Friday, August 19, 2005

The Office of Special counsel on the Sternberg case

The Office of Special Counsel has decided that Sternberg's complaints were justified. See http://www.rsternberg.net/OSC_ltr.htm

And this is a discussion of Michael Ruse's differences with some of his fellow Darwinists.

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2005/08/06/ruse/index_np.html

Apparently he is considered a traitor by some on his own side.

http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/michael_ruse_is_a_very_confused_fellow/

My point is this: regardless of what "side" you are on, you can and should be critical of misguided tactics on the part of your own side. Even if you think that ID is insane, you don't have to go on a crusade against it.

That said, it does not follow from the fact that some people are overzealous in their attacks on ID, that ID is good science.

I feel the same way about heresy-hunting Christians and their crusade against open theism, for example.

4 comments:

Jason Pratt said...

For kicks, I perusing through the commentary I once wrote, back in 1996, for Dawkins' TBW (gosh, that was 9 years ago... do I feel old yet...? {s}); and ran across this promotional blurb from a Professor Michael Ruse (probably from TBW's original publication in 1986).

"It succeeds quite brilliantly. Most particularly, again and again, it brings home the nature and force of the central evolutionary mechanism of natural selection in a way that I have never seen or felt previously. The closest analogy I can think of is Galileo's Dialogues which made reasonable the Copernican Revolution, and I hope I will not be thought to be pushing things to an embarrassing point if I say that Dawkins' book can be compared to Galileo's, not only in type but in standard."

Same Michael Ruse?

Jason Pratt said...

Ack. "_was_ perusing..." (drat, I hit the publish, not the preview button... {self-critical g})

Victor Reppert said...

Yes. That's the Ruse.

Steven Carr said...

http://www.math.jmu.edu/~rosenhjd/DDDIII.pdf contains a report of J.P. Moreland claiming that Ruse admitted in public to having perjured himself at the 1981 Arkansas Creationism trial.

Ruse responded 'The sad thing is that I am the one dyed-in-the-wool
Darwinian who tries to relate in a serious and non-hostile fashion with the ID people, and they return the favor with sneers and stories.'