ID Lacks a Punch Line

In the same way the shape of the Earth is a debated point between NASA and the Flat Earth Society.

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You may want to check out my thread on the pattern of substitution mutations:

Young acolytes are usually college students or grad students associated with a university or institute,which will have nothing to do with us. Plus it looks bad on their cvs.

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Why do you suppose that is?

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Don’t y’all have a decent amount of students showing up for y’all seminars? Are none of them interested?

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Sorry, I don’t buy that. If you’re convinced that there’s something to ID and you successfully convey that to them in your summer seminars, they will see a possible path to fame and fortune.

And they don’t have to put it on their cvs if it doesn’t.

The sense I get from your posts here is that ID is dying a slow death.

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You would be pulling from a limited pool, so I understand the uphill battle you are describing. You might be able to find a good technician who doesn’t have to worry about their CV, especially if you offer strong compensation. There are plenty of PI’s who don’t do any lab work, so that shouldn’t be an issue. Of course, all of this requires a firm financial commitment from whatever funding source you are using, and that funding should be justified by a clear vision on what the research is going to look like.

I know this won’t happen for obvious reasons, but it would be interesting to see how you envision the development of a focused ID research program. What are the aims? What are the hypotheses within each aim? What are the proposed experiments for each hypothesis? If you were to write a grant, what would it look like? These are more rhetorical questions, but are still worth pondering.

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You are not able to collaborate with Biola? They have some pretty bright undergrads, and I would think that opportunities to conduct research at the DI would interest some of them.

Of course, this assumes that you have a budget to allow for some bench and computer work.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Funding an Assessment of Creation Models

@patrick I agree . I may have lived in Seattle 30 years but I lived in Boston first!

They make the students sign non-disclosure agreements. And their names are kept private. It makes it look very cult like. @Agauger Why all the secrecy? If ID is so scientific, why not openness?

Look at the summer course admission requirements:

Admission Requirements: You must be currently enrolled in a college or university as a junior, senior, or graduate student. Required application materials include (1) a resume/cv, (2) a copy of your academic transcript, (3) a short statement of your interest in intelligent design and its perceived relationship to your career plans and field of study, and (4) either a letter of recommendation from a professor who knows your work and is friendly toward ID, or a phone interview with the seminar director.

Note that items 3 and 4 are very exclusionary. You need to know a professor who is friendly towards ID? Do you have a list of ID friendly professor at every university? How is a student to know who are ID friendly professors?

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Maybe there’s a secret handshake…

I think this theory needs work :slight_smile:

How do you think this paper maps into multicellular organism promoters?

We get a fair number of students who don’t know a professor friendly to ID. Usually we handle those without recommendations by interviewing them ourselves,
We have had students who were on the fence about ID and came there to observe and learn. It’s not a monoculture or cargo cult.

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Just to be clear, I didn’t write that, Patrick did.

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@Patrick I have never see any one sign a non-disclosure agreement. We do ask them not to post picture of each other or mention names to protect identities. This must be some sort of anti-DI folk legend… I have already answered about what we do about people who don’t have a reference.

As to why the protection of student identities, are you not paying attention? Students who are openly ID will be refused positions, denied degrees, be unable to find a post-doc, and will mysteriously never get a call from 100s of job applications. A grad student who attends whose name is noticed by her PI might have something like this happen: “So where did you go this July?
Student mumbles.
" I saw your name mentioned in connection with the DI Summer Seminar. How was it?”
Student perks up. “Great!”
Professor;"Sorry to hear that. There will be a meeting with your committee to discuss this. Anyone who falls for that ID pseudoscience doesn’t belong in biochemistry (or genetics or molecular biology or…)

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If ID and DI were doing real science and publishing the results in real journals, this wouldn’t be a problem. I work with atheists in Muslim countries where being an atheist is a crime with a death penalty.
I consider the “adversity” your ID students have to get through is minor compared to what an atheist in a Muslim country must endure.

ID is clearly religious. It is not science. DI operates in this country where religious freedom is guaranteed by the constitution. DI needs to come clean that they are a religious institution not a science institution. Then students can join the summer seminar as they would summer Bible study, and not mention it to their professors. I find the need to get a professor who is ID friendly to be corrosion. DI is trying to indoctrinate free thinking science students in DI’s religious beliefs. It is really sad.

I’ll ask again: why do you think that is?

If you were a hospital would you hire a doctor who rejected the germ theory of disease in lieu of voodoo chants and reading chicken entrails?

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This has been my complaint about the DI since well before Kitzmiller v. Dover. The DI doesn’t produce any science - new scientific ideas are presented and argued in mainstream professional science journals. The DI only produces popular press books and films with nothing but religious propaganda aimed at scientifically untrained laymen. We in science know it, the DI knows it too but they just don’t care. Their goal as always is to undermine “materialism” and get their religious views pushed back into public schools.

I have no problem with folks like Dr. Gauger holding their own personal religious views of life’s origins. I have a huge problem with an organization trying through BS propaganda to foist off those views as scientific.

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