In article ,
John Harshman wrote:

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

Also you may be interested in a growing list of scientists that are
seriously questioning Darwinian Evolution.

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:I...ient=firefox-a

A better link for the Discovery Institute ad is:

http://www.discovery.org/articleFile...ientistsAd.pdf

It seems to be unreachable right now though. (DOS attack?)

This list is bogus. Many of the signers had no idea it would be used to
support creationism. It was a bait-and-switch that relied on the
ambiguity of "Darwinian evolution" to attract customers. But if you like
lists, try Project Steve:

http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/new..._9_16_2005.asp

Hmmm..., do you know for a fact that "many" of the signers didn't
know what they were getting into, and don't support the Discovery
Institute's agenda? I just assumed, in a country with an many
fundamentalist Christians as the US, that one would have no trouble
lining up a short list of scientists of one sort or another who
supported Creationism. Scientists are human after all, and if you
look hard enough you can find scientists who believe in UFOs, or
ghosts, or astrology, or all kinds of crazy stuff. So it didn't
occur to me that the list might actually be phony in some way.
What reason do you have to believe that this is so?

When I first saw the Discovery Institute ad (IIRC, back in September
2001 -- *very* bad timing for the Discovery Institute!) my first
thought was not that the list might have been faked, but rather
how patheticly weak it was. Yes, at the beginning of the list
there were a few names I recognized, like the physicist Frank Tipler
(co-author with John D. Barrow of a very interesting book on the
Anthropic Principle in physics). But hey!, what is a physicist
doing on this list anyway? In fact it was blazingly obvious that
the Discovery Institute had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to
get even 100 names. There were an awful lot of physicists and
chemists and mathematicians and engineers, which is to say, people
with no special expertise in evolutionary science. (A Postdoctoral
Researcher in Internal Medicine? An Assistant Professor of Urban
& Community Forestry?? WTF???). There were an awful lot of obscure
institutions, such as Biola University, a fundamentalist Christian
college which was profiled in the New York Times Magazine a little
while back, and which accounts for a full four percent of the list.
(Nobody who accepts evolution gets a position at Biola). They even
padded the list with people who, other than a PhD in this or that
(Anthropology? Philosophy of Biology?), seem to have had no
credentials whatsoever worth listing. (Heck, if I had finished my
dissertation I could have made the list myself). All in all, truly
a sad effort.

Of course, the target audience is not going to know this. When
scientists talk seriously about science, their intended audience
tends to be -- for obvious reasons -- people who are capable of
understanding what they are talking about, i.e., other scientists.
If the scientific community had rejected Einstein's theories, do
you think there is any chance he might have reacted by going around
to school boards and trying to convince the members that Relativity
should be taught in their schools, because he was right and all
the other scientists were wrong, and here's why? Not bloody likely!
But the target audience of the Discovery Institute is precisely
people who don't know much about evolution, and who will be impressed
by a list of 100 people (wow!) with academic degrees (wow!), no
matter how bogus this list might be in real terms. (Actually I
think this is one of the defining characteristics of pseudo-science
in general: far more effort is put into persuading non-scientists
than scientists). Sad, but very typical of the Creationist PR
campaign.
--
John Brock