A professor at the University of Vermont, Nicholas Gotelli, got an invitation to debate one of the clowns at the Discovery Institute. Here's what they wrote.

Dear Professor Gotelli,

I saw your op-ed in the Burlington Free Press and appreciated your support of free speech at UVM. In light of that, I wonder if you would be open to finding a way to provide a campus forum for a debate about evolutionary science and intelligent design. The Discovery Institute, where I work, has a local sponsor in Burlington who is enthusiastic to find a way to make this happen. But we need a partner on campus. If not the biology department, then perhaps you can suggest an alternative.

Ben Stein may not be the best person to single-handedly represent the ID side. As you're aware, he's known mainly as an entertainer. A more appropriate alternative or addition might be our senior fellows David Berlinski or Stephen Meyer, respectively a mathematician and a philosopher of science. I'll copy links to their bios below. Wherever one comes down in the Darwin debate, I think we can all agree that it is healthy for students to be exposed to different views--in precisely the spirit of inviting controversial speakers to campus, as you write in your op-ed.

I'm hoping that you would be willing to give a critique of ID at such an event, and participate in the debate in whatever role you feel comfortable with.

A good scientific backdrop to the discussion might be Dr. Meyer's book that comes out in June from HarperCollins, "Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design."

On the other hand, Dr. Belinski may be a good choice since he is a critic of both ID and Darwinian theory.

Would it be possible for us to talk more about this by phone sometime soon?

With best wishes,
David Klinghoffer
Discovery Institute

You'll enjoy Dr Gotelli's response.

Dear Dr. Klinghoffer:

Thank you for this interesting and courteous invitation to set up a debate about evolution and creationism (which includes its more recent relabeling as "intelligent design") with a speaker from the Discovery Institute. Your invitation is quite surprising, given the sneering coverage of my recent newspaper editorial that you yourself posted on the Discovery Institute's website:

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/02/

However, this kind of two-faced dishonesty is what the scientific community has come to expect from the creationists.

Academic debate on controversial topics is fine, but those topics need to have a basis in reality. I would not invite a creationist to a debate on campus for the same reason that I would not invite an alchemist, a flat-earther, an astrologer, a psychic, or a Holocaust revisionist. These ideas have no scientific support, and that is why they have all been discarded by credible scholars. Creationism is in the same category.

Instead of spending time on public debates, why aren't members of your institute publishing their ideas in prominent peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences? If you want to be taken seriously by scientists and scholars, this is where you need to publish. Academic publishing is an intellectual free market, where ideas that have credible empirical support are carefully and thoroughly explored. Nothing could possibly be more exciting and electrifying to biology than scientific disproof of evolutionary theory or scientific proof of the existence of a god. That would be Nobel Prize winning work, and it would be eagerly published by any of the prominent mainstream journals.

"Conspiracy" is the predictable response by Ben Stein and the frustrated creationists. But conspiracy theories are a joke, because science places a high premium on intellectual honesty and on new empirical studies that overturn previously established principles. Creationism doesn't live up to these standards, so its proponents are relegated to the sidelines, publishing in books, blogs, websites, and obscure journals that don't maintain scientific standards.

Finally, isn't it sort of pathetic that your large, well-funded institute must scrape around, panhandling for a seminar invitation at a little university in northern New England? Practicing scientists receive frequent invitations to speak in science departments around the world, often on controversial and novel topics. If creationists actually published some legitimate science, they would receive such invitations as well.

So, I hope you understand why I am declining your offer. I will wait patiently to read about the work of creationists in the pages of Nature and Science. But until it appears there, it isn't science and doesn't merit an invitation.

In closing, I do want to thank you sincerely for this invitation and for your posting on the Discovery Institute Website. As an evolutionary biologist, I can't tell you what a badge of honor this is. My colleagues will be envious.

Sincerely yours,

Nick Gotelli

P.S. I hope you will forgive me if I do not respond to any further e-mails from you or from the Discovery Institute. This has been entertaining, but it interferes with my research and teaching.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/02...requests_to.php

so much for free speech. i guess if you don't believe it cannot be possible.

sounds similar to the lack of debates being given to the scientists who don't buy
into the gw scam.

enjoy your glee --- i almost feel bad for you.

almost. ;)

Crying this to be afoul of free speech is disingenuous. The scientist responded in adequate manner, challenging the IDers to publish some peer-reviewed, critical science that provides evidence of creationism. If they do so, he will be more than happy to comment upon and even debate their conclusions. But they won't, because creationism isn't defensible science. In fact, it isn't science at all, but superstition masquerading as science.

only joak could turn two people speaking freely into an attack on free speech.


people can say whatever they want. however, no one is required to listen.

Or to believe....

and what science do they have to show that God doesn't exist?

as for the free speech comment, i was merely referring to having an open debate regardless of one's beliefs, or lack thereof.

superstition? so can you provide PROOF that God doesn't exist?

hooray demand for disproof fallacy!


i can (illogically) both prove and disprove the existence of god using the same inductive argument. does this mean god is inconsistent?

no, it simply means that we do not have the ability to prove such things.

i find it amazing that people wish to have everything proved to them instead of just understanding that we aren't really that intelligent to begin with and will never be able to understand everything.

not to mention that as far as Catholicism is concerned, the basic tenet of my religion is faith.


with that said, i understand where you are coming from --- correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't your line of work in a mathematical setting?

yeah, applied math and chaos theory. i've actually made several serious attempts to prove the existence of god (generally when i'm drunk, but still serious) but it always runs into a consistency problem.

You know what CAN be proven?

That the Earth is almost 5 billion years old and that dinosaurs never lived with humans.

That's stone cold fact.

yes.

What??!! You mean the Flintstones weren't based on reality? Oh, the horror...

see, this is pretty much how it goes.

you get to make up anything you like, and i have no way to disproove it, so it must be true.

that's not science, it's hOAKery.

* currently...

so since you can't prove something it therefore can't exist?

ignorance at best.

Ignoring the fact that the existence of God wasn't the point in question (the merits of Creationism was), you might want to take a refresher on logical fallacies. The one you've used here is known as Argumentum ad Ignorantiam. Here is a good explanation:

http://philosophy.lander.edu/logic/ignorance.html

kinda unnecessarily spiteful response though... I don't know if there is anything to warrant that behavior, but he sounds too cool for school...

:lol:

and it all falls under the guise of:

"We may assume"

solid.

I beg your pardon? Are you referring to the bit in the link I gave that begins with "We may assume"? That is an example of this logical fallacy. Or are you talking about something else?

thank you john. just what i was thinking but didn't know quite how to put it.