Moulton arbitration request Options

[Cedric]

Now take a look at the entirety of that otherwise unnamed petition that circulated in academia in 2001 (before the DI gave it a name and spun it into a PR campaign for ID)...

We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.

I happen to think it's a poorly worded pair of sentences, since Darwin's Model (descent with random modifications) addresses neither the origin of life nor the complexity of life. James Tour, whose nano-technology group engineers extremely complex organic molecules says he has no idea how such complexity arose in nature. He (and a lot of us) would love to know. But science doesn't yet have a viable theory for how DNA-based self-replicating organic systems ever got started in the first place.

Examining the evidence therefore seems a sensible way to begin answering interesting questions that Darwin's Model doesn't address: How (and where) did DNA-based life begin, and how did such astonishingly complex mechanisms arise out of the laws of organic chemistry?

Moulton, I don't know if you had referred to the actual wording of the petition before here on WR (I don't remember you doing that), but it has done much to clarify and sharpen the issue for me, a non-scientist. I would appear to me that The New York Times made the error of adding 2+2 and coming up with 100, and the Wikipediots further compounded the error by coming up with a thousand. Whether the petition is badly worded for the reason you suggest or not, it does not strike me as a neccessarily anti-Darwin, anti-evolution or pro-ID petition. It just expresses doubt about random mutation and natural selection as the explanation for the complexity of life, and calls for a closer examination of the evidence. So what? Aren't scientists supposed to take a skeptical view (in the modern sense of the word)?

Even if we assume that the petition was a clever ruse by the Discovery Institute to rook a number of unsuspecting scientists into signing on to just one particular principle that the ID polemicists also advance, what of that? Is that any real excuse compound and extend the humiliation suffered through the adverse publicity through the means of a Wikipedia BLP especially designed to give undue weight to the incident? Just who, exactly, appointed these assholes, most (if not all) of whom are non-scientists like myself, to serve as judge, jury and executioner over the professional reputations and careers of these unfortunate scientists? Outrageous!

All the more reason to say

Hasten The Day!™

[Moulton]

Given that those initial 100 scientists and academics who signed that original untitled petition back in 2001 were expressing a rather uncontroversial notion (among scientists) that's it's important to adhere to the protocols of the scientific method, I was astonished to discover that the editors of the Wikipedia Project on Intelligent Design (WPID) were accepting and repeating the Discovery Institute's rather doubtful interpretation and spin of those two sentences as a "dissent from Darwinism" or the NY Times' headline suggestion that it was "anti-evolution".

Consider this frankly WP:POINT edit I made to the James Tour biography (which the WPID editors didn't appreciate one bit)...

Controversial petition

In February 2006, the New York Times reported[1] that Dr. Tour was one of a small number of nationally prominent researchers out of several hundred scientists and engineers whose names appeared on the Discovery Institute's newly launched website promoting a controversial petition characterized as "A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism", which states "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."[2] Tour's field of organic chemistry is a branch of scientific research which establishes his credentials as a practitioner and advocate of the protocols of the scientific method as they apply to all branches of science. The controversy arises from confusion over whether the statement is an expression of the technical protocols of the scientific method or an expression favoring a political agenda regarding the teaching of scientific subjects related to evolution.

I made essentially the same edit to Picard's biography, too...

Controversial petition

In February 2006, the New York Times reported[9] that Picard was one of a small number of nationally prominent researchers out of several hundred scientists and engineers whose names appeared on the Discovery Institute's newly launched website promoting a controversial petition characterized as "A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism", which states "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."[10] Picard's field of affective computing is a field of scientific research which establishes her credentials as a practitioner and advocate of the protocols of the scientific method as they apply to all branches of science. The controversy arises from confusion over whether the statement is an expression of the technical protocols of the scientific method or an expression favoring a political agenda regarding the teaching of scientific subjects related to evolution.

...which Steve Dufour reverted...

My last edit

I took off Moulton's opinion. As I said before, this article is about Picard. It would be just as wrong to use it as a coatrack to attack evolution as to defend it. I also added the word "later" because I understand that the title of the petition was added after she signed it. If I got this wrong please take it out. I also took the word "Controversial" out of the section title. Too often that word is used to mean "bad" or at least "politically incorrect". That might be true, but it's bad style to give away too much in the title. Steve Dufour 12:11, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

I don't mind that you excised my opinion. I put it there to demonstrate that there is more than one way to interpret the statement. The statement can, on the one hand, be viewed in a favorable light (as suggested by half a dozen scientists) or it can be viewed in a negative light (as has been the case in these pages for a good year and a half) or it can be viewed in a neutral and nonjudgmental light. The question I ask is pretty transparent: What light do the Wikipedians cast on the statement, and what is their evidence and reasoning to promote that view as worthy of an encyclopedia? Moulton 14:08, 30 August 2007 (UTC)