Discovery Institute's "400 Scientist" Roster

your topic got rejected for the pnt. this is not the place for it.please, we are trying to keep this fairly straight forward. this thread is JUST for collecting the emails of people on this list.

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oddly enough, i don't have excel. but i have it at the office, so it's no biggie. i'll trust that you're taking care of the list.

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well, i want to make this point absolutely clear.this is not a witchhunt.if people with degrees in various sciences choose to dissent, that's fine. that's their choice. we're not trying to ridicule anyone (not even mrs. gauger -- being a homeschool mother is a very noble choice, and one i admire very much).the list is being billed as people who "dissent." but it's not. it's people who are skeptical, as per their own wording. and we already know that there is one person on the list who does not dissent.we're not going to hound people because of their beliefs, we're going to send them a very polite questionaire where they can clarify their exact position on the debate. basically, we're trying to see if the list is in fact accurate in what it claims to be: a list of 400 scientists who dissent with darwin.so far, we haven't even emailed these people yet, and we're finding problems. many don't seem to be scientists, and many don't seem to work in applicable fields. as noble a choice as home schooling your children is, it does not make you a scientist. basically, consider this a retest with a better procedure. we're not trying to blacklist people who don't like darwin. we're trying to find out who really dissents, who's just skeptical, who was looking for a theistic evolution group, and who just signed up for a few cd's. we're trying to see how accurate this list is in its billing and content.

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i've started a thread for that here because i realize this is going to be a concern very quickly. it just has to get through the pnt, but i imagine the admins are kind of debating it.also, do you think that as charles is updating the file, we (i) should go back and remove the emails? well, their names have been posted to the web already by the discovery institute. but yes, i totally agree about phone numbers. if other people are going to help with this, PLEASE do not post phone numbers. we don't want people calling and bothering these people at work. yes, i was thinking of having it sent by my 13 year old brother, as a science fair project. that's pretty innocuous, i think.and yes, the email is very important. it does have to be very respectable, polite, and more importantly allow for both sides. we can't lead people down a particular path with questioning, nor can we make a position seem silly with questions. we just want to find out what the actual positions are.

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hawt. thanks.

well, i think we should first ask if they did indeed sign the petition (or whatever). remember, both fraud and incorrect emails ARE concerns. we might very well get the wrong people. i'm not sure. i thought about this, because the anonymity would be comforting. but it'd be a headache for us. how do we know it's the right people? password it?and what about cross referencing opinion with field and qualifications? i think that's a pretty important point -- if all of the biologists for instance do not dissent with darwin, then we have a pretty substantial claim, even if the physicists don't agree. or at least see if there is indeed as much support as the movement claims. quite. but google can also turn up phone numbers (i know -- i've gotten office numbers for just about everyone so far). we should still keep those private. there's a difference between email and phones. people get spam all the time.if they don't want to answer our email, they don't have to. i suspect we'll probably only get a return rate of 50% at best anyways. i would too.This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 08-28-2005 04:48 PM

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alright, i have the master excel file bookmarked, and i've removed all of the emails i've found.

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if you can do that, that'd be cool. i have no idea about how to do that sort of thing. yeah, i was thinking about asking about education, etc, anyways. so that'd solve that. we just have to trust them to answer honestly lol.

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actually, that would be really cool. however, for general safety reasons, it'd probably be better that we don't directly link the survey to evc. that's a good idea. pretty much. their statement is pretty vague. right now, i think, we should just stick to examining the varied intricacies of the positions their vaguary encompasses.

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please. your pnt was rejected -- go back and work on it. this is not the place for this.

actually, i proposed the whole thing. not trying to steal any credit for charles -- he's organizing the data which helps alot. he's also going to handle the actual email list and the survey. yes, i definitally want input from creationists and id'ers. i want this to be totally fair, and as without bias as possible.

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oh, well, that kind of blows the validity here, but it's definitally interesting to hear from one personally (if you are who you claim to be, at least)either way, welcome to the board. that's kind of a suspicious wording. last i checked, the scientific method isn't "practiced" like law or, well, religion. yes, agreed. that is essentially true for ANY theory. i'm sorry, but i'm frankly quite skeptical of THAT claim. gould does not strike me as an id'er or creationist, although i don't know much about his personal faith. but even just opening his book and leafing through it, and looking at the pictures in some similar (though less popularist) fossil books has me totally satisfied with the claim that random mutation and natural/sexual selection can account for the complexity of life. if i had to bet on gould's take on it, being a lot more educated in paleontology than i, i'm willing to put my money of "he's not a creationist."besides, the "look what gould said!" claims are kind of old among the creationist community, we've all seen them before, and every one of them has been false or out of context. so when i say i'm skeptical, it's because i'm skeptical and past example has proven this particular brand of argument to be wrong, not out of any kind of devotion to gould. i'd like to note to the other people reading this that here is not the place to debate this specific claim. however, i think i speak for the rest of when i say that we hope you'll stay on to debate this particular bit elsewhere on this forum.but i'd like to ask for some clarification. by "darwinian mechanisms" do you mean strict "origin of species" darwinism, or are you including more modern adaptions of the theory, including convergent evolution, cooption, punctuated equilbrium, various other selection techniques and the like?also, do you find that personal faith (no matter what it is) plays some kind of role in this particular decision (be honest).

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i think we hased this out a bit before. i forget what we decided. certainly, someone working the field is a little more qualified to their take on the evidence than someone who got a masters and now teaches homeschool.basically, the question is: "are you a working scientist, or did you just get a degree in science and then never use it?"

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imagine if a biologist attacked one of euclid's axioms. kinda silly, isn't it?why then can a mathematician be taken seriously for attacking an axiom of biology?actually, i should rephrase. having grown up in a math department. mathematicians don;t take dembski seriously. they seem to rank him with numerologists and engineering students.

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