Comments

  1. PaulC says

    About as much as I wonder why The Onion picked Lehigh for this article:

    Rogue Scientist Has Own Scientific Method
    http://www.theonion.com/content/node/49180

    “What my hopelessly pedantic colleagues fail to realize is that their scientific method is just that–their method,” said Hapner, whose self-published 2004 thesis argued that matter exists in four states: solid, liquid, gas, and powder.

  2. zadig says

    Lehigh University is becoming quite active in asserting their opposition to ID. Wonder why?

    Wait, wait, I know this one:

    It’s because they’re an institute of higher learning with a commitment to teach accurate information.

    Amy I right? What do I win?

  3. Stwriley says

    Couldn’t have anything to do with the inconvenient Black Box lodged in thier midst, could it?

  4. quork says

    Clearly they must be part of the Worldwide Atheist Conspiracy.

    Here’s a good bit from Jill E. Schneider:

    …
    Q: What is Michael Behe, an enthusiastic spokesperson for intelligent design, doing in a university biology department?
    .
    A: He was tenured in the Department of Chemistry for his scientific research on unusual conformations of DNA (published in top journals and funded by the National Institutes of Health). It was not until later that he shifted his focus. Dr. Behe and I both joined the Department of Biological Sciences in 1995 (I came from psychology while he came from chemistry). Around that time, I eagerly bought and read Dr. Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box , anticipating that I would find his challenge to evolutionary theory intellectually stimulating and provocative. I did not. He graciously autographed my copy of the book, and I invited him to give a seminar in our department in the hope that lively, high-level intellectual debate would ensue. It did not. ID bored us in the first five minutes, and here we are, ten years later. We hesitated to make a public response because it seemed impossible, literally impossible, that anyone would see ID as a serious alternative to the theory of evolution. As we predicted, the overwhelming majority of scientists dismissed ID as nonscientific. What we failed to predict is that the creationists and their ID compatriots would take their case to America’s children, local school boards and scientifically illiterate politicians.
    …

  6. paleotn says

    Wonder how much arm twisting it took to make him put a disclaimer on his own faculty bio page.

    http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/faculty/behe.html

    To paraphrase

    ….”My ideas on irreducible complexity and ID in general are my own. Those views are in no way, shape or fashion endorsed by Lehigh University as a whole, or by my colleagues in the biology department, all of whom have concluded I must have been dropped on my head as a child. In other words, I am the department crank / astrologer and thank the supreme designer, whoever he, she or it may be, every day for creating tenure, without which my hiney would have been whacked by the door knob a long time ago.”

  7. lt.kizhe says

    Also from Behe’s page:

    Despite much general progress by science in the past half century in understanding how complex biochemical systems work, little progress has been made in explaining how such systems arise in a Darwinian fashion.

    …except for the progresss that has been made, which Behe ignores or dismisses…

    I have proposed that a better explanation is that such systems were deliberately designed by an intelligent agent. (Behe 1996b, 2001)My current work involves: 1) educating various groups to overcome mistaken ideas of what exactly intelligent design entails,

    (ie, either: “much ado about nothing” or “Hallelujah, Amen!” depending on who you ask, and whether we’re talking to the press, or in church)

    so that they can make informed judgments on whether they think it is a plausible hypothesis; and 2) trying to establish a reasoned way to determine a rough dividing line between design and non-design in biochemical systems.

    (1996b refers to Darwin’s Black Box)

    And how much progress has been made in the past 10 years in discriminating reliably between designed and non-designed bits of biology? Or identifying the designer(s), or his/her/their/its methods, or when or why? (In short, all the questions routinely asked, and often also answered, by archaeologists when they dig up likely-designed artefacts from some ancient garbage dump).

    Is it even as high as 20% as much as the progress made on biochem in general in that “past half century”?