For the BU alumni
John Silber, the gentleman who presumably helped Boston University rise from the ashes to become a poor man's Harvard across the river, apparently is not as smart as everyone thought he was. While tooling around the internets, I found an article he wrote for the New Criterion which was cited approvingly on a creationist website to prop up the absurd Intelligent Design theory. Check this out:
A second excellent piece is in The New Criterion by John Silber, the straight shooting former president of Boston University, entitled Science versus scientism. Silber explains skepticism of evolution is met by dogmatic assertions: "The critical question for evolutionists is not about survival of the fittest but about their arrival. Biologists arguing for evolution have been challenged by critics for more than a hundred years for their failure to offer any scientific explanation for the arrival of the fittest. Supporters of evolution have no explanation beyond their dogmatic assertion that all advances are explained by random mutation sand environmental influences over millions of years."First, "straight shooting" is usually code for bigoted or shallow. In my experience, Silber's "straight shooting" was actually extreme callousness with a side of slight bigotry. I'll try to compile other examples when more motivated but I'm a little too irritated at the fact that he single-handedly destroyed a number of sports teams at BU, including baseball, football and wrestling. Second, there is no excuse for anyone, never mind an intellectual, to be commenting on evolution (not Darwinism, which is the creationists tactic to try to limit evolutionary theory to some cult of personality and hero worship to take it down to their level so they can "discredit" it by calling it just another form of religious faith, which is a strange tactic to use to discredit something, especially when the whole point of ID and creation science is to lend credibility to their faith-based worldview) without knowing basic facts. Evolutionary theory DOES posit theories about the beginnings of life, and they are far more serious than any Intelligent Design guess as to the origins of life. In fact, a recent Nova on PBS discussed how some scientists are getting nearer to recreating the conditions which they believe sparked the first lifeforms, and hope to be able to do so themselves. Let's be clear. Intelligent Design is basically this: I will repeat endlessly how there are gaps in evolutionary theory, then ignore reasonable explanations for these gaps, and further ignore conclusive explanations of why Irreducable and Specified Complexity theories and Probability theory do not disprove evolution, yet continue to parrot these "common sense" theories, then claim that ID is just dispassionate science, while at the same time failing to adress the fact that EVERY ID proponent is a practicing and believing Christian, usually born-again and fundamentalist, and fail to explain their ties to explicitly creationist groups (most of them old-earth creationists, you know, the ones who think the world is 6,000 years old), and, while again claiming that ID is dispassionate science, hysterically accuse evolution proponents of anti-religious bias. There is no one who knows the contrarian itch of an ill-informed conservative better than I, but how does an intellectual fall into these traps? Seriously, how? Because I have no idea.
