Amanda Gefter
We managed to create a bit of a stir when we pointed people to a pulled story by one of the magazine's editors, Amanda Gefter, on "How to Spot a Hidden Religious Agenda" in writings on ID and evolution. Demonstrating the Internet's hastiness in pouncing, many people suggested this was an effort to appease creationists. The NS website was update to explain it was the result of a legal complaint that had led to the story being pulled, UK libel laws being what they are.
Then, the blogosphere demonstrated the same hastiness in completely dropping it as a non-story, convinced the story would return shortly. (A copy can still be found here.)
Now, weeks later, the story is still "lost", and the editor has been effectively muzzled and can say nothing more than that lawyers are wrangling over it.
So it appears New Scientist got unfairly maligned, and have done nothing but act responsibly in this matter (even their much ballyhooed cover on "Darwin was Wrong", I think, was overblown). But that doesn't change the fact that someone has caused them to pull an article that appears, on its face, to have nothing objectionable. They may not have acted to appease creationists, but it appears they have been silenced by creationists, which in my book, requires some bile to be spewed in the offender's direction.
In our googling, we found that one of the two people mentioned by name in Gefter's piece, Denyse O'Leary, has denied it was them. "For the record, I was not the one who complained, although I am not in fact a creationist in any meaningful sense of the word." We were also told by someone in the know that the person suing is not a creationist.
New Humanist does most of the legwork, here. According to them, there is no legal recourse unless you are named in the article. There are only two people mentioned by name: "Denyse O'Leary, a Canadian writer and blogger who defended Intelligent Design in her 2004 book By Design or Chance, and the other is James Le Fanu, a British GP and writer who, while he is not a creationist, has criticized the theory of evolution and scientific 'materialism.'"
If O'Leary is to be believed, then that leaves Le Fanu. Add to that the fact that it was "not a creationist", that also seems to point to Le Fanu, who seems to have carved out the same niche in the ID fraud Lomborg has carved for himself in the global warming debate by conceding the Earth is warming due to human activite -- unlike all those quackpot deniers -- yet wants to delay action and shoot down any effort to do anything.
The fashionable, more sophisticated way to sneak creationism into public education is to be more coy about the religious aspect -- precisely what ID was designed to do. Thus, it needs proponents like Le Fanu who claim not to be creationists while claiming Darwin must be wrong because it robs the living world of unknowable profundity." He's talking out of both sides of his mouth, and was called out for it by Gefter before. His usefulness in the ID movement is rooted in his ability to lend credence to the theory by denying any religious agenda, as ID has done by suggesting there must be an "intelligence" behind life that can't be explained by evolution, without calling that intelligence God. It might be aliens!
New Scientist editor Roger Highfield has also called Le Fanu out in a review of his book. When Le Fanu says Darwin's theory appears on the brink of collapse, Highfield adds, "Only if you are a creationist who is out of touch with the literature." A fair point, considering that Le Fanu's attacks on the inability of Darwin to explain such things as altruisim reveals either a disengenuousness, or the fact that Le Fanu has written an entire book on evolution without reading any of the breakthroughs of the past few decades. Some of the most exciting research regarding human development deals directly with this subject.
If it is Le Fanu siccing the lawyers on NS, why did he not sue here? Highfield does point out the nuance (or obfuscation) of Le Fanu's position:
Le Fanu holds back from invoking a Creator but calls on scientists to “conceive of forms of understanding different from those in which they have been trained”. But the point is that science is not prescriptive. You can use emergent, holistic, non-materialist approaches too, so long as they successfully drive the agenda of experiment and theory. A few have taken the doctor’s spiritual medicine: the Nobel prizewinner Brian Josephson and Rupert Sheldrake, the biologist who gave us morphic resonance. Alas for Le Fanu, the cold, materialist, rational approach of science is truly wonderful because it works.
It doesn't seem as though Gefter bothered to explain that Le Fanu's hidden religious agenda is, well hidden. Le Fanu, like ID, is not about pushing creationism, but about opening the door to bring it in. He does not bring in a creator, but a "life force" to explain what Darwin already has. His position is not religious, but to instill "a renewed interest in and sympathy for religion." He even calls upon the old, creationist stand-by of invoking the complexity of the eye to say evolution could not posibly explain such complexity. Then what can? Not God! But "Intelligence". A "Life Force". A "non-material" force. An intelligent, non-material, life force that creates life, but is not a creator.
Le Fanu's religious agenda, like ID, is more covert, hidden, if you will. If only some enterprising reporter could provide us with a handy guide by which to spot such an agenda?
So, Gefter's article appears to threaten Le Fanu's ability to play both sides and straddle the fence, and once you've lifted the veil on that particular hypocrisy, why would anyone talk to him? It's his whole schtick.
Whoever it is who caused the story to be pulled, so far, has been too cowardly to come forward, and UK law appears to have provided an excellent opportunity to remove an article and keep it in legal limbo while pursuing baseless legal maneuvers. If it is him, he has won by losing (and may yet win), and gets to escape any of the fallout New Scientist, so far, has taken the brunt of.
It may not be Le Fanu who took legal action. It could be a janitor who thinks Gefter stole her idea. In which case, Le Fanu still deserves to be called out for his two-faced approach to an intelligent-non-material-life-force that does not rob the world of its profundity through science, facts and data. A force that keeps the Universe unknowable and mysterious, one whose explanations are arrived at through other means -- just don't call it faith.
Comments
Creationists and their fellow travelers (to use a term) are getting sneakier and sneakier in pursuing their anti-science agenda of scientific illiteracy for the masses. Whether you call it creationism or intelligent design creationism or non-materialism or spiritualism - it's not science. Casting official doubt on evolution or the age of the earth (as was recently done by the Texas Board of Education) is another of the latest (in a long string) of dirty tricks by the Christian Reconstructionists and Theocratic Dominionists in their drive to take the human race back to the Dark Ages of ignorance.
I don't believe there's a big ghost in the skies reading all of our minds and controlling all of destinies. I also don't believe we came from monkeys or that scientists have all of the answers. Evolution is a THEORY thats being forcibly crammed down our necks in schools as an absolute where creationism is some nonsense that you have to go look for if that's your bag. I wish both ships would sink.
This conversation is meaningless unless the term "Creationist" is defined. Certainly those who use a holy text like the bible as a scientific tretis, or an authority above that of scientific discovery are creationists. But is one a creationist if one holds to any metaphysical view beyond abject atheism? If so, then science as you have defined it is religious, it promotes one religous perspective, atheism, to the exclusion of all others.
I am of the mind that science should hold to a committed agnostic position.
Science celebrates positive and parsimonious descriptions of presumed objectivity. But we must never forget that our knowledge is only “best thus far.” Even the most fundamental laws of physics technically must be viewed as “tentative.” We rightly eschew diatribes of metaphysical pontifications. Science proceeds through open-mindedness and the falsification of null hypotheses, not through the rhetorical pronouncement of dogmas. Popper and many since have exposed the problems associated
with trying to prove any positive hypothesis [176, 177]. Neither induction nor deduction is foolproof. Theses that cannot be proven ought not to be proclaimed as positive statements of fact.
At the same time, we have spent much of the last century arguing to the lay community that we <i>have</i> proved the current biological paradigm. Unfortunately, very few in the scientific community seem critical of this indiscretion. One would think that if all this evidence is so abundant, it would be quick and easy to falsify the null hypothesis put forward above. If, on the other hand, no falsification is forthcoming, a more positive thesis might become rather obvious by default. Any positive pronouncement would only be labeled metaphysical by true-believers in spontaneous self organization. Those same critics would disingenuously fail to acknowledge the purely metaphysical nature of the current Kuhnian paradigm rut [178]. A better tact is to thoroughly review the evidence.
Let the reader provide the supposedly easy falsification of the null hypothesis. Inability to do so should cause pangs of conscience in any scientist who equates metaphysical materialism with science. On the other hand, providing the requested falsification of this null hypothesis would once-and-for-all end a lot of unwanted intrusions into science from philosophies competing with metaphysical materialism.
While proof may be evasive, science has an obligation to be honest about what the entire body of evidence clearly <i>suggests</i>. We cannot just keep endlessly labeling abundant evidence of formal prescription in nature “apparent.” The fact of purposeful programming at multiple layers gets more “apparent” with each new issue of virtually every molecular biology journal [179-181]. - The Capabilities of Chaos and Complexity (D. Abel) <i>International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2009, 10, 247-291</i>
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