Interestingly enough, here, it is Luskin making the knee-jerk accusations and trying to discredit my comments by (loose) assosciation instead of addressing what I said. Rather than modeling my views off Dr. Mirecki in late 2005, my interest in standing against pseudo-science began in high school, long before I'd heard of Mirecki, and certainly before I was in attendence at KU.
More specifically, my interest disdain for Creationism and specifically the ID version came nearly 4 years ago while I was still in attendence at Missouri State University.
So Luskin's claim that I've been corrupted by the views of Dr. Mirecki are far from credulous.
Additionally, Luskin shows that he only briefly skimmed my post. He claims I'm
trying to imply Dr. Gonzalez doesn't have a prestigious publication record.Yet my post clearly states:
published over 60 papers in reputable journals “including Astronomy and Astrophysics, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Astrophysical Journal and Solar Physics.” The NASA Astrophysical Database System when searched, confirms that he has a good deal of contributions up to present day.I went out of my way to confirm that Gonzalez has been published and even make a special point that he continues to do so unlike nearly every other ID proponent out there who have all seemingly dropped even the pretense of the practice in favour of watered down garbage. Good for him!
One of the points that I was making is that I expected the DI to be trumpeting Gonzalez's publications. Yet they don't. From his main page on their website, they hide his scholarly publications. Searching their site for "Gonzalez publications" also turns up nothing. I suspected that this is because much of Gonzalez's work flies in the face of people like FtK who try to deny stellar evolution. This isn't good for the Discovery Intistute's "big tent" policy which wants to rope in the young earthers.
The final point was that publication isn't the only requirement for tenure. Honesty is. The Discovery Institute and its affiliates (including Gonzalez) all dishonestly pretend that ID is a legitimate theory. It's not.
Not that this is the only reason that Gonzalez doesn't really meet the qualifications for tenure. PZ has more, and Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars puts it in more perspective, noting that, no matter how much the DI spins, well published people are routinely denied tenure. In fact, I've had a number of people warn me away from the field of astronomy because it's so difficult to get tenure.
But don't let any of that factor in Casey. Instead, just keep making stuff up about how I'm Mirecki's protege. You keep lying. I'll keep laughing.
