PZ Meyers and Guillermo Gonzalez

But I’m a Neville Chamberlain atheist.But Meyers’ new comments on the Gonzalez case show why I think humility is important; it keeps basic mistakes at bay.There’s some double-quoting going on (from a Nature article on the case), and for that I apologize.First Meyers quotes from the original article:Gonzalez, who has been at Iowa State in Ames since 2001, was denied tenure on 9 March…. To say otherwise is itself a mistake; it is to assign a probability of 0 to a possibility which can only be absolutely excluded on non-scientific grounds.But, in Meyers defense, he does end by quoting this paragraph from the nature article:Eli Rosenberg, who chairs Iowa State’s physics department, concedes that Gonzalez’s belief in intelligent design did come up during the tenure process.

Update on the Gonzalez Tenure Case

The way I see it there are at least three related Darwin/Intelligent Design arguments going on simultaneously: The true account of the origin of biological diversity.The (privileged ) role of science in public policy debates.The role of science (including/especially biology) in our society.Only the first is won or lost exclusively through scientific research, scientific practice and the norms of the scientific community…. I still think that if real, live scientists give off a whiff of scheudenfreude when an IDer doesn’t get tenure, it sends the wrong message to society at large; it tells them that science doesn’t deserve the privileged role in public life we think it ought have.If the pro-science among us gloat over Gonzalez loosing his bid for tenure, simply because he belongs to the ID contingent, it’s actually worse if he was rejected for good reasons.

Intelligent Design and Tenure on the Net

On the one hand, the usual suspects cry foul when Guillermo Gonzalez is denied tenure, at least in part because he is an advocate of Intelligent Design.On the other, those who want to defend the integrity of the Scientific Establishment are just fine with it — denying tenure because a teacher believes odd and peculiar things, or because they “embarrassed his department and his University” or because they hang with the wrong crowd.Let’s get some things straight, right off the bat: I think that Intelligent Design is flawed, incorrect, and poor science; I suspect that the Discovery Institute & friends are probably engaged in all of the sneaky, underhanded things of which they are accused; and I strongly suspect that the traditional Darwinian picture explains everything its strongest proponents — Richard Dawkins, Michael Ruse — claim for it.Here are other things I believe: denying tenure in order to promote intellectual homogeneity is dangerous to academia in general; Intelligent Design, while poor science, can’t simply be brushed off by calling it the ‘new creationism’; and that rather than being paragons of superhuman virtue, scientists are sometimes as petty as all other human beings.But what I really think is lost in the overall debate — not just about tenure, about Intelligent Design, about Guillermo Gonzalez — is the relationship of science and scientists to society at large…. My problem with the Gonzalez tenure case has nothing to do with the merits or flaws of tenure, of science as a process, of the nature of Intelligent Design itself; no, my problem with how things went down in this case is the message it sends to the non-scientists watching.

Tenure and Intelligent Design

Tenure is a special thing for academics, and there is certainly good psychological reasons for keeping it pure and unadulterated.