background:
with the recent request of dr. robert davidson to be removed from the discovery institute's infamous "400 scientists" list of darwinian dissenters, and his charge that he misunderstood what the organization was about and what he was signing, we began questioning the motivation of the signers. someone (maybe monk, maybe me) suggested that he just signed up to get a free dvd or two. the idea came up in
The DI loses one to email him, and find out precisely what he thought, why he joined the list. was his name used with permission?
the thought also crossed my mind that if davidson felt misled, maybe others did too. so let's email ALL of them. in
Discovery Institute's "400 Scientist" Roster we are working on compiling a list of the emails of every "scientist" on the list. the quotes are used because, as it turns out, many of these people are very hard to find because they're not actually scientists. many appear to be post-docs who don't even work in the field anymore (let alone studied an applicable field, period). this thread is for:
step two: drafting the questions we are to ask.
my suggestion is that we make the questionaire multi-part, with a few yes or no questions in each section, but allow them to explain too. i think we should ask questions regarding:
- personal background and education, current career
- god
- religion
- science (and geology?)
- evolution/biology
- intelligent design
- creationism
- education
i think if we break it up into enough specifics (without making it overly long) we could concievably allow for very intricate positions, and compromises, such as theistic evolution, etc. the idea is not to take a pot-shot at DI, but to find out exactly who these people are, and where they really stand on the issues. DI's original statement is very vague:
quote:
I am 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.
any good scientist is skeptical by nature, and by practice carefully examines evidence and encourages others to do so as well. it also says "evidence FOR darwinian theory" not "against." this wording seems to be designed to trick people into agreeing, imho. but that's wort of what we're aiming to find out. so we need to be specific.
side note:
also, i'm thinking of getting my little brother involved -- it might prove to be an interesting science fair project and the "scientists" might be mroe prone to answer a 13 year old doing a research project than a bunch of message board geeks.
This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 08-28-2005 04:38 AM
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