Recently in Conferences Category

We learn at the Discovery Institute Blog about a recent lecture tour in Spain by ID creationists

Over an eight day period last January, Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity (aka DoctorsDoubtingDarwin.com, a rapidly growing, 277-member, physician group from 17 countries) sponsored a lecture tour in Barcelona, Malaga, Madrid, Leon and Vigo. It was titled “Lo Que Darwin No Sabia,” or “What Darwin Didn’t Know.” Tom Woodward, Ph.D. (author of Doubts About Darwin and Darwin Strikes Back) and myself (author of What Darwin Didn’t Know and Billions of Missing Links) lectured on eight occasions to exceptionally large audiences. Santiago Escuain was our translator extraordinaire. Rich Akin, the CEO of PSSI, put in enormous hours into making this trip a huge success.

El Pais reports on the ‘successful’ Spain Tour of ‘Lo que Darwin no sabía’. Of course, the DI does admit later on that the success was limited.

Laurence Moran at Sandwalk comments on a video excerpt with Bill Dembski, recently touted by the Discovery Institute’s Robert Crowther. What is fascinating that despite more than a decade of Intelligent Design ‘research’ this is the best ID has to offer.

Ironically, Dembski starts of by stating that “what darwinists have done is hidden behind complexities of living systems”. How ironic can this be… While science, as I have shown in several examples, deals in explanations, pathways and hypotheses, Intelligent Design has contributed exactly zero to our scientific understanding of these systems. Worse, while Dembski mentions some complex systems, he also avoids some examples of complex systems science understands quite well how they may have evolved.

My thanks to Robert Crowther for presenting the “best’ response ID has to offer. You be the judge.

The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, William Dembski’s current employer, has something rather curious on its website. If you look at their page of upcoming conferences, here is what they have listed in the left-hand sidebar:

• The Practice of Biblical Counseling
• Certification in Biblical Counseling
• The Family: Reclaiming a Biblical View
• Intelligent Design in Business Practice

Can you spot the one that appears out of place? Me neither.

But anyway, yes, they really are having a conference called, Intelligent Design in Business Practice. The flier for the conference comes complete with an obligatory ape-typing-at-keyboard graphic. Unfortunately, it does not say which of the speakers this is intended to represent.

If you’re wondering what the heck ID could have to do with business practice, when it doesn’t even have anything to do with science, then you’re thinking what I’m thinking. All the pretense about ID being some dispassionate scientific theory – not exactly believable to begin with – is rather hard to maintain with them holding conferences that try to apply ID to things that have little or nothing to do with science. (Not to mention that even their supposedly “scientific” conferences tend to resemble tent revivals.) As the Wedge Document has promised us, ID is supposed to have “cultural implications” for “sex, gender issues, medicine, law, and religion”. Business isn’t listed there, but once you’ve declared that your theory makes sweeping dictates over all facets of human society, it’s hardly a stretch to add business practices to the list.

Nevertheless, one has to wonder, given the history of the ID movement, exactly what useful advice the ID movement could possibly have to offer business. As luck would have it, I’ve gotten my hands on a preliminary schedule – the only copy in existence as a matter of fact – which I will post below the fold.

by Bora Zivkovic

As the 2007 Science Blogging Conference was such a great success, we are already in full swing in organizing the 2008 conference and hoping to make it even bigger and better than the first one.

Our beta-version wiki is up—check out the homepage and the first, rough outlines of the program (feel free to edit the page and add your idea at the bottom or in the comments). At this point we are trying to get more sponsors so if you and your organization/company/magazine is interested, let us know soon.

Check out out blog for updates.

Last time, almost in time for the conference, we edited and published the first-ever science blogging anthology, the Open Laboratory 2006, which was an instant hit. Thus, we are already collecting nominations for the next years’ edition. Send us your best posts (or best posts written by others) of the year by using this submission form and help us spread the news by adding this code to your blog or website.

Just a reminder that there will be a symposium this weekend discussing evolution and intelligent design at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa (and featuring PT-er Wes Elsberry). The event is geared toward those interested in matters of faith or science; teachers; principals; college students majoring in education, science and religion/philosophy; clergy; and parish educators. Scholarships are available for the first 200 K-12 educators, board of education members, school administrators, etc. who apply–still plenty of those left, so if you know anyone who’d be interested, point them in our direction. I’m including the text of one press release below the jump; all the information (including registration and hotel) can be found at the symposium website.

The Cincinnati Post has a story about the possibility that AiG’s creation science museum will encourage religious groups to hold conventions in the Cincinnati area. No word yet on whether it will discourage the realty base community from coming to Cincinnati as well.

But I guess that, with Kent Hovind in jail, AiG is going to have to pick up the slack in the mis-education of America.

Prof. Steve Steve and his trusty sidekick Nick Matzke plan to be at the NCSE booth at the AAAS Annual Meeting at the Hilton in downtown San Francisco from 10-5, Saturday, February 17. I know many PT people and ScienceBloggers are at the meeting, so stop by and see us! (transport info)

Prof. Steve Steve, and perhaps Nick, will also be in attendance on Sunday and Monday. It looks like Saturday and Sunday have free Exhibit Hall admission on account of 2007 Family Science Days.

As with every AAAS meeting, the true goal is to get invited to the Science Journalists’ Party, which I hope is Saturday night. They always throw quite a bash, although it will be hard to trump the molten chocolate fountain from the DC meeting a few years back.

It’s a new year, and it will be a busy one here in Iowa when it comes to evolutionary biology. I want to highlight two upcoming events: Iowa City’s first annual Darwin Day celebration featuring a lecture by Massimo Pigliucci, and an upcoming symposium on evolution and intelligent design, featuring John Haught and Wesley Elsberry. These events will be held in February and March, respectively; more information on both of them can be found over at Aetiology. Hope to see some readers there!

Many readers of this blog will be familiar with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. CSHL is the Long Island educational and research institution that hosts some of the most important professional meetings in several biological disciplines. It has for decades been the “home campus” of phage, bacterial and yeast genetics, as well as of computational neuroscience, developmental biology and various branches of genomics, bioinformatics and systems biology.

As a frequent attendee of meetings and symposia at CSHL, I am on their regular mailing list. I recently got an announcement of a meeting to be inaugurated this December that should be of great interest to followers of Intelligent Design. The meeting, “Engineering Principles in Biological Systems” ought to be exactly the kind of forum at which “Intelligent Design” researchers present their conclusions.

Greetings and salutations! I just returned from the AAAS meeting in St. Louis, and what a trip it was! I finally got to meet Wesley Elsberry and Nick Matzke of NCSE fame, and it was great to see Eugenie again. The occasion for these festivities? The newly formed Alliance for Science ran a three hour symposium entitled Antievolutionism in America: What’s Ahead? We had one hell of a speaker line-up. Dr. Scott kicked it off with her usual eloquence, and was followed by a slew of people to talk about everything from threats to fields outside biology, particularly geology and neuroscience, to the successes of Dover C.A.R.E.S. This symposium was unique because we recognize the plight of those on the front line and gave plenty of podium time to them. For example, Gerald Wheeler from the National Science Teachers Association, a certain pastor from this little town called Dover, and Michael Zimmerman of the Clergy Letter Project all got a chance to air their concerns and suggestions.

Not surprisingly the room was packed for most of the event, with standing room only in the back. The press even ate it up by publishing a story that included the Alliance for Science and a legislative initiative with which we are involved. The article did get one little piece of information wrong though: it suggests that the AAAS itself was involved in the creation of the Alliance for Science. This is not the case.

UPDATE: I just found out this event has been cancelled at the last minute. So don’t come. I will, however, still be around all week and attending other Darwin Day events until the 11^th.

I just wanted to let PT readers across the pond in England know that I am zipping over there for a Darwin Day talk this coming Sunday, February 5^th, in Shrewsbury. The details are here, and used to be here but have been dropped for some reason. Actually, I am speaking a week before Darwin Day, and they appear to have a whole series of events planned.

Naturally, I will be talking about the Kitzmiller case and in particular how we discovered the “smoking gun” tying ID to creation science. Following my talk will be a, um, unique musical event (see description).

There will be a session on creationism presented at this year’s GSA Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City (October 16–19, 2005). “T103. Is it Science? Strategies for Addressing Creationism in the Classroom and the Community” has 16 presentations from a range of science professionals. There are some familiar names (Meert, Scott, Wise) but happily more unfamiliar ones. Hopefully there will be a Proceedings published.

I opened comments after some hesitation. Please restrict yourselves to comments about the conference abstracts, or your teaching experience. Off topic comments will be deleted.

If you are looking for entertainment this week, I recommend you follow the Answers in Genesis Creation Mega Conference 2005 blog. The conference is starting today, July 17, and is running through July 22 – and it’s “Featuring a stunning lineup of the world’s greatest minds in creation apologetics presenting their premier presentations. “ It looks like they will put some devotions and videos online, but if any Thumb-ites happen to be in the vicinity of Lynchburg, Virginia, and have the courage to attend for a day – you should come prepared to be stunned – we would be glad to post a report.

An interesting conference on Evolution and God: 150 years of love and war between science and religion will be held on October 15-17, 2004

at the Strosacker Auditorium of the Case Western Reserve University

Darwin’s revolution was not limited to the scientific world. It reverberates to this day in theology, philosophy and politics. As a result, in America today, people hear more about evolution from evangelists preaching against it, than they do from their high school teachers. This highly charged political nexus has delivered a false impression about the history of evolutionary theory and its interactions with walks of life outside the scientific world. This conference is committed to achieving a more accurate historical understanding of these issues among historians and philosophers, and bringing that view directly to the public.