Welcome to Alt-Science

Expelled

Sometimes it’s obvious, as in the case of the scientific research paper that was rejected after it was accepted. While the paper was well accepted and given positive comments from peer reviewers, certain members of the editorial board of a seemingly scientific journal noticed that the results had negative implications for evolution. And so months after the editor had told the authors he was happy “to proceed with publication,” the paper suddenly was, “on further reflection and discussion,” summarily rejected.

And what exactly was the “discussion” about? That “the unspoken implication of the article is that, probabilistically, random undirected evolution is impossible.”

And that, dear scientists, is not allowed.

Random undirected evolution is, by definition, a fact. Break that ground rule, and pay the price. This isn’t about science or truth. This is the alt-science that seeks to control everything from publications and textbooks to careers and funding.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

How Big is the Closet?

A Report From Academia

When a theory repeatedly fails its fundamental predictions, and is unable to explain even the basic facts, well there is bound to be doubt. No evolutionist who has ever peered into a microscope can look in the mirror and maintain self-respect. So I wasn’t too surprised when a friend told me that all across the country, life science professors “have told me in private they have questions about evolution,” and he keeps their identities secret. One wonders: How big is the closet?

More Threats of Persecution For AGW Dissent

The Penalty For Dissent

Appeals to constitutional rights are becoming quaint ideas as the call for persecution of dissent continues to rise. This month is was leading academic Michael Kraft and none other than the Science Guy, Bill Nye, issuing their opinions that those not going along with AGW (man-made, or anthropomorphic global warming) should face persecution. Kraft writes that “Those who intentionally misled the public about climate change should be held accountable,” and Nye states that “there is a chilling effect [from the threat of persecution] on scientists who are in extreme doubt about climate change, I think that is good.”

Nye is quite correct. Persecution will have a chilling effect, though it is at the extreme of the spectrum. Less aggressive, yet nonetheless effective, tools include the withholding of passing grades, diplomas, letters of recommendations, peer-reviewed publications, academic positions, employment, funding grants, tenure, and legitimization in general—all tools that have been used quite successfully by evolutionists for decades to stamp out dissent.

There is a very real selection process in academia enforcing evolutionary thought. The reason dissent is not tolerated is that once one is allowed even a tiny ray of light the entire edifice comes crashing down. Once one genuinely considers even the mere possibility that evolution may not be true, then the lie is suddenly exposed. Like those optical illusions, suddenly you can see the scientific evidence plainly.

AGW may or may not be accurate, I have no idea. But I know McCarthyism when I see it. A metaphysically-driven idea with failed predictions that is enforced by political and social tactics is not a good sign. The leaked emails revealed the underside of what was already fairly obvious from the outside.

Publications are controlled, journals and careers are threatened, data are manipulated to produce dramatic results, and failed predictions are ignored.

Yes Nye is correct that persecution, or even the threat of persecution, would have a chilling effect. But to be clear, there already is a chilling effect. Kraft and Nye think they are doing a good service by raising the specter of persecution, but that is merely one more tactic, after a long series of less aggressive, yet effective, tactics. McCarthyism didn’t end with McCarthy.

Here is Matt Ridley’s Must Read Article on Climate Science

A Most Dangerous Door

One of the standard defenses of evolution—the Epicurean idea that the world arose spontaneously—is that science is a self-correcting, feedback process and, as such, will always lead to the truth. This is such an ignorant claim it is difficult to know where to begin in rebutting it. First of all, at its best science is a process that takes as input a set of observations and produces as output some generalizations, sometimes called models or hypotheses or theories or laws, about how nature works. A scientist might observe the planetary motions in the sky and hypothesize that the planets travel in elliptical orbits about the Sun. Or a scientist might observe the movement of objects and theorize that the product of the mass and acceleration of an object equals the force applied to it. These are valuable theories that condense a vast amount of observations into simple and useful formulas that can predict future events. But for every one of these successes there are hundreds of failures. Sometimes these failures are rooted out only after decades or centuries of contentious debate with proponents who are convinced they’ve got it right. Indeed, there is no guarantee of a timely resolution of scientific failures. There is no guarantee of a resolution, period. Every engineering student knows that feedback loops do not guarantee accuracy—they don’t even guarantee stability.

Even at its best, science is not guaranteed to produce truth because of some real or imagined feedback process. And the story gets worse in practice because of the many nonscientific influences at work. Scientists have religious, philosophical and political biases as much as anyone else, and too often they are under pressure to conform. Bucking the trend doesn’t usually win the funding grant.

Yet the Warfare Thesis, the myth that in its objective search for truth science is opposed by religion, has persisted and has fueled a strong trend of scientism—the view of science as dispassionate truth giver. It was constructed and promoted by evolutionists to frame the debate in their favor, and it worked.

So the idea that evolution is true because science “says so,” and after all science can’t be wrong, continues to enjoy broad traction. It is for these reasons that Matt Ridley’s brilliant article in Quadrant Online is important. Ridley begins:

For much of my life I have been a science writer. That means I eavesdrop on what’s going on in laboratories so I can tell interesting stories. It’s analogous to the way art critics write about art, but with a difference: we “science critics” rarely criticise. If we think a scientific paper is dumb, we just ignore it. There’s too much good stuff coming out of science to waste time knocking the bad stuff. Sure, we occasionally take a swipe at pseudoscience—homeopathy, astrology, claims that genetically modified food causes cancer, and so on. But the great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses put to the test. So a really bad idea cannot survive long in science. Or so I used to think.

Ridley’s main concern is the highly politicized idea of anthropomorphic global warming (AGW):

Now, thanks largely to climate science, I have changed my mind. It turns out bad ideas can persist in science for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they can turn into intolerant dogmas.

This piece by Ridley is important because it is a cogent and direct challenge to the dominant and damaging ideas of scientism and the Warfare Thesis. And it is an admission that the problem is rather obvious:

This should have been obvious to me. Lysenkoism, a pseudo-biological theory that plants (and people) could be trained to change their heritable natures, helped starve millions and yet persisted for decades in the Soviet Union, reaching its zenith under Nikita Khrushchev. The theory that dietary fat causes obesity and heart disease, based on a couple of terrible studies in the 1950s, became unchallenged orthodoxy and is only now fading slowly.

Ridley has shed the mythology of the objective scientist driven simply by a pursuit for the truth:

Scientists are just as prone as anybody else to “confirmation bias”, the tendency we all have to seek evidence that supports our favoured hypothesis and dismiss evidence that contradicts it—as if we were counsel for the defence.

And Ridley has learned about scientific hegemony:

What went wrong with Lysenko and dietary fat was that in each case a monopoly was established. Lysenko’s opponents were imprisoned or killed. Nina Teicholz’s book The Big Fat Surprise shows in devastating detail how opponents of Ancel Keys’s dietary fat hypothesis were starved of grants and frozen out of the debate by an intolerant consensus backed by vested interests, echoed and amplified by a docile press.

Ridley observes that global warming has now joined this infamous list of dubious yet dangerous sciences:

This is precisely what has happened with the climate debate and it is at risk of damaging the whole reputation of science. The “bad idea” in this case is not that climate changes, nor that human beings influence climate change; but that the impending change is sufficiently dangerous to require urgent policy responses.

Ridley explains how climate science was hijacked by partisans some 15-20 years ago and since then dogma, not data, has controlled the research:

These huge green multinationals, with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, have now systematically infiltrated science, as well as industry and media, with the result that many high-profile climate scientists and the journalists who cover them have become one-sided cheerleaders for alarm, while a hit squad of increasingly vicious bloggers polices the debate to ensure that anybody who steps out of line is punished. They insist on stamping out all mention of the heresy that climate change might not be lethally dangerous. Today’s climate science, as Ian Plimer points out in his chapter in The Facts, is based on a “pre-ordained conclusion, huge bodies of evidence are ignored and analytical procedures are treated as evidence”. Funds are not available to investigate alternative theories. Those who express even the mildest doubts about dangerous climate change are ostracised, accused of being in the pay of fossil-fuel interests or starved of funds; those who take money from green pressure groups and make wildly exaggerated statements are showered with rewards and treated by the media as neutral.

It is not difficult to imagine how this plays out:

Look what happened to a butterfly ecologist named Camille Parmesan when she published a paper on “Climate and Species Range” that blamed climate change for threatening the Edith checkerspot butterfly with extinction in California by driving its range northward. The paper was cited more than 500 times, she was invited to speak at the White House and she was asked to contribute to the IPCC’s third assessment report. Unfortunately, a distinguished ecologist called Jim Steele found fault with her conclusion: there had been more local extinctions in the southern part of the butterfly’s range due to urban development than in the north, so only the statistical averages moved north, not the butterflies. There was no correlated local change in temperature anyway, and the butterflies have since recovered throughout their range. When Steele asked Parmesan for her data, she refused. Parmesan’s paper continues to be cited as evidence of climate change. Steele meanwhile is derided as a “denier”. No wonder a highly sceptical ecologist I know is very reluctant to break cover.

Ridley explains that this abuse of science is justified and enabled by the propagation of a false dichotomy that casts skeptics as dangerous or ignorant extremists:

These scientists and their guardians of the flame repeatedly insist that there are only two ways of thinking about climate change—that it’s real, man-made and dangerous (the right way), or that it’s not happening (the wrong way). But this is a false dichotomy. There is a third possibility: that it’s real, partly man-made and not dangerous. This is the “lukewarmer” school, and I am happy to put myself in this category. Lukewarmers do not think dangerous climate change is impossible; but they think it is unlikely. I find that very few people even know of this. Most ordinary people who do not follow climate debates assume that either it’s not happening or it’s dangerous. This suits those with vested interests in renewable energy, since it implies that the only way you would be against their boondoggles is if you “didn’t believe” in climate change.

And given this false dichotomy, the next step is the vilification of the skeptic in a full-scale demagoguery:

But the commentators ignore all these caveats and babble on about warming of “up to” four degrees (or even more), then castigate as a “denier” anybody who says, as I do, the lower end of the scale looks much more likely given the actual data. This is a deliberate tactic. Following what the psychologist Philip Tetlock called the “psychology of taboo”, there has been a systematic and thorough campaign to rule out the middle ground as heretical: not just wrong, but mistaken, immoral and beyond the pale. That’s what the word denier with its deliberate connotations of Holocaust denial is intended to do. For reasons I do not fully understand, journalists have been shamefully happy to go along with this fundamentally religious project.

And behind all the demagoguery, politics, fallacies and manipulation is just plain old bad nineteenth century science:

Joanne Nova, incidentally, is an example of a new breed of science critic that the climate debate has spawned. With little backing, and facing ostracism for her heresy, this talented science journalist had abandoned any chance of a normal, lucrative career and systematically set out to expose the way the huge financial gravy train that is climate science has distorted the methods of science. In her chapter in The Facts, Nova points out that the entire trillion-dollar industry of climate change policy rests on a single hypothetical assumption, first advanced in 1896, for which to this day there is no evidence. The assumption is that modest warming from carbon dioxide must be trebly amplified by extra water vapour—that as the air warms there will be an increase in absolute humidity providing “a positive feedback”. That assumption led to specific predictions that could be tested. And the tests come back negative again and again. The large positive feedback that can turn a mild warming into a dangerous one just is not there. There is no tropical troposphere hot-spot. Ice cores unambiguously show that temperature can fall while carbon dioxide stays high. Estimates of climate sensitivity, which should be high if positive feedbacks are strong, are instead getting lower and lower. Above all, the temperature has failed to rise as predicted by the models.

Ridley chronicles the long sordid history of manipulating evidence and mindless predictions that, though one after the next turned up false, never mattered and even though they failed ridiculously were used anyway as confirmations of AGW:

Excusing failed predictions is a staple of astrology; it’s the way pseudoscientists argue. In science, as Karl Popper long ago insisted, if you make predictions and they fail, you don’t just make excuses and insist you’re even more right than before.

In the end all of this will ultimately harm science. Its hard won reputation can withstand only so many religious and political intrusions. For Ridley himself, it gets personal:

That complacency has shocked me, and done more than anything else to weaken my long-standing support for science as an institution. … I feel genuinely betrayed by the profession that I have spent so much of my career championing.

But this goes far beyond feels of personal disappointment and betrayal. The consequences are enormous:

None of this would matter if it was just scientific inquiry, though that rarely comes cheap in itself. The big difference is that these scientists who insist that we take their word for it, and who get cross if we don’t, are also asking us to make huge, expensive and risky changes to the world economy and to people’s livelihoods.

Ridley’s article is a must read for anyone who is true to science. But for all of its import, it is only the beginning. Ridley is obviously a discerning man but there has been another misadventure and abuse of science that dwarfs climate science. Virtually everything he points out in this excellent piece could be restated, but to even greater extremes, regarding evolution science.

Ridley was once an AGW proponent who now has pulled himself out of its mire. He has stepped back and now the landscape has become all too clear. It is not that there is no warming, or that carbon dioxide has no effects. That’s hardly the point. The problem is in the misrepresentations of the science, the control of the funding, the publication control and blackballing, the demonization, the false dichotomies, the political intrusions, the dangerous impact on public policy, and so forth. This is not science, it a hijacking of science for nonscientific purposes.

Ridley sees all of this. He sees how it really is, and he doesn’t like what he sees. What Ridley does not yet see is that evolution science is all of this, but on a grander scale. Ridley has opened a door, but he is focusing on the first step. It is a most dangerous door, for behind it are all manner of truths people prefer to avoid.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

DOMA and Evolution’s Dangerous Cocktail

A Witch’s Brew

Evolution is, if anything, a negative theory. We don’t know how life started in a warm little pond or anywhere else for that matter. We don’t know how fish evolved, or how they transformed into amphibia, reptiles, birds, mammals and all the rest. In short, beyond vague speculation, we don’t know how the species arose. But we do know how they did not arise. The species were not created or designed in any sort of intentional sense. You can see right off that this is a peculiar scientific theory. It arrives at an unlikely conclusion without much of an explanation or justification except that the alternative must be false. But that’s not all. Along with this non empirical, rationalistic, formulation comes two important corollaries: certainty and self-righteousness. It is a dangerous mix in a scientific theory and this week it emerged in American jurisprudence as well.

Evolutionists are certain that evolution is a fact. For if creation and design are false, then one way or another, the species must have evolved. Evolution, they say, is beyond all reasonable doubt. Evolutionists like to compare their theory with gravity, the roundness of the Earth and heliocentrism.

Given this level of certainty, it is not surprising that evolutionists do not suffer dissent gladly. In fact for evolutionists, those who disagree are typically viewed as undermining science and up to no good. This leads to value judgments and the assigning of motives of those who are skeptical of evolution.

So it is not surprising that evolutionists have no compunction about blackballing dissent. Evolution is good and right, and anyone who disagrees has nefarious motives. Here is how one philosopher described this dynamic (speaking of rationalism in general):

The typical rationalist will believe that theories that meet the demands of the universal criterion are true or approximately true or probably true … The distinction between science and non-science is straight-forward for the rationalist. Only those theories that are such that they can be clearly assessed in terms of the universal criterion and which survive the test are scientific … The typical rationalist will take it as self-evident that a high value is to be placed on knowledge developed in accordance with the universal criterion. This will be especially so if the process is understood as leading towards truth. Truth, rationality, and hence science, are seen as intrinsically good. [A. F. Chalmers, What is this thing called science? 2d ed., (Indianapolis, IN.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1982) 102.]

What is dangerous here is the tendency to identify ones theory, not merely as an explanation of the natural world and as explaining certain evidences, but with righteousness. And so those who doubt that the world spontaneously arose, by chance and on its own, are routinely subject to everything from innuendo and silent discrimination to ridicule and blackballing.

All this for an allegation which is patently false. Evolution may be true, but skeptics are certainly not surreptitiously attempting to undermine science. It would be laughable except evolutionists have ruined so many careers and misdirected so many textbooks and students. And like the Witch Trials, once blame has been assigned there is no acceptable defense except to admit to the imagined wrong-doing and accept the sentence.

Such high moralizing, unfortunately, is not limited to the life sciences. Its familiar pattern is too common in today’s cultural disputes and this week it appeared in the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act.

The ruling was, in part, a response to pro traditional marriage propositions that were passed in California. The first one was declared unconstitutional by a judge, so the second (Proposition 8) made the necessary change to the state constitution. It too was overruled, this time by a gay judge in San Francisco.

In his decision the judge accused Californians who had voted for the proposition of bigotry. With the motives of millions of voters determined the judge was confident of his decision. Gay marriage was good and Proposition 8 supporters were bad.

In science there is an old saying, initiated by physicist Wolfgang Pauli, for theories that are not merely incorrect, but make no sense. Such theories are said to be “not even wrong.” The judge’s overturning of Proposition 8 was a legal ruling that was not even wrong. What was amazing was that the judge was oblivious to his own erroneous moralizing.

This week that bizarre opinion not only went uncorrected, but was reinforced when the Supreme Court doubled-down on such high moralizing, this time in its decision on DOMA. Not only did the high court strike down DOMA, it determined that those who disagree with them are out to “disparage,” “injure,” “degrade,” “demean,” and “humiliate” our fellow human beings and citizens who are homosexual.

This ruling was not from a lone judge in a lower court but from five of the top judges in the land with a small army of clerks on their staffs. It is astonishing they could produce a judgment so irrational and false. Again, gay marriage was good and DOMA supporters were bad. It would be difficult to imagine a better example of out of touch elites pronouncing judgments from on high.

The status and definition of marriage is no doubt a complex legal issue. But this is not about technical legal details. Evolution’s negative theorizing and moralizing has set a pattern that now seems to be prevalent. What is frightening is that these prosecutors actually believe their charges. Whether we are talking about a scientist or a judge, whatever the color of the robe, they are certain and they are self-righteous.

For Evolutionists, Crime Does Pay

Ruining Careers and Reputations to Get Their Way

Why is there no debate over evolution? Why does everyone believe in the Epicurean vision that the world arose spontaneously? Just ask David Coppedge, the IT guy at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who dared question evolution. Coppedge was an excellent employee who enjoyed his job, but when he openly questioned Darwin’s theory all that changed. The evolutionists at JPL manipulated his reviews, creating a false paper trail which they would later use against him. Coppedge was demoted, eventually fired, and had his good name taken away. Now a judge, who no doubt like Judge Jones “understood the general theme,” has ruled in favor of the evolutionists. For evolutionists it is all about control because they cannot tolerate an open exchange of ideas. It is yet another disgraceful case of evolutionary blackballing, and that is why there is no debate over evolution.

Evolutionary Blackballing No Longer in the Closet

Evolutionists don’t usually advertise their McCarthyist blackballing, for even they realize that manipulating the message, controlling information, ruining careers and the like doesn’t look good. But in the wake of the uproar over this year’s commencement speaker—neurosurgeon Ben Carson who doubts all of biology arose spontaneously as evolutionists insist—Emory University President Jim Wagner had no choice not only to implement an evolutionary “background checking step” to filter out all future commencement speakers who might say something interesting, but to make it clear to all that such a blackballing procedure would be formally implemented.

This information was triumphantly conveyed in an email from biology professor Jacobus (Jaap) de Roode who issued several misrepresentations of science in a letter to the editor.

Of course McCarthyites always believe they are right, for after all they hold the truth. And so there is always the hypocritical twist that while engaging in their blackballing activities evolutionists tell each other they are upholding truth.

So it is not surprising that, according to Jaap, President Wagner “expressed his hopes that this discussion can be followed up in the fall, with a College-wide discussion on truth and systems of belief.”

Yes, it will be another teachable moment with the evolutionists. In that fact-free ambiance all will be assured that the good doctor is a fine man with good intention, but that the objective, unquestionable scientific truth that everything came from nothing can be a bit too raw and hard-hitting for the sentimental.

How can we better communicate the hard truth of evolution while not offending those not equipped to handle it? That will be the question of the day in that polite, collegiate gathering where evolutionists, having controlled the message, continue to drink their own bathwater.

You can be sure that there will be no more evolution doubters at Emory University, blackballing is now coming out.

Here’s the Rundown on the Latest Evolution Blackball Operation

University of Texas El Paso mathematics professor Granville Sewell wrote a paper on how the second law of thermodynamics bears on the theory of evolution. The paper was peer-reviewed and accepted for publication. But after a blogger complained the journal, Applied Mathematics Letters (AML), pulled the article, in violation of its own professional standards. That evolutionary blackball operation ended up costing the journal $10,000 in attorney’s fees.

The evolutionist’s next move was not only to continue to reject the letter, but to publish criticism of the peer-reviewed, accepted, unpublished, rejected paper in the journal Mathematical Intelligencer (MI). And their final move was to reject Sewell’s response to the criticism, again in violation of their own standards.

It is yet another episode of the Banality of Evilution which has evolutionists falling over themselves to blackball those who disagree.

Here’s How Evolutionists Hypocritically Criticize Others

The planets do not revolve about the Earth. Nor do the Sun or the stars. But if that is your model, you can force-fit the observations to it. In the case of geocentrism, dozens of bizarre adjustments were required to fit the observations. As the figure illustrates, these adjustments added a great deal more complication to the basic geocentric model. With the adjustments, the planets were not exactly rotating about Earth, but about some nearby point (which could be adjusted as needed). Furthermore, as the planets circle around the Earth or a nearby point, they also travel in smaller circles, or epicycles. And of course these epicycles can be adjusted as needed. The result is a complicated model of celestial motion with a large number of knobs which are adjusted to try to match what we observe from Earth. And it works. If your model has sufficient number of knobs, you can fit any data.

This is what evolutionists do as well. The species do not fit into an evolutionary tree of life. The fossil record does not reveal this, the anatomy of the species does not reveal this, their embryonic development patterns do not reveal this, nor does the DNA reveal this.

So evolutionists add a great number of evolutionary “epicycles” to their model. Genes are transferred between species as needed, identical designs independently evolve—like lightning striking twice—over and over, unique designs rapidly evolve over and over, and so forth. These are the evolutionist’s just-so stories of the many bizarre, unobservable ways that they imagine evolution to have occurred in order to fit the data. And evolutionists insist all of this is true. It is not merely a theory, it is a fact beyond any reasonable doubt, they resolutely maintain.

And so all of these epicycles do not bother the evolutionist. One evolution professor, after admitting that the evolutionary tree requires a vast number of gene transfer events for many species, nonetheless insisted that it would be perverse to suggest that the evolutionary tree does not work for animals:

To be sure, much of evolution has been tree-like and is captured in hierarchical classifications. Although plant speciation is often effected by reticulation and radical primary and secondary symbioses lie at the base of the eukaryotes and several groups within them, it would be perverse to claim that Darwin’s TOL [tree of life] hypothesis has been falsified for animals (the taxon to which he primarily addressed himself) or that it is not an appropriate model for many taxa at many levels of analysis. 

Perverse? Readers unfamiliar with the evolution genre may find that to be a curious choice of words. But in fact such sentiment, and this specific word, is not at all unusual in evolutionary thought. This is striking because “perverse” is a rather strong word that suggests more than merely a scientific mistake or misjudgment. It suggests mal intent perhaps driven by ulterior motive.

Evolutionists are so certain that the world arose spontaneously, all by itself, that anyone who even has the slightest doubt is viewed as harboring some irrational, deliberate opposition to the truth.

Are you getting the picture? Evolutionists hold to a religiously-driven creation story that is continually refuted by science. They dogmatically insist it is not merely a theory, but is a fact. And with self-righteous indignation they smear anyone who even so much as expresses doubt about theory dogma. It isn’t a pretty picture.

In this case, there are all kinds of scientific problems with the professor’s insistence that animals fit evolution’s tree of life model. Over and over the same designs are found in distant animals, in very different environments. At the other end of the spectrum, completely unique designs are found in animals that otherwise are highly similar. Likewise the embryonic development patterns reveal such unique differences in otherwise similar species. And the fossil record looks more like an inverted evolutionary tree, with bursts of diversity appearing followed by a reduction of diversity via extinction.

Now there are no easy answers to the question of origins. I’m not going to tell you I have the truth of why the fossil record, the embryonic patterns, the anatomical comparisons, and so forth, look the way they do. And when someone says they do, then run. For those who say it is all obvious, and smear those who disagree, have cards they’re not showing.

Evolution’s hole card is religion. It always comes out when the going gets rough. There are all kinds of proofs for why evolution is a known fact, and every single one of them is religious. Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes it is subtle. But it always is religious. That shouldn’t be too surprising since you certainly can’t use science to prove such an incredible claim.

Historically and today, evolution is underwritten by deep metaphysical truth claims. Then evolutionists turn around and claim it is all about science. And anyone who disagrees is perverse. It isn’t a pretty picture.

Here’s the Latest on the Evolutionist’s Blackballing of David Coppedge

Back to that other court case, it turns out that David Coppedge was not fired from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab due to his Intelligent Design sympathies after all. Instead, it was all about Coppedge’s job performance. Turns out Coppedge is a downright terrible worker according to his annual performance reviews. Strange how the NASA lab didn’t notice this for so many years before the ID issue arose. JPL somehow erroneously gave Coppedge all kinds of positive, glowing performance reviews in those earlier years. Only after meeting with their lawyers did the management take notice of the true quality of Coppedge’s work. Funny how lawyers can really open your eyes. Only after that did those performance reviews begin to get it right. You can read all about it in David Klinghoffer’s latest report.