A few days ago I got a “pingback” from a site on the “Skeptic Society Magazine,” showing that someone had linked to my post that criticized ID advocate Michael Egnor’s video defense of libertarian free will. I went to the Skeptic Magazine site, and, as you’ll see, became puzzled. First of all, I’d never heard of the Skeptic Society. Here’s a bit from the Society about its mission and the magazine
Skeptic Society is an independent, secular online magazine dedicated to original ideas, free thought, and freedom of speech. We regularly publish articles on a variety of subjects, including politics, religion, book reviews, science, and technology. We welcome any material that is truly thought-provoking.
We are not affiliated with Skeptic Magazine or The Skeptics Society. This blog started as half joke and half serious notion about promoting scientific articles that are worth reading.
We don’t have membership, and we don’t discriminate no matter what political orientation you may have. If you have a valid point that is rational, we would love to hear about it.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to publish here.
And then I read the pinbacked article in that magazine, which you can also read by clicking below. As you can see, the piece says that it’s “written by Jenni Sidey”. (I’ve archived the article here).
This article is apparently the first in a four-part defense of Egnor’s talk and a critique of my piece I posted on my website. What struck me immediately, beyond its misleading arguments, was that it was written in the first person, as if it was produced by Egnor himself. I goes on and on using the first-person “I” in the response. Here are a couple of excerpts showing that:
University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne has now posted, at his blog, Why Evolution Is True, a reply to a talk I gave in March at the 2026 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. In the talk, presented by Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, I discussed the reality of free will, and criticized the coterie of scientists, specifically neuroscientist Sam Harris, primatologist Robert Sapolsky, and Coyne himself, who deny it.
. . .I offer four strong arguments to support that view:
- Everyone believes in free will. Even free will deniers do.
- Denial of free will is self-refuting.
- Determinism, which is the ideological basis for contemporary free will denial, has been disproven by modern physics.
- Neuroscience supports the inference that free will is real.
Those are Egnor’s arguments, not “Jenni Sidey’s”. At any rate, the first part of “Sidey’s” four-part critique maintains that I don’t “walk my talk” when it comes to free will. “Sidey’s” accusation is that although I have argued that you can still have morality without libertarian you-could-have-done-otherwise free will, that view makes me a hypocrite, for nobody can be held “morally responsible” unless you have free will. From “Sidey’s” piece (indented):
First, morality presupposes free will. No person can be held morally accountable for an act he did not choose. It is self-evident that every sentient human being invokes morality. Even serial killers get offended if you steal from them. Everyone invokes moral law in everyday life. Everyone has a moral sense, of varying degrees, so everyone at some real level believes in free will. What we believe is not merely what we say. What we believe is how we live our lives. Every free will denier, Jerry Coyne included, invokes moral law day in and day out. Morality presupposes freedom to choose right and wrong.
Apparently “Jenni Sidey” (you’ll see the reason for the quotes shortly) hasn’t read my own work on free will. I have never said that people are or should be deemed “morally responsible” for their good and bad acts. That would assume the ability to freely choose to be moral or immoral, but I am a determinist who rejects that kind of “choice.” What I have said, and which anybody who reads what I’ve written will know, is that you should be held responsible for what you do, but not morally responsible. That is, you are responsible if you are the person who performed the act. That, to anyone with two neurons to rub together, is absolutely compatible with determinism.
You can also have a morality without determinism, for morality is just the social code that deems actions good (a consequentialist would say “having overall good consequences for society”) or bad. In my view, you are “immoral” if you kill someone without a good reason like self-defense. That means you’re doing something that society deems not only bad but worthy of punishment, but you don’t have to have made a libertarian decision to kill or not to kill. And society enforces its “morality” through punishment and reward, both of which can change people’s behavior, whether they be the person at issue issue or onlookers.
Changed behavior is also perfectly compatible with determinism: if you’re rewarded for good behavior or punished for bad—or see someone else undergo these consequences—you will be more likely to do good things and less likely to do bad things. I’m sure that “Jenni Sidey” would agree that rewarding dogs for good behavior or punishing them for bad behavior will, in the future, change their behavior; and yet I don’t think that “Sidey”, being religious (see below), would say that dogs have free will.
I explain this again because “Sidey” attacks me for going after people who do bad things and praising people for doing good things, even though I deny free will. That, “Sidey” thinks, is me not “walking the talk.” “Jenni” gives an example:
In Coyne’s case, there is an element of self-contradiction. Some years ago, he authored a blog post lamenting the moral impropriety of a guy who dented his car in a parking lot and drove off. If Coyne is right that there is no free will and we are meat machines, then all that happened is that a meat machine in a car machine collided with a parked car machine owned by a subsequently unhappy meat machine. If free will isn’t real, the guy who hit Coyne’s car and drove off is no more morally culpable than the car he was driving. Coyne, in his justified moral indignation at the other driver’s moral lapse, affirms his own belief in free will, at least free will in parking lots.
But my chastising someone for hitting my car does not mean I’ve sneakily “affirmed free will ,” nor did I say it at the time. If you read my post, I say nothing about free will or morality. Instead, I talk about selfish and altruistic behaviors, though I could have used “immoral” in the way I construe above. It makes no difference, for what I call “selfish”, “altruistic” or “immoral” has nothing to do with libertarian free will. “Sidey” continues:
Second, in some sense Coyne is right that I am making an argumentum ad populum. But it is actually better understood as an argumentum ad omnes — I’m arguing that everyone believes in free will, including Coyne. I’m saying that Coyne doesn’t walk his talk. On the one hand, he writes sophistry denying free will and on the other hand, he rails at the moral reprobate who dented his fender. In general, his blog is full of moral proclamations — Coyne is a moralizing scold on everything you can imagine. Of course, the fact that Coyne doesn’t really believe his own arguments against free will doesn’t prove that the arguments are wrong. But, as Carl Sagan noted, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Coyne’s claim that every human being, including Coyne himself, is always wrong about the experience of free will is a very extraordinary claim, for which Coyne offers no ordinary, let alone extraordinary, evidence. My suggestion to Coyne is: if you want to be taken seriously in your denial of free will, stop invoking morality. Walk your talk.
Note the “I” in the first sentence, which seems to come not from a “Jenni Sidey” but from Egnor himself. Once again, if I, Jerry, criticize or praise someone, that doesn’t mean I believe in libertarian free will. I may not have been able to do something other than criticize or praise, but merely deeming something good or bad is not a “choice” I made freely. I had no such choice. I am constituted so as to defend actions I think are salubrious and damn those that I deem harmful. I do not understand why “Sidey” doesn’t get this—it’s not rocket science.
Anyway, you have probably concluded that “Jenni Sidey” is none other than Michael Egnor himself, perhaps writing under a pseudonym. And you’d be partly right: all the words in that article do indeed come from Egnor, as I found out when I got a second pingback from the Discovery Institute site Mind Matters—this time to a piece identical to “Sidey’s” at the Skeptic Society Magazine site, but written by Egnor himself (click screenshot to read:
So yes, Egnor did write the talk at the Skeptic Society Magazine site. But who, then, is Jenni Sidey? Is she a pseudonym for Egnor himself, writing at Skeptic Society Magazine, or was the article stolen by Skeptic Magazine and given another title?
It turns out it’s the second possibility. First, there is no record on the Internet of a Jenni Sidey, though there is a Canadian astronaut named Jenni Sidey-Gibbons, but this is clearly not the person who wrote the Skeptic Magazine article—and several other articles in the magazine on unrelated topics, so it’s clear that the author is not a real person, much less the Canadian astronaut. But is it a pseudonym for Egnor?
I don’t think so. What seems to be the case is that Skeptic Society Magazine is simply plagiarizing articles from other places and changing the author to a nonexistent “Jenni Sidey.” That is outright plagiarism: attributing Egnor’s words to someone else (“written by Jenni Sidey”). That’s why I archived the article as well as the one below, because it’s proof that Skeptic Society Magazine is engaged in wholesale plagiarism.
You can see the plagiarism simply by Googling sentences from Jenni Sidey’s articles and seeing where they came from. Here’s another article that was plagiarized; it came from the site Artnews.com and you can read it by clicking on the link below:
Here are the first two paragraphs of Vollaard’s article:
Weaving may be the world’s oldest way of reproducing information—and computing is poised to become its final one. Across millennia, surprising similarities persist: both media operate on binary logic (over/under, on/off), are intrinsically based on counting, and are characterized by patterns that emerge structurally, not on the surface. In fact, the first automated machine, the Jacquard machine, was a loom, and weaving was a favorite metaphor employed by Ada Lovelace while she was working with early computers and algorithms. Even language betrays this lineage: etymologically, before “text” became “textual,” it was “textile.”
Diné weaver Marilou Schultz has been probing the harmonies and dissonances between these technologies since the 1960s. Her first retrospective opens this week at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in upstate New York, where curator Candice Hopkins has brought together some 55 works, threading them together with contextual archival materials. The show highlights Schultz’s range as a weaver, from her command of traditional styles to her penchant for formal experimentation, and hones in on one subject that has preoccupied her practice over the last thirty years: computer chips.
And it’s easy to find that Lua Vollaard is a real person. But Jenni Sidey, on the Skeptic Society Magazine site, has plagiarized Vollaard’s piece, too. Click below to see the plagiarism, which I’ve archived here. Note that “Sidey” has changed the title of the article, but the content is the same:
“Sidey’s” first two paragarphs are identical to those of Vollaard’s piece. This is big-time plagiarism, attributing Vollaard’s words to someone else.
Weaving may be the world’s oldest way of reproducing information—and computing is poised to become its final one. Across millennia, surprising similarities persist: both media operate on binary logic (over/under, on/off), are intrinsically based on counting, and are characterized by patterns that emerge structurally, not on the surface. In fact, the first automated machine, the Jacquard machine, was a loom, and weaving was a favorite metaphor employed by Ada Lovelace while she was working with early computers and algorithms. Even language betrays this lineage: etymologically, before “text” became “textual,” it was “textile.”
Diné weaver Marilou Schultz has been probing the harmonies and dissonances between these technologies since the 1960s. Her first retrospective opens this week at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in upstate New York, where curator Candice Hopkins has brought together some 55 works, threading them together with contextual archival materials. The show highlights Schultz’s range as a weaver, from her command of traditional styles to her penchant for formal experimentation, and hones in on one subject that has preoccupied her practice over the last thirty years: computer chips.
Note again the authorship: “written by Jenni Sidey.”
What can we conclude? First, that Egnor is not writing at a different place using a pseudonym. Second, that “Jenni Sidey” is a pseudonym—for someone who re-publishes articles stolen from other places, and attributing them to an author at Skeptic Society Magazine. (I haven’t checked “Jenni’s” other articles, but you can bet that they are also stolen from elsewhere and given Jenni’s name as an author.)
The upshot: Skeptic Society Magazine is engaged in wholesale plagiarism. Nowhere does it say that it’s republishing articles from other sites and giving them a new author. Real authors, like Egnor and Vollaard, should go after the magazine for stealing their words. Readers might want to investigate the website and see if other authors’ words are being stolen.
And of course this form of plagiarism is IMMORAL, whether or not you believe in libertarian free will. The magazine should first admit what it did, and then vanish.
