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Dear Sir/Madam, I'm writing from FCI Otisville work camp. This facility has a majority young first offenders. I've taken it upon myself to compile college info - no www access. I like to keep a copy of the student newspaper in each folder (helps show school's tempo, spirit, etc.) Kindly mail a copy. Current or not is OK. Sincerely, Antonio Bosco
Response to "U.S. Celebrates Barbaric Anniversary" Mike, The death penalty is primarily a state's rights issue. You accidentally hit on this with your references to North Carolina and Texas. Don't forget Bill Clinton failed to "evolve" on this issue also. If you've ever traveled outside Arkansas, you'd know the United States is a big country. Liberals seem to think they can force a blanket decision for the whole country on any issue they choose. Wrong. If a citizen of this country wants to live in a state that kills killers, so be it. This is still America. Please! It's laughable to blame Bush for everything. If you don't like it, change it. Or, do you want to take the vote away too? Regards, Chris Kleinhofs More Chaos in the Streets This is in response to the comment made on "Chaos Reigns on Monticello Streets." Mr. Newton, I would like to inform you that Mr. Gill was being satirical. Now before you go and look that word up, let me tell you what
it means. Because that uses the root word (Satire) to define it, here is
another definition: Now, Mr. Gill was using exaggeration to point out the habits of bad drivers in Monticello. It was not a joke, but a form of writing often employed by journalists. Journalists tend to enjoy being sarcastic, and they try to pull it off so as to make people think about what they are saying. Read "A Modest Proposal" by Swift. If you took Mr. Gill literally, you will really hate Swift. "The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." (Thomas Jefferson) So, please read something else if you don't understand what is written in the newspaper. And by the way, the personal hits at Bradley about his family, and financial business were under the belt. There is nothing easy about being on scholarship. I am on full scholarship, and I can tell you that I had to work my tail off before I got to college to get my scholarship. I spent 2 summers in C-Pep, and countless hours studying for school. It takes determination to get to college and receive not just Pell Grants, but scholarships enough to get a refund. And the hard work hasn't stopped, I must keep it up to maintain my scholarships so I can walk across that stage at graduation, and not owe anyone a dime. That is a goal I am determined to obtain. I could start saying snide things about you, but that is hitting below the belt in my book. Mr Gill is a journalist, He has worked very hard to get where he is. Do you realize how few journalists there are on this campus? They all have to do a lot of work every week to get the paper up by Friday afternoon. Now I am not saying they don't deserve criticism once in a while, but some of the low stuff you dished out was really unecessary. Had you merely used his admission to having never left the state as ammo for your comment, that would be one thing, but... Well anyway, that is merely a tangent issue. I have to get back to studying for my finals. I do actually have to work at it to pass them. I know this won't be printed till next term, but I want to be heard. I have used enough valuable study time on your un-informed comment. Good Bye Mr. Newton, and Good Luck. Continuing Evolution Colt, In your eight-paragraph response, you address NOT ONE of my two (2) critiques. Is the reason for your non-response that you do not understand those critiques? Or is it that you acknowledge your error? That is to say, you acknowledge that 1) you TOOK OUT OF CONTEXT (sound familiar?) the word “theory” as it is used in science, and 2) that you acknowledge evolution to be hardly, as the Creationist Michael Denton calls it, a “Theory in Crisis”? Perhaps you just deliberately chose to ignore the substance of what I said, which would put you in line with a long proud Creationist tradition of sidestepping the issue. I would be most impressed at this point if you came back defending either the notion that scientific theory really is equivalent to soft speculation, or that those awful “atheist scientists” really are, unbeknownst to anyone but the ID community, “forsaking evolution” annually in droves. On this last point, your unreferenced quotes of William Dembski (who is technically not a scientist) and Michael Behe do not buttress your case. By the way, that ID has been rejected, not to mention wholly discredited is not the only thing that Behe acknowledged in the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial (See here and here). You do realize—don’t you?—that, contrary to your quotations, Dembski and Behe are among those who claim that ID is obtaining acceptance in science (See here and here). I do look forward to your next letter.In the meantime, I invite readers to revisit your first letter (paragraph #3) and judge for themselves the merit of your charge that I took your “ultimate convictions” statement “completely out of context.” Let me get this straight: I claim that you “wrote that sentence to justify Intelligent Design”? No, my point was then, and still is now, that the impetus behind ID can best be defined as religious (i.e., non-scientific), and your statement is an indication of that impetus. Look carefully at what YOU said, Colt: It seems clear enough that the “we” in “believe the way we do” are Christians. And what is “the way” if not ID since that is precisely what you are talking about? Contrary to your protest, justification for ID is the main thrust of your argument, and it seems to me that religion is the primary motivation. Indeed, those poor chaps at the Discovery Institute must be highly frustrated with their followers. The ID gurus, unlike their ideological ancestors (pun fully intended), the Creationists, actually want to forsake Christian-speak altogether in their polemics, at least until they can get ID safely installed in public school curricula. The ID party line is aimed squarely at denominationally diverse, and even secular, audiences. In short, the more scientific they can sound (i.e., non-religious) to the general public, school boards, and especially legislators, the better chance, so the strategy goes, of penetrating the dreaded Wall of Separation. But ID fan clubs make the masquerade all the more transparent when they shower praise upon ID as “biblically sound science,” or use other such Creationist terminology in their arguments with, who else, but those gosh-darned “atheists.” You will remember that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) that so-called “balanced treatment” for “Creation Science” in public school biology classes was unconstitutional because the “science” was determined to be not science at all, but rather a thinly veiled attempt to cover-up a strictly religious agenda. It should therefore be no surprise that the name used in “two-model” politics changed during this very period from Creationism to “Intelligent Design.”I am going to let Mark try to explain to you the fallacy of Argumentum Ad Populum, since both your use of, and denying the use of this fallacy were addressed to him. I will, however, point out another one of your odd contradictions: You admit to not demonstrating much knowledge of what you (and Todd Kelly) were talking about, which was ID, but it seems you do, nonetheless, “know about” ID. So, do you know it exists, but you do not understand it? Or are you just hiding your erudition for now, waiting to spring it on us later? I see you also “know of” Complex Specified Information (CSI), but do you understand it like you claim to “know and understand the wild criticisms directed toward ID”? For our readers, here is a small sample of those “wild criticisms” directed specifically at CSI, since you brought up CSI in particular:
You don’t have to be a scientist to notice some of the behavior mentioned above, but to wade through much of the verbiage that the ID propaganda machine puts forward can require more background knowledge than most people possess. This fact is exactly why in the textbook battles, proponents are happy to have ID approved almost on the credentials of the Discovery Institute celebrity panel alone, completely by-pass the peer review process, and take their case straight to the public: the decision recently handed down in the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial speaks to this very phenomenon. Most members of the public, it seems to me, who applaud ID do not know nor really want to know anything about ID or its methods. They just like the result: no evolution. I do not pretend to be a scientist, but looking at evolutionary biology and what ID says about it, and looking at the political and religious environment that surrounds the “controversy,” I am convinced that most people who promote ID do so only after willfully and aggressively ignoring the evidence that ID is pure pseudoscience. For one thing, in all the pontifications about “law of conservation of information” and “irreducible complexity,” ID is clearly a sequel to a much older and philosophically problematic argument that can be traced back to classical times. ID will acknowledge its dept, however, to a nineteenth century philosopher, William Paley. In his book, Natural Theology, published in 1802 (seven years before Darwin’s birth), Paley spelled out his now famous watchmaker argument. A watch discovered alongside a road would not lead someone to infer that it was part of nature and came into being by chance, but rather that the primary origin of the watch was a watchmaker, which would essentially be correct. So, as the analogy goes, why not apply this same reasoning to nature? If the watchmaker made the watch, then is it not perfectly reasonable that a Great Watchmaker—a Creator God—created the world and us in it?Well, the biggest problem with the watchmaker analogy begins with the analogy. Our knowledge of watchmakers as the first cause of watches comes primarily from our background knowledge about intentions and human artifacts, an epistemological luxury we do not have regarding the natural world, of which we are a part. More immediate to our purposes here, however, is that Paley, who was operating in a pre-Darwinian world, was making a purely theistic argument. That is to say, Paley was offering “proof” for the existence of God. This fact is relevant because modern Creationists are still evoking watchmaker-type arguments in their debates with “evolutionists,” and evolutionary biology, in turn, has nothing to say about God or any other theism—atheism, polytheism, whatever—one way or the other. Biological evolution has the comparatively less glorious task of reconstructing global biodiversity in terms of historical processes and what can be understood of those processes using the scientific method. There is no room here to do even minimal justice to the subject of evolution. Suffice it to say for now that if you look just carefully enough at Dembski’s thesis, what emerges is a variation of the watchmaker analogy, which Dembski claims poses problems for evolution. Dembski references a lot of mathematical mumbo-jumbo in his writings, but stripped bare CSI has the same problem as the watchmaker analogy. Certain elements in nature—specifically organic elements—contain “information” that is so “specified” and so “complex” that they defy explanation offered by natural selection or, as ID folks put it, “unguided processes.” But through Dembski’s explanatory filter, we can detect CSI and, if we are to believe Dembski, infer a designer. Sound familiar? The technical problems with CSI circle around the fact that CSI makes sense only under Dembski’s vague and inconsistent use of terms like “specified.” But like the watchmaker analogy, CSI is also essentially a god-of-the-gaps argument. Even for those mysteries of nature that science may not understand in natural terms at present, a retreat to ignorance as the only possible alternative, and in the form of deference to an unspecified “designer,” is at its very best a medieval way to teach high school students about scientific inquiry.In my second installment to the Forum, I have briefly argued that, behind all the rhetoric about “science,” ID is essentially religious fundamentalism in disguise, a fact betrayed by their own public pronouncements. I have argued with equal brevity that “specified complexity” and other ID concepts are ideological descendants (pun again!) of the old watchmaker argument, which is itself not really an explanation of anything, but rather an overly ambitious analogy that a nineteenth century philosopher made with the intention of “proving” the existence of God. I have also supplemented my observations with hyperlinks to places on the Web that more fully flush out these observations—places that I can only hope have brought to the attention of readers the issues discussed here. I will end my letter the same way I began. Are you after all, Colt, going to bolster your original assertion that 1) evolution is “only a theory” or that 2) those shameless scientists, despite their godlessness, are “forsaking evolution every year”? In the meantime, since you mentioned it, see here and here for FOX News (surely a news source that you trustJ) coverage on the “Special Topics in Religion” class that was cancelled—by whom did you say? And just for yet more fun, take a look here for a humorous take on the whole thing. I apologize to everyone for such a long response. Welcome back to school. Jeff Dickens Tina, Having answered Colt, I simply ran out of time to respond to your letter of 12/9/05, and you deserve better than a hurried response. Therefore, I should respond to you more fully on the next installment. For future reference, it would be more efficient for both of us if you picked only one or two of the Dr. Dino questions—that way, we could more properly indulge the question(s). You may also want to check the gauge on your curiosity meter. Did you even try to investigate the answers to any of these questions? The first six, for example, are not questions for evolutionary biology at all, but for a field of science called abiogenesis. Two of the most obvious answers are as follows: 11. Is it possible that similarities in design between different animals prove a common Creator instead of a common ancestor? It is not possible in this case that stating “similarities in design” proves anything, much less removes the ambiguity of what you mean by “design.” But assuming that you did “prove” what you say, why would that necessarily therefore omit a common ancestor? As it stands now, there is far more evidence for common descent than there is for a purposeful designer. 23. What would you have said fifty years ago if I told you I had a living coelacanth in my aquarium? Creationists like to make a big ‘to do’ about the coelacanth, suggesting that an unchanged organism somehow poses a problem for evolution. Even if it were true that the modern coelacanth had not changed, this fact would not ‘pose a problem’ for evolution; it would suggest that the coelacanth’s environment had not changed sufficiently to necessitate any change in the organism. In the meantime, you should also check out more about Kent Hovind and especially see what the Creationists themselves have to say about him. Jeff Dickens Dear Editor, I find it impossible not to confront misleading allegations about my recent letter, which has been recently adulterated by two writers in Vol. 3, No. 12 of your newspaper. My first rebuttal concerns Colt Roan’s assertion that I took him out of context when I explained his reasoning behind teaching Intelligent Design theory (ID) in schools, as he says, “…because an overwhelming majority of people do not believe in evolution.” He argues, “I was referring to the debate between TWO options or choices: Intelligent Design and Creationism. Obviously if we were to be taught what was popular it would be taken from a pool of hundreds of alternatives.” The two options are ID and Creationism? This doesn’t sound like much of a choice to me. I, at least, was giving him credit for keeping evolution on the table. What are these “hundreds of alternatives” to which he refers? Are they also scientifically viable theories to explain our biological observations on this planet, or is he simply throwing out a high number to distract readers from his non-argument? I believe that if one looks back at his original statements, it will become quite clear that it is the latter, and also that his context was not misconstrued by me in the slightest. Secondly, I cannot help but put to rest the outright silliness of Tina Bardin’s “cut and paste” questions. If anyone were taking this conversation out of context it would be Bardin, who is also uninformed in her equivocating of ID and Creation Science by introducing a list of questions by prominent Creation Scientist Dr. Kent Hovind (whose PhD is in Education). If one is really interested in this passé line of reasoning, one can look up Hovind at one of his websites, Creation Science Evangelism, and see that he also subscribes to “young earth” Geology and argues against radiometric dating techniques. Even Roan states that, “I.D. is different than Creationism.” Is this subject really so confusing? We need to keep these theories straight! I would also like to remind Ms. Bardin that a list of questions is not an argument, and it does not invalidate any of the discussion given to this issue thus far. Evolutionary biologists can and do give theoretical answers to all of Hovind’s questions, though many of the questions are not scientific in nature (i.e. are not testable, observable, physical). If Bardin were actually informed about ID, she would also realize that many of these questions are irrelevant to the issue anyway, as neither ID nor evolution necessarily make claims about the origin of the cosmos. Last, I must draw attention to an oversight made by both Roan and Bardin. Apparently neither of them bothered to read The Wedge Strategy document suggested in Jeff Dickens’ letter. This document, authored by the proponents of ID (including Dembski and Behe), very consciously speaks of ID as a means to an end: cultural upheaval. The most basic reason ID is now a hot topic in America is that a small group of evangelical scholars have decided to band together for the purpose of spreading their faith. This is what should be taught alongside scientific theory in our science classrooms? Science, this is not. In my first letter, I suggested a gross lack of critical thinking skills and debate skills on this campus (which is an atrocity in light of the fact that we seem to have an award-winning debate team). I also offered to work with any faculty member(s) or university organization(s) to initiate an informational panel on this topic for our students. My initial claim still stands, and I’ve yet to receive any calls … figures. Mark Wegley 
Adviser's note: Are you itching to have your voice heard on one of these
issues? Join in the debate over intelligent design and
evolution in the
blog. - RS
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