthly location is extraordinarily well suited to allow us to peer into the heavens and discover its secrets”
So, he says this, and people still take him seriously? Seriously?
Sheesh, talk about shallow, this guy isn’t even in the kiddie pool. I honestly do not understand how people are capable of displaying this kind thinking and are still able to tie their shoes. Isn’t that kinda like saying “hey from the top of this tree, it is amazing that I can see my neighbors roof!”…?
Isn’t that kinda like saying “hey from the top of this tree, it is amazing that I can see my neighbors roof!”…?
… therefore my neighbor’s roof was built for the purpose of my viewing it.
Since I find the Rare Earth idea with its open-ended bayesian model dubious at best, it will be no surprise that I loathe the Privileged Planet with its mistaking a posteriori bias for apriori likelihood in the usual religious way.
Currently the websphere makes a lot of noise about the first 3D models of cloudy atmospheres, that effectively doubles the habitable zones of M stars. Seems the paper settles for 60 billion habitables, but using the earlier estimate Milky Way may have 200 billions.
And systems like ours or Gliese 667C that has 3 terrestrials in the habitable zone will be many, some packed systems could even have 4-5 habitables. Which means Milky Way will have some moderately spaced binaries, each with at least 3 habitables on, perhaps all inhabited. What a privilege eventual organisms in those systems will have, “extraordinarily well suited to allow [them] to peer into the heavens and discover its secrets” _and_ to travel between neighboring planets and do some leg work (as opposed to Gonzalez).
“Privileged Planet”, my ass. Earth is a runt as habitables goes, barely able to have plate tectonics, a late 3d generation system with a large Sun that will die prematurely, and orbiting far away from the more crowded places we could be. There are orbiting planets in clusters, why aren’t we privileged enough to be in such a dynamic neighborhood?
The idea that people like Hedin and Gonzalez who believe in ID but agree not to teach it can nonetheless be excellent scientists and teachers has got to be generally wrong. People who excel in science despite harboring crazy ideas like ID are rare, aren’t they? And not just because their brains are not firing on all cylinders but because a full appreciation of natural processes, like evolution, is important (critical even) to the process of advancing scientific understanding.
I so agree!
Umm, Isaac Newton?
I don’t think scientific excellence and teaching ability are necessarily linked. The two talents are quite different.
By way of example, the best physics/maths teacher I ever had – and he was brilliant, he made the subject come alive – was very easy to stump by asking a question outside the syllabus. He might not have made a very good physicist. But that really didn’t matter in the least when it came to our learning physics.
Umm, yes, there are exceptions to rules (generalizations).
There are dozens of us… DOZENS!
…and the Huffpo http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/10/ball-state-guillermo-gonzalez_n_3573972.html?utm_hp_ref=college