After some 25 years in the University system, Procrustes now has contacts with the next generation who are taking science courses at the academy. Allan Bloom's worst predictions are being realized, with academia closing down even faster than had  been feared. At a leading Ivy League school on the East Coast, a stellar student was denied a master's degree in biochemistry despite having excelled at all the coursework and labwork involved. Why? Because when asked what her future plans were, she said she was going to go to seminary. "Then you don't believe in Evolution?" the Inquisitor continued. "No", she replied and sealed her fate. The director of the program, an immigrant Chinese biologist, seemed torn. "It was a very disturbing situation", he told the class, 'but the faculty were all against it."

This reminds me of the quote in Jonathon Wells book "Icons of Evolution", where a mainland Chinese biologist was reprimanded for saying something critical about darwinism. "In my country," he said, we cannot criticize the government, but we can criticize Darwin. But in this country, you can criticize the government but not Darwin."

At one time, it seemed that this narrow-mindedness was limited to the biological sciences, but after observing propaganda sessions at the American Geophysical Union (and president revisions to its code of conduct,) as well as  AAS, APS  it is clear that the religious commitment to Darwinism is spreading throughout Chemistry and Physics.  Procrustes own career in academia was cut short by the Darwinian Inquisitors, but he was lucky to have had a go at it then. Today, he would not have made it through the starting gate.

What, precisely, will be the effect on Western science? First, it will go into decline, because scientists will apply the newfound tactics on their opponents, demonizing the opposition as a means of promoting their own theories and securing funding. Don't believe me? Look at the whole area of global warming.

Second, sufficiently polarized scientific groups will undermine and attack each other, leading to a breakdown in the sort of group efforts that have made Western science so fruitful. This opens to the door to a migration of good minds out of the West, back to the hinterlands of China, India, Europe and Russia. By the time the trend is seen as threatening to the academies, it will be well-nigh unstoppable. Flight of talent means that the vaunted technological society that has made the West ascendant, and has made the US so strong, will melt away like global warming.

And finally, it means that even as our society becomes more dependent on technology, it becomes less able to understand, or even use that technology (look at Jet Blue's problems with a 2/14 snowstorm.) We become technologically vulnerable, in proportion to our technological illiteracy. The same shrill cries of "standards" as a defense against anti-Darwinists lead the the erosion of those same standards, via the hedonistic paradox. That is, the more we recognize that the success of the West was an ephemeral and unexpected blessing, the less we are able to preserve it, simply because, like happiness, it is a byproduct of something else more important.

Read what the NYT (and NRO's commentary) have to say on this topic. Read and weep.

NYT: Believing Scripture but Playing by Science’s Rules  By CORNELIA DEAN

KINGSTON, R.I. — There is nothing much unusual about the 197-page dissertation Marcus R. Ross submitted in December to complete his doctoral degree in geosciences here at the University of Rhode Island.

His subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that, as he wrote, vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago. The work is “impeccable,” said David E. Fastovsky, a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at the university who was Dr. Ross’s dissertation adviser. “He was working within a strictly scientific framework, a conventional scientific framework.”

But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a “young earth creationist” — he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.

For him, Dr. Ross said, the methods and theories of paleontology are one “paradigm” for studying the past, and Scripture is another. In the paleontological paradigm, he said, the dates in his dissertation are entirely appropriate. The fact that as a young earth creationist he has a different view just means, he said, “that I am separating the different paradigms.”

He likened his situation to that of a socialist studying economics in a department with a supply-side bent. “People hold all sorts of opinions different from the department in which they graduate,” he said. “What’s that to anybody else?”

But not everyone is happy with that approach. “People go somewhat bananas when they hear about this,” said Jon C. Boothroyd, a professor of geosciences at Rhode Island.

In theory, scientists look to nature for answers to questions about nature, and test those answers with experiment and observation. For Biblical literalists, Scripture is the final authority. As a creationist raised in an evangelical household and a paleontologist who said he was “just captivated” as a child by dinosaurs and fossils, Dr. Ross embodies conflicts between these two approaches. The conflicts arise often these days, particularly as people debate the teaching of evolution.

And, for some, his case raises thorny philosophical and practical questions. May a secular university deny otherwise qualified students a degree because of their religion? Can a student produce intellectually honest work that contradicts deeply held beliefs? Should it be obligatory (or forbidden) for universities to consider how students will use the degrees they earn?

Those are “darned near imponderable issues,” said John W. Geissman, who has considered them as a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of New Mexico. For example, Dr. Geissman said, Los Alamos National Laboratory has a geophysicist on staff, John R. Baumgardner, who is an authority on the earth’s mantle — and also a young earth creationist.

If researchers like Dr. Baumgardner do their work “without any form of interjection of personal dogma,” Dr. Geissman said, “I would have to keep as objective a hat on as possible and say, ‘O.K., you earned what you earned.’ ”

Others say the crucial issue is not whether Dr. Ross deserved his degree but how he intends to use it.

In a telephone interview, Dr. Ross said his goal in studying at secular institutions “was to acquire the training that would make me a good paleontologist, regardless of which paradigm I was using.”

Today he teaches earth science at Liberty University, the conservative Christian institution founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell where, Dr. Ross said, he uses a conventional scientific text.

“We also discuss the intersection of those sorts of ideas with Christianity,” he said. “I don’t require my students to say or write their assent to one idea or another any more than I was required.”

But he has also written and spoken on scientific subjects, and with a creationist bent. While still a graduate student, he appeared on a DVD arguing that intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism, is a better explanation than evolution for the Cambrian explosion, a rapid diversification of animal life that occurred about 500 million years ago.

Online information about the DVD identifies Dr. Ross as “pursuing a Ph.D. in geosciences” at the University of Rhode Island. It is this use of a secular credential to support creationist views that worries many scientists.

Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, a private group on the front line of the battle for the teaching of evolution, said fundamentalists who capitalized on secular credentials “to miseducate the public” were doing a disservice.

Michael L. Dini, a professor of biology education at Texas Tech University, goes even further. In 2003, he was threatened with a federal investigation when students complained that he would not write letters of recommendation for graduate study for anyone who would not offer “a scientific answer” to questions about how the human species originated.

Nothing came of it, Dr. Dini said in an interview, adding, “Scientists do not base their acceptance or rejection of theories on religion, and someone who does should not be able to become a scientist.”

A somewhat more complicated issue arose last year at Ohio State University, where Bryan Leonard, a high school science teacher working toward a doctorate in education, was preparing to defend his dissertation on the pedagogical usefulness of teaching alternatives to the theory of evolution.

Earle M. Holland, a spokesman for the university, said Mr. Leonard and his adviser canceled the defense when questions arose about the composition of the faculty committee that would hear it.

Meanwhile three faculty members had written the university administration, arguing that Mr. Leonard’s project violated the university’s research standards in that the students involved were being subjected to something harmful (the idea that there were scientific alternatives to the theory of evolution) without receiving any benefit.

Citing privacy rules, Mr. Holland would not discuss the case in detail, beyond saying that Mr. Leonard was still enrolled in the graduate program. But Mr. Leonard has become a hero to people who believe that creationists are unfairly treated by secular institutions.

Perhaps the most famous creationist wearing the secular mantle of science is Kurt P. Wise, who earned his doctorate at Harvard in 1989 under the guidance of the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, a leading theorist of evolution who died in 2002.

Dr. Wise, who teaches at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., wrote his dissertation on gaps in the fossil record. But rather than suggest, as many creationists do, that the gaps challenge the wisdom of Darwin’s theory, Dr. Wise described a statistical approach that would allow paleontologists to infer when a given species was present on earth, millions of years ago, even if the fossil evidence was incomplete.

Dr. Wise, who declined to comment for this article, is a major figure in creationist circles today, and his Gould connection appears prominently on his book jackets and elsewhere.

“He is lionized,” Dr. Scott said. “He is the young earth creationist with a degree from Harvard.”

As for Dr. Ross, “he does good science, great science,” said Dr. Boothroyd, who taught him in a class in glacial geology. But in talks and other appearances, Dr. Boothroyd went on, Dr. Ross is already using “the fact that he has a Ph.D. from a legitimate science department as a springboard.”

Dr. Ross, 30, grew up in Rhode Island in an evangelical Christian family. He attended Pennsylvania State University and then the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, where he wrote his master’s thesis on marine fossils found in the state.

His creationism aroused “some concern by faculty members there, and disagreements,” he recalled, and there were those who argued that his religious beliefs should bar him from earning an advanced degree in paleontology.

“But in the end I had a decent thesis project and some people who, like the people at U.R.I., were kind to me, and I ended up going through,” Dr. Ross said.

Dr. Fastovsky and other members of the Rhode Island faculty said they knew about these disagreements, but admitted him anyway. Dr. Boothroyd, who was among those who considered the application, said they judged Dr. Ross on his academic record, his test scores and his master’s thesis, “and we said, ‘O.K., we can do this.’ ”

He added, “We did not know nearly as much about creationism and young earth and intelligent design as we do now.”

For his part, Dr. Ross says, “Dr. Fastovsky was liberal in the most generous and important sense of the term.”

He would not say whether he shared the view of some young earth creationists that flaws in paleontological dating techniques erroneously suggest that the fossils are far older than they really are.

Asked whether it was intellectually honest to write a dissertation so at odds with his religious views, he said: “I was working within a particular paradigm of earth history. I accepted that philosophy of science for the purpose of working with the people” at Rhode Island.

And though his dissertation repeatedly described events as occurring tens of millions of years ago, Dr. Ross added, “I did not imply or deny any endorsement of the dates.”

Dr. Fastovsky said he had talked to Dr. Ross “lots of times” about his religious beliefs, but that depriving him of his doctorate because of them would be nothing more than religious discrimination. “We are not here to certify his religious beliefs,” he said. “All I can tell you is he came here and did science that was completely defensible.”

Steven B. Case, a research professor at the Center for Research Learning at the University of Kansas, said it would be wrong to “censor someone for a belief system as long as it does not affect their work. Science is an open enterprise to anyone who practices it.”

Dr. Case, who champions the teaching of evolution, heads the committee writing state science standards in Kansas, a state particularly racked by challenges to Darwin. Even so, he said it would be frightening if universities began “enforcing some sort of belief system on their graduate students.”

But Dr. Scott, a former professor of physical anthropology at the University of Colorado, said in an interview that graduate admissions committees were entitled to consider the difficulties that would arise from admitting a doctoral candidate with views “so at variance with what we consider standard science.” She said such students “would require so much remedial instruction it would not be worth my time.”

That is not religious discrimination, she added, it is discrimination “on the basis of science.”

Dr. Dini, of Texas Tech, agreed. Scientists “ought to make certain the people they are conferring advanced degrees on understand the philosophy of science and are indeed philosophers of science,” he said. “That’s what Ph.D. stands for.”

And here is NRO's commentary:

Earning a Degree May Not Be Enough   [David French]

I just returned from a week away (helping at Fort Knox’s Legal Assistance Office) to find this article landing in my inbox from friends far and near.  Entitled “Believing Scripture but Playing by Science’s Rules” (why the “but?”  Has the New York Times forgotten that many of the world’s most groundbreaking scientists were also committed believers?), the story outlines the alleged dilemma created when secular universities give doctoral degrees to . . . sharp intake of breath . . . “creationists.”

The article begins with the story of Marcus Ross, a “young earth” creationist who obtained his PhD from the University of Rhode Island after writing a dissertation about dinosaurs that adopted the “paleontological paradigm” (as he described it).  In other words, the dissertation adopted the standard scientific explanations about dinosaurs — a dissertation that more secular scientists dubbed “impeccable.”

So why write an article?  Is it news that public universities are granting advanced degrees to students who do good work?  Well, it turns out that there is a story here.  Apparently, the granting of a degree to a creationist raises “thorny philosophical and practical questions.” According to the Times, these questions are:   

May a secular university deny otherwise qualified students a degree because of their religion? Can a student produce intellectually honest work that contradicts deeply held beliefs? Should it be obligatory (or forbidden) for universities to consider how students will use the degrees they earn?

The fact that these questions are even asked boggles the mind.  What’s worse is that some leading scientists not only think the questions should be asked, they find the answers “darned near imponderable.”  It’s difficult to even begin laying out all the incorrect, ignorant, and (perhaps) malicious presumptions at work in those questions, but let’s begin by answering the Times’s questions with different questions: How can a society that purports to value a free conscience and fundamental individual liberty even contemplate denying otherwise qualified individuals the degrees they earn simply because of the scientific establishment disapproves of their theology?  How does one’s position as a tenured physicist or geologist qualify one to make the moral, political, and philosophical decisions necessary to determine whether a degree is “used” appropriately?  

It is hardly surprising to see some university professors extending their emerging priesthood mentality (“let me teach you and tell you how you must live”) to the hard sciences, but what I found especially dispiriting was the underlying — and false — assumption that religious individuals are somehow less open to “truth” than secular scientists — that people like Marcus Ross are somehow afraid to confront hard facts.  I know my own experience is anecdotal, but I attended one of the most conservative religious colleges in the United States and then one of the most secular law schools.  I can tell you that the students and faculty at my religious college were far, far more open to questions and debate about their core principles than the students and faculty at Harvard Law School.  

In fact, I would say that this openness was a product of our “deeply held beliefs.”  If one of those beliefs involves the primacy of truth, then how can a person be “intellectually honest” without producing work that tests, probes, and questions even our most fundamental ideas and values?