Slaughtering The Dissonance – Part The Tres

As an ongoing examination of the alleged ‘Slaughter Of The Dissidents’, let’s examine the ‘slaughter’ of  one Roger Dehart, as per the CreationWiki:

For much of his career, he introduced challenges to Darwinism and the concept of intelligent design in his high school classes. DeHart assigned his students excerpts from the creationist supplemental biology textbook Of Pandas and People, he would also show the film Inherit the Wind, and draw upon articles from science journals that challenged evolution as a way of having students question evolutionary presuppositions.

Wait - ‘Of Pandas And People’? Wasn’t that the book that was edited to substitute ‘creationism’ for ‘intelligent design’? The same one that,  Kevin Padian, a biologist at University of California Berkeley reviewed the book and called it "a wholesale distortion of modern biology." Michael Ruse, a professor of philosophy and biology, reviewed it, saying "this book is worthless and dishonest." Gerald Skoog, Professor of Education at Texas Tech University, wrote it reflects the creationist strategy to "attack evolution," but the book does not contain a scientific theory or model to "balance" against evolution. And as for Inherit The Wind, that’s work of fiction.

He was the high school biology teacher at Burlington-Edison High School in Washington State for 14 years, when in June 1997 a parent of one of DeHart's students sent a complaint to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU quickly threatened to sue the Burlington-Edison School District if DeHart didn't stop teaching intelligent design. In response to the threats of impending lawsuit, the district took away the biology classes from his teaching load, and he was reassigned to earth sciences.

Yes, but he was teaching ID in the classroom for 11 years when someone actually spoke up about this nonsense. Here are some of the issues I have:

A. Intelligent design is not only NOT science, it’s a violation of church and state separation,
B. evolution is the backbone of biology,
C. high school is a completely inappropriate place to even raise the alleged ‘controversy’.

So what happened to our stalwart ‘martyr’?

DeHart later resigned and took a teaching job at Marysville Pilchuck High School where he taught for one year. He then transferred to Oaks Christian School located just outside Malibu, California where he taught Honors and AP Biology. Mr. DeHart currently resides in Florida.

So…no cross raised on Golgotha, no spikes through the hands? No pillory, being drawn and quartered, no strappado? They just re-assigned him, he resigned and took a job elsewhere, to ruin more young minds?

This is the third example advertised from the book that has all the earmarks of sour grapes.

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Slaughtering The Dissonance – Part The Deux

I began researching the book, Slaughtering The Dissidents here, and began my step-by-step examination of some of the accusations that (I’m told) are in it. Part one is here. In part two, we’ll examine the claim that one of the big boys of the movement, one Guillermo Gonzalez, was in some way discriminated against.

Guillermo Gonzalez (born 1963 in Havana, Cuba) is an astrophysicist and notable proponent of intelligent design, and is a professor at Grove City College, an evangelical Christian school, in Grove City, Pennsylvania. He is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, considered the hub of the intelligent design movement, and a fellow with the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design, which also promotes intelligent design.

I’ll freely admit, not too crazy about any of his bylines, but as usual, instead of foraging about for interpretations I’d rather hear, we’ll just examine the hard cold facts, shall we?

Gonzalez obtained a BS in 1987 in Physics & Astronomy from University of Arizona and his Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Washington in 1993 and has done post-doctoral work at the University of Texas, Austin and the University of Washington. He has received fellowships, grants and awards from NASA, the University of Washington, Sigma Xi, and the National Science Foundation. He is a proponent of the Galactic Habitable Zone concept. He currently teaches at Grove City College, an evangelical Christian school, and was previously an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Iowa State University until May 2008.

He has sufficient credentials – he’s obviously an expert in the field of astronomy.

Two years prior to his consideration for tenure, approximately 130 faculty of Iowa State University signed a statement co-authored by Hector Avalos, a professor of Religious Studies, opposing "all attempts to represent Intelligent Design as a scientific endeavor." Similar statements were issued by faculty at the University of Northern Iowa and at the University of Iowa. A total of approximately 400 professors signed the three petitions.

How on earth this would impact an astronomy professor is hard to see. Of course, somebody made a connection:

Although no mention of Gonzalez was made in these petitions, two years later at the time of his denial of tenure, The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier called Gonzalez "the unnamed target" of the ISU petition.

An ‘unnamed target’? The eyes roll. Was there anyone else there who was an Intelligent Design advocate? (Shudder)

However, Hector Avalos has stated that this statement "was in no way targeted specifically at Gonzalez", that Tom Ingebritsen, an Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology, had been advocating, and teaching a course in, Intelligent Design at ISU for a number of years before Gonzales arrived, and that "[a]t that time [the] statement began to circulate, Dr. Gonzalez was not well-known as an ID advocate to most faculty even at ISU".

Well, my personal opinion is that ID shouldn’t even be within spitting distance of a science class, but who am I to dictate policy. Still, it tears a hole through the entire argument that one could drive a truck through.

Avalos also accused the Discovery Institute of "combining sentences from different sections of [the statement] in order create a fragmented syntax that appears to target Gonzalez":

Why is this unsurprising?

Denial of tenure and appeals

In April 2007 Iowa State University denied Gonzalez tenure.

On June 1, 2007, Gregory Geoffroy, President of Iowa State University, rejected Gonzalez's appeal and upheld the denial of tenure. In making this decision, Geoffroy states that he "specifically considered refereed publications, [Gonzalez's] level of success in attracting research funding and grants, the amount of telescope observing time he had been granted, the number of graduate students he had supervised, and most importantly, the overall evidence of future career promise in the field of astronomy" and that Gonzalez "simply did not show the trajectory of excellence that we expect in a candidate seeking tenure in physics and astronomy – one of our strongest academic programs." Geoffroy noted, "Over the past 10 years, four of the 12 candidates who came up for review in the physics and astronomy department were not granted tenure." Gonzalez appealed to the Iowa Board of Regents and the board affirmed the decision on February 7, 2008.

Skipping a paragraph:

The Chronicle of Higher Education said of Gonzalez and the Discovery Institute's claims of discrimination "At first glance, it seems like a clear-cut case of discrimination ... But a closer look at Mr. Gonzalez's case raises some questions about his recent scholarship and whether he has lived up to his early promise." The Chronicle observed that Gonzalez had no major grants during his seven years at ISU, had published no significant research during that time and had only one graduate student finish a dissertation. The Discovery Institute misrepresents an op-ed by John Hauptman, one of Gonzalez's colleagues in the physics department. Hauptman states clearly that Gonzalez's work falls far short of what scientists know to be science, containing not one single number, not one single measurement or test of any kind. "I believe that I fully met the requirements for tenure at ISU," said Gonzalez. On May 8, 2007 Gonzalez appealed the decision.

Gonzalez's failure to obtain research funding has been cited as a factor in the decision. "Essentially, he had no research funding," said Eli Rosenberg, chairman of Gonzalez's department. "That's one of the issues." According to the Des Moines Register, "Iowa State has sponsored $22,661 in outside grant money for Gonzalez since July 2001, records show. In that same time period, Gonzalez's peers in physics and astronomy secured an average of $1.3 million by the time they were granted tenure."On February 7, 2008, his appeal to the Board of Regents was denied.

I’m no college or university professor, but it’s pretty clear what actually happened here. The professor became so involved with his full-time hobby that his work suffered for it. And he’s gainfully employed at Grove City College, so it’s not as if he’s foraging food out of a MacDonald’s dumpster.

So, in a nutshell – it’s another episode of life slapping someone’s hand, that person blaming the people around him, the inability to look in the mirror and admit he’s made a mistake. Which is, in fact, simply one of the many ingredients of the stew that is the human condition.

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Slaughtering The Dissonance – Part One

I’ve already bitched about the book ‘The Slaughter Of The Dissidents’ – I’ll dissect some of the more ridiculous claims of  the ‘dissidents’.

Aforementioned ‘dissidents’ are mentioned here. As I don’t own the book, I’ll start (and likely end) with the ones mentioned on the internet.

Let’s start with the alleged ‘inventor of the MRI’, Raymond Damadian:

Raymond Vahan Damadian (born March 16, 1936) is an American practitioner of magnetic resonance imaging. In 2001, the Lemelson-MIT Prize Program bestowed its $100,000 Lifetime Achievement Award on Damadian as "the man who invented the MRI scanner." He went on to collaborate with Wilson Greatbach, one early developer of the implantable pacemaker, to develop an MRI-compatible pacemaker. The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia gave its recognition of Damadian's work on MRI with the Bower Award in Business Leadership. He was also named Knights of Vartan 2003 "Man of the Year". He received a National Medal of Technology in 1988 and was inducted in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989.

Sounds interesting, no? The entry on his work says:

In a 1971 paper in the journal Science , SUNY Downstate Medical Center professor Damadian reported that tumors and normal tissue can be distinguished in vitro by nuclear magnetic resonance ("NMR"). He suggested that these differences could be used to diagnose cancer, though later research would find that these differences, while real, are too variable for diagnostic purposes. Damadian's initial methods were flawed for practical use, relying on a point-by-point scan of the entire body and using relaxation rates, which turned out to not be an effective indicator of cancerous tissue. Nonetheless, in 1974, he received the first patent in the field of MRI when he patented the concept of NMR for detecting cancer after filing an application in 1972. As the National Science Foundation notes, "The patent included the idea of using NMR to 'scan' the human body to locate cancerous tissue." However, it did not describe a method for generating pictures from such a scan or precisely how such a scan might be done. Raymond Damadian's "Apparatus and method for detecting cancer in tissue."

In the 1950s, Herman Carr reported  creating a one-dimensional MR image. Prompted by Damadian's report on the potential medical uses of NMR, Paul Lauterbur expanded on Carr's technique and developed a way to generate the first MRI images, in 2D and 3D, using gradients. Peter Mansfield from the University of Nottingham then developed a mathematical technique that would allow scans to take seconds rather than hours and produce clearer images than Lauterbur had. While Lauterbur and Mansfield focused on animals and human limbs, Damadian built the first full-body MRI machine^[7] and produced the first full magnetic resonance imaging ("MRI") scan of the human body, albeit using a "focused field" technique that differs considerably from modern imaging.

In recording the history of MRI, Mattson and Simon (1996) credit Damadian with describing the concept of whole-body NMR scanning, as well as discovering the NMR tissue relaxation differences that made this feasible.

So, has the good professor been recognized at all? Why, yes he has:

Damadian received a National Medal of Technology in 1988 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989. His original MRI full-body scanner was given to the Smithsonian Institution in the 1980s and is now on loan and on display at the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Ohio.

In 2001, the Lemelson-MIT Prize Program bestowed its $100,000 Lifetime Achievement Award on Damadian as "the man who invented the MRI scanner." The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia gave its recognition of Damadian's work on MRI with the Bower Award in Business Leadership. He was also named the Knights of Vartan 2003 "Man of the Year." In September 2003, he was honored with the Innovation Award in Bioscience from The Economist.

Thus far, on the up and up. Here’s where it gets ugly (and preposterous):

On July 3, 1977, the first MRI body exam was performed on a human being (the first human scan was performed by Sir Peter Mansfield's team in Nottingham a year earlier - but this was a cross-sectional image through a finger rather than a body scan).

It took almost five hours to produce one image. The images were, by modern standards, rudimentary. Dr. Raymond Damadian, a physician and scientist, along with colleagues Dr. Larry Minkoff and Dr. Michael Goldsmith, labored tirelessly for seven long years to reach this point. They named their original machine "Indomitable" to capture the spirit of their struggle to do what many said could not be done... but no systems would ever use Damadian's method however. His technique of imaging was never made a practically useable method and has never been used in what is considered MR imaging as we know it today and this is probably why the Nobel prize committee did not feel Damadian and his work deserved inclusion in the prize for physics when it was awarded to Lauterbur and Mansfield for "Inventing Magnetic Resonance Imaging" in 2003. His 1972 patent never described an imaging device but a method of "detecting" cancer... more of a Geiger counter approach for cancer 'detection'. Also, his patent followed on the heels of rumors already floating throughout the scientific community of Lauterbur's proposed idea of using NMR 'in vivo' (still in the human body... an imaging device) rather than Damadian's idea to use NMR as a 'in vitro' (or excised tissue) technique for differentiating cancerous from normal tissue. Damadian has continually argued that was what he meant but the truth is in the details. Damadian may have inspired Lauterbur's idea but Damadian did NOT invent MRI and careful review of Damadian's patent does not support his arguments (even the title of the patent states DETECTING); so, his 'FIRST body MRI' on July 3, 1977 is not actually the first MRI. It was his first attempt at a technique which was un-useable and ultimately abandoned even by him.

After Dr. Damadian's outrageous, numerous public tantrums over his exclusion, a New York Times columnist criticized Damadian's behavior by saying... "there is no Nobel Prize for whining".

None the less his 'machine', which could never be considered an actual MRI, is now in the Smithsonian Institution. As late as 1982, there were but a handful of MRI scanners in the entire United States. Today there are thousands. It is possible to image in seconds what used to take hours but not using any of Damadian's imaging methods of "field focused nuclear magnetic resonance".

So…Damadian was not the inventor of the MRI – contingent on whether one grants inventor status on the idea or the actual non-prototypical device itself. And the fact is, while the aforementioned trio did the pioneering work, the MRI is the result of many other scientists pitching in piecemeal. And from what I can extrapolate, it’s a combination of a few missed swings and a great deal of Damadian’s lack of people skills that denied him his part in the Nobel. Personally I think he should’ve gotten an honorable mention in the very least. However, he’s won a few awards and a great deal of recognition for his work.

To top it off, a quote from the professor:

Damadian himself said, "Before this happened, nobody ever said to me 'They will not give you the Nobel Prize for Medicine because you are a creation scientist.'... If people were actively campaigning against me because of that, I never knew it."

There’s absolutely no proof that this happened, not in the slightest. So I’m going to have to deem this YALTCT (Yet Another Lie The Christians Tell).

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