Ladies,

The title of your Daily Campus editorial, "Open debate in jeopardy," shows that 
you have not exercised due diligence in your research.
This event is not going to be a "debate".  All four speakers are in the 
Intelligent Design camp.  The name of the presentation should be changed from 
"Darwin vs. Design" to "Design, Design, Design, and more Design". No 
evolutionary biologists from on or off the SMU campus will be
speaking.  This is a meeting of and for ID believers.  The purpose is not to 
advance science but rather to advance their religious and political agendas. 
This new stealth version of creationism is trying to distance itself from its 
fundamentalist religious origins by referring to a "Designer" for legal 
reasons, specifically to evade the Establishment Clause in the U.S. 
Constitution.

As for the body of the editorial:

The SMU science departments do not object to the conference occurring.
We object to the conference occurring *ON CAMPUS*.  SMU's reputation can only 
suffer from this association, and I'm afraid that Science will suffer as well. 
The ID "Wedge Document" strategy outlines exactly this method of infiltrating 
academic venues.  There are plenty of convention halls and
area churches that can hold the conference instead.

Please consider that not every idea deserves exposure on a university
campus.  Some ideas are simply beyond the pale.  And these ideas
aren't the ramblings of some lone deranged lunatic.  There are groups
boasting Ph.D.s among their members who believe that the Sun moves
around the Earth (fixedearth.com), that HIV does not cause AIDS
(virusmyth.com) [they even have a Nobel Prize winner in their ranks!],
that the Holocaust did not occur (ihr.org), that astrology is a viable
science, etc.  Can you imagine the reaction of the faculty to a visit
by one of these groups under the guise of a legitimate scientific
conference?  Now consider that there is more evidence for evolution
than there is that the earth moves around the sun.

Geographers don't debate the sphericity of the Earth; evolutionary biologists 
don't debate whether living things descended with modification from common 
ancestors.  Both scientists and the Federal District Court
in PA have said that ID is not science.  Have you read the Kitzmiller
Memorandum Opinion by Judge John E. Jones III?

Let me quote from Lee Cullum's April 4, 2007 editorial in the Dallas
Morning News:

"... putting intelligent design in opposition to Darwin is like offering
a program on faith healing versus oncology. Faith healing is worth discussing, 
but not as a scientific alternative to medical treatment ..."

" The university does not have a First Amendment obligation to provide a venue 
to intellectually suspect arguments, unless they are framed in a way that does 
not violate settled history (the Holocaust) or settled science."

----------------

Don't you think you should get your facts straight before you treat
the campus to your opinion?

"Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than 
once." -- Thomas Huxley

--Randall J. Scalise, Ph.D.
   Physics Department
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