Aydin Örstan is a biologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pensylvania. From his blog, Snail's Tales, he runs Circus of the Spineless, a carnival featuring posts about invertebrates. For this edition of the Circus, I submitted my post, The problem with model invertebrates, which pointed to some problems with using fruit flies and nematodes as model organisms, citing data published in the scientific journal Current Biology.

Much to my disappointment, Örstan turned it down. Not because I was too late in submitting it (I submitted it almost two weeks ago), and not because of its actual content. No, Örstan's problem was with the source of my post. As he writes, at the end of the current Circus:

My policy on this blog is not to have any links in any of my posts to any creationist (including "intelligent" design) sites. Hence I turned down a submission from one such site. I offer no apologies.

Örstan did not spend any time justifying his label "creationist". In fact, as anyone reading my post would notice, it explicitly relies on the common ancestry of humans, insects, worms, and corals.

Now, I don't presume to tell Örstan which posts to feature. It's his blog, and he can use any crazy criteria he likes. But let's look closer at the mindset of this sample of the biological community: He thinks intelligent design is creationism, and he thinks material from ID supporters should be rejected as a matter of policy.

Is this one of the "peers" that will be performing the "peer review" of an eventual ID research paper?

Update November 1st: The manual trackback I left at Snail's Tales has been deleted.

Danny Pearlstein offers the following perspective:

Following Rawlings’ speech Friday, Cornell Board of Trustees Chair Peter C. Meinig ’62 told assembled reporters: “It is great for a president to present a topic of great interest.” But being scared of intelligent design is hardly a topic of great interest outside the educated liberal elite, for whom — I know from substantial personal experience — it’s always fun to mock the presumed backwardness and religiosity of others. At best, Rawlings contributed handily to a hullabaloo over nothing. At worst, his choice of topic signals a genuine lack of understanding of the major issues now at stake around the globe.

These days, it’s popular for scholars and scientists to sign off on decrees condemning ID. I thought I would join in on these efforts. Since my views have always been restricted to cyberspace, I thought I would give the critics in cyberspace a unique chance to publicly condemn ID. So let me offer the following petition statement:

Intelligent Design (ID) is nothing more than repackaged creationism (i.e., “Creationism in a Cheap Tuxedo”). Being that it is nothing more than a religiously-motivated movement to insert God into the classroom, the concept of ID is empirically vacuous and pure nonsense. It constitutes a ‘science killer’ since it is a purely negative approach that cannot come up with testable hypotheses about the natural world and merely seeks to mask our current ignorance with a statement of religious faith (i.e., “God did it”).

I invite critics to sign-off on this statement - you don’t have to use your real name. Once I get enough signatures, I will host this petition on my web page.

So, if you agree with the statement, and would like to be part of the petition, just say so below.

Both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association are using their copyrights to prevent the Kansas education materials from quoting from the writings of the two organizations. The reason? The Kansas materials "overemphasize uncertainties about the theory of evolution and fail to make it clear that supernatural phenomena have no place in science."

This got me thinking: Perhaps I should make it a requirement that whenever an ID critic quotes something I write, he or she would have to include the following:

"Krauze is the smartest guy in the whole wide world, and I bow to his superior intelligence. Also, he's quite the hunk."

What do you think? Should I do it?

Evolutionary theory says nothing about the existence or the non-existence of god. - Hunter R. Rawlings III, Interim President of Cornell University.

In other words, religion is compatible with modern evolutionary biology (and indeed all of modern science) if the religion is effectively indistinguishable from atheism. - William Provine, Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University.

Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist - William Provine, Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University.

If you consume a steady diet of rhetoric from anti-ID blogs and forums, you might be under the impression that Philip Johnson invented a bogeyman to rally the religious troops, arguing that acceptance of evolution leads to atheism. That sneaky lawyer. Everyone knows that Ken Miller goes to church! But y’see, in reality, Johnson did not make up this argument. He is simply passing on what some leading scientists and scholars have argued.

William Provine is the Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University. So what does this representative of the mainstream say? At a Darwin Day event, he laid out his views about the meaning of evolution:

“Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.”

Most ID critics, while posturing as if they are objective elsewhere, like to sweep such comments under the rug. Test it yourself. The experiment is simple. 1. Find an internet forum dominated by ID critics. 2. Post the Provine quote and simply ask for feedback. The result? Chances are very high that the quote will be either ignored, or will elicit a response that starts with a brief, mealy-mouthed dismissal followed by a significant effort to change the topic.

Our critics at TelicThoughts will have none of this. Here, at TelicThoughts, we will not censor their opinion. On the contrary, even those who argue that science leads to atheism have a right to speak their mind as it relates to this debate. So, below the fold, I will simply repost some comments from ID critic, DataDoc. DataDoc will elaborate on Provine’s insights and help readers to better understand how many people view evolution as evidence for atheism. So without further delay, I introduce to you…..DataDoc:
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The Journal of Clinical Investigation describes itself as “a top-tier journal publishing biologically significant findings with clinical relevance.” Ushma S. Neill, the Executive Editor of the journal, has given us a fresh editorial entitled, “Don’t be stupid about intelligent design.”

Let’s not be stupid, okay? Let’s learn from the experts.
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Y’see Hunter, if you send your scholars into the streets, don’t expect the street people to sit quietly with hands folded in their laps. Expect questions, cynicism and maybe even [gasp], critical thinking. Imagine this scenario unfolding for one of your scholars:

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After Mike drew attention to how glowingly Cornell University's president spoke of Andrew Dickson White's book on the warfare between science and religion, I've been re-reading some writings about the subject. White's book formed, together with a similar book by John William Draper, the foundation for the warfare model: A popular perception that science and religion has always been at war, with religion trying (and usually failing) to supress the march of science. But despite its popularity, the warfare model has been rejected by historians and science, and has been so for the last thirty years.

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From: The Boston Globe

If anything, Kirschner and Gerhart hope their book will have an impact at least as substantial on their colleagues in biology. For too long, they say, researchers in its different domains-from evolutionists in the field to cell biologists in the lab-have remained isolated. ''I wouldn't call it an antagonism as much as one not knowing anything about the other," Gerhart offers.

Kirschner likes to invoke the much-quoted declaration of famed 20th-century biologist Theodesius Dobzhansky that ''nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" (the title of a 1973 essay). ''In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has
proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself," Kirschner declares. ''Molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all."

I wonder what Michael Ruse would have to say to these guys. Questioning the historical playing-out of Dobzhansky's principle?