Cornell lecturer in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Allen MacNeill has announced another summer course, this one entitled Evolution and Religion: Is Religion Adaptive? It looks to be fairly interesting, and of course has PZ all atither. Because the idea has been explored a little bit here in the thread Hard-Wired for God: Take 2, let me list below the 6 requirements for qualification as an evolutionary adaptation that MacNeill offers:

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It is ironic that some of the professors at SMU complain about propaganda when they themselves seem willing to engage in such things. Consider the following claim:

Other biologists compared the conference to a presentation by Holocaust deniers. Would the university allow that to happen?

Thus, in order to rationalize their demand for censorship, the professors slime the ID people by likening them to neo-nazi's and the Iranian theocracy. Look, the problem with Holocaust denial is not that it is a dismissal of an established piece of history. The problem is that such denial is almost always an expression of hate and bigotry that is intended to hurt other human beings. The ID people may be misguided and/or political, but they are not hateful bigots trying to hurt others.

In the end, the SMU professors simply give us more evidence of the knee-jerk, closed-minded reactions to anything associated with ID. When these professors are presented with "ID", their minds hear "Holocaust denial." And all they need is "evidence." Yeah, right.

I've been busy lately, so I spent some time this morning catching up on some blog reading. Over at Uncommon Descent, Dembski catches Miller in an act of blatant misrepresentation. It is this type of misrepresentation which makes me truly wonder if Miller even understands Dembski's arguments.

For example, imagine Miller was given the following test question:

In three hundred words or less, describe Dr. Dembski's arguments for Intelligent Design.

Note, the question would not ask Miller to agree with the arguments, nor would it ask him to critique the arguments. It would simply ask him to describe them, testing his reading comprehension skills and ability to communicate another person's ideas.

Would Miller pass such a test? If not, wouldn't it be fascinating to realize that one of the leading critics of ID doesn't even understand the arguments of one of the leading proponents of ID? If so, just how deep does that problem go?

As you can see from this news report, the fear of ID is causing some professors to embrace censorship:

Science professors upset about a presentation on "Intelligent Design" fired blistering letters to the administration, asking that the event be shut down.

The anthropology department:
"These are conferences of and for believers and their sympathetic recruits," said the letter sent to administrators by the department. "They have no place on an academic campus with their polemics hidden behind a deceptive mask."

Many SMU science professors say they are worried that merely allowing "Darwin vs. Design" on campus could give the public impression that Intelligent Design has support from scientists at the school.

While some who are leading the protest acknowledge the need for free speech and academic freedom, they say this event doesn't qualify.

"This is propaganda," said Dr. John Ubelaker, former chairman of the chemistry department. "Using the campus for propaganda does not fit into anybody's scheme of intellectual discussion."

Other biologists compared the conference to a presentation by Holocaust deniers. Would the university allow that to happen?

Unfurling a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" at an Olympic torch procession may seem like a teenage prank, but to school administrators, it is nothing less than an affront to the school's "educational mission." From the Cincinnati Enquirer:

It was off school property, though during school time, and principal Deborah Morse ordered [student Joseph Frederick] to take it down. He refused, she tore it down and suspended him, so he sued. Morse objected to the sign's apparent advocacy for marijuana. Frederick said it was simply taken from a snowboard slogan to be "meaningless and funny" for the TV cameras - a typical teen prank.

This seems to be much ado about very little, but it has reached the Supreme Court as a test of previous court rulings over the rights of school administrators to limit student speech when it conflicts with the school's "educational mission." …

Whether you think a student ought to or should be allowed to advocate drugs, even in apparent jest and even away from school, is one thing. But the government here is arguing something far more sweeping - that administrators have the right to ban virtually any speech that conflicts with the "educational mission," and that they have the right to define that mission as they wish.

This is a case with far-ranging implications. After all, if teaching evolution is part of a school's "educational mission", surely it also has the right to muzzle students whose beliefs conflict with that mission - like creationist students giving presentations or handing out materials on creationism.

As I was blithely ambling down the primrose path, oblivious to all the really important issues of the day — such as the refugees of Darfur — and escaping into the happy realm of ID, where one's opinion needn't have any impact on one's existential commitment to anything, I made the mistake of visiting Uncommondescent (UD). There for all the world to see was post after post, challenging the scientific community's opinion that human civilization is increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which in turn is increasing global warming.
Now it had never dawned on me that an advocate of ID needed to challenge the scientific community's opinion of global warming. It seemed perfectly logically compatible to believe in ID and in global warming, which up until now I have done. So at first I was slightly baffled as to why they were making such a fuss about it at UD. But then I started to see the dots that they were connecting (and the dots they conveniently didn't mention, but which are probably the real connection). For those of you who haven't noticed what's going on, here's the scoop in a nutshell:
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This thread is to serve as a place to continue the very interesting discussions that have gone on for more than 300 comments in the Evidence, ID and God thread. Because Mesk suggested a new thread, and because it takes forever for me to refresh that too-long page.

To begin, I am re-posting Mesk's last post to me, so that it will be here for me to respond to. Enjoy! §;o)

I have mentioned in passing a background in physics, an interest in the many competing wannabe replacements for the good ol' Standard Model (and contestants for what qualifies as a 'Theory of Everything'), and a particular interest from investigations of the phenomenon of consciousness in an 8-dimensional model of reality both psychic and physical. As opposed to an 11, 22 or infinite dimensional reality per other theoretical models, that is.

ScienceDaily reports today that Mathematicians Map One Of The Most Complicated Structures, which is the symmetry Lie group E₈. The project took an international team of 18 mathematicians 4 years working on separate portions of the calculation, and 77 hours of supercomputer time to put them all together. They had to 'map' the symmetries of a 57-dimensional object (in 248-dimensional E₈) as representations in a matrix with 205,263,363,600 entries for 240 vectors in an 8-dimensional space. A rather impressive accomplishment.

I'd reproduce the computer generation of the Gosset polytope 4₂₁ drawn by Peter McMullen in the 1960s because it's so pretty, but it's right there on the ScienceDaily page, so do check it out for yourself!

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new article up on Molecular Genetics.