The start of a high-powered Vatican-sponsored acadmeic conference on evolution was anything but fossilized.
The third STOQ International Conference, called Biological Evolution, Facts and Theories, began on Tuesday at the Pontifical Gregorian University (picture right) under the patronage of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture.
The conference, which has been organised together with the University of Notre Dame to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, had barely gotten underway when charges of censorship and undemocratic and unacademic behaviour began flying.
At the end of the first session Oktar Babuna, a Turkish doctor and collaborator of prominent Turkish anti-Darwin campaigner Harun Yahya,asked for the floor to put forward a question. Babuna, a proponent of the Islamic creationist campaign against evolution, spoke about his view that there were insufficient transitional forms from species to species to support the theory of evolution.
After he began speaking two professors on the dias, Francisco J. Ayala of the University of California at Irvine and Douglas Futuyma of the State University of New York were visibly irritated. Someone in the hall can be heard saying “turn the microphone off” and seconds later two organisers approached Babuna. One of them abruptly took the microphone away from Babuna and another ordered him to go back to his seat. Watch it all here
“After I walked back to my seat someone said “only evolutionists can ask questions,” Babuna told Reuters afterwards. “This is very anti-democratic and very unacademic. If this is a scientific meeting … if you have scientific questions to ask, they should be responded to scientifically, everybody accepts that … if you force people to shut up and don’t let them ask any question … then it is not a scientific theory but an ideology.” The spat was filmed by Babuna’s associate Dr Cihat Gundogdu, who put 
an edited version on the Harun Yahya website.
Both men attended the conference with English and Italian versions of Harun Yahya’s super-slick mega-book Atlas of Creation (picture left) in hand. We have done numerous blogs on Islamic creationism, its proponents and its opponents. Some of the links are listed below. But what do you think about the debate and, more importantly, do you think officials at the Gregorian University were right or wrong to yank the microphone from Babuna at a scientific conference?
Trackback
195 comments so far
Previous | 10 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | … 1 | Next
“If mainstreal [sic] geology disagrees all it has to do is to produce a single experiment that proves the contrary…
Please provide the experiments and drop the polemic.”
Hey, I don’t need to do anything. I’m not trying to disprove anything, you and your friend Berthault are. And so far you’re failing miserably.
Until Berthault submits his research for legitimate peer review in a major publication - not some conferences or publications in Russia, China and France - he’ll continue to be ignored.
- Posted by GalapagosPetethe vatican was very wrong to yank the microphone.
they should have just had the security guards shoot him dead on the spot!
imagine the temerity of asking questions about the gospel of nihilism according to charles darwin!
- Posted by Michael KornGpete writes:
“So, you agree that mainstream geology doesn’t accept his conclusions that all or most layers were laid down by moving water. That being the case, obviously it is you that is practicing polemics, since what I say represents the mainstream view.”
Laboratory experiments backed by field analyses demonstrate strata form by sorting of sedimentary particles in moving water. The only exceptions are those formed in currentless water: a very rare phenomenon. So the mechanism for the vast majority of strata is sediemts sorted by turbulant water. If mainstreal geology disagrees all it has to do is to produce a single experiment that proves the contrary. This it has not done. Arguments to the contrary are therefore pure polemic by those who see this new knowledge brings an end to evolution theory.
Please provide the experiments and drop the polemic.
Peter
- Posted by Peter WildersI suspect, some people have planned to stop Mr. Babuna to speak before. This might be considered as a ‘countermeasure’ for what Harun Yahya did to them. This ‘evil action’ is purely inability to respond what next ‘bomb’ that would Mr. Babuna deliver to them… This is the stereotype of a liar!
- Posted by El CidSo, you agree that mainstream geology doesn’t accept his conclusions that all or most layers were laid down by moving water. That being the case, obviously it is you that is practicing polemics, since what I say represents the mainstream view.
- Posted by GalapagosPeteNo one is denying that some strata were laid down by moving water; however, virtually no professional geologists accept that this was a significant factor in the laying down of strata.
http://www.evolutionpages.com/berthault_ critique.htm
“Polemics is the practice of disputing or controverting significant, broad reaching topics of magnitude such as scientific matters” This definition based on one from Wikipedia seems to fit. In GPete’s case the words “A controversy unsupported by empirical proof” should be added.
Berthault’s scientific experimental results having passed the peer review process makes them part of the official scientific data. The fact that they are given a low profile by most scientists does not change the fact they represent current sedimentological/geological knowledge and a refutation of basic geological principles. Principles are defined as general law with no exceptions. They cannot be taken as valid in a limited context and not in others. The fact that his work is ignored by most scientist illustrates the latter’s unwillingness to recognise the experiment’s far reaching implications for evolution theory and the fossil record.
Seen in this light GPete’s latest post is a continuing polemic.
Peter
- Posted by peter wildersAnd just to be clear, when you say that my points have been “addressed” in previous posts, “addressed” doesn’t mean answered. I can “address” the topic of fairies in the garden. Doesn’t mean they’re there.
You’re provided nothing of substance to support Berthault’s conclusion. Neither has he.
- Posted by GalapagosPeteI’ll say this yet again, since it doesn’t seem to be getting through to you.
No one is disputing what he did in his flume.
No one is disputing that layers do sometimes get laid down in the real world by moving water.
OK? Those things are not in dispute, and those things are all he can show evidence for.
However, his conclusion that most of not all of the layers in the world were laid down by moving water in a few thousand years so the world obviously isn’t as old as some - OK, most - OK, the staggeringly overwhelming vast majority of - scientists think it is?
Nah.
He still hasn’t convinced anyone who matters. Like geologists, for example.
And “polemic” STILL doesn’t mean what you apparently think it does.
- Posted by GalapagosPeteGpete continues his polemic. His points have been addressed in numerous previous posts. Berthault’s website http://www.sedimentology.fr provides all the proof one could wish. His experiments have been proved empirically both in the laboratory and the field. No proof to the contrary has been forthcoming in over 20 years. No evolutionary scientist wants to know the truth that these experiments produce. They refute the evolutionary paradigm they cling to and its associated theological and philosophical implications. A non-evolutionary world is the last place in which a non-believer can dwell.
Peter
- Posted by peter wildersAnd yet, strangely, Berthault still isn’t taken seriously by anyone who matters. Probably because he keeps insisting that he’s right but provides nothing to back it up.
Everyone already knows that some layers are deposited by moving water. What’s his evidence that moving water is a significant source of all layers on Earth?
- Posted by GalapagosPeteReading through GPete’s posts it becomes clear that instead of responding to answers such as those of Berthault to his critic, he resorts to polemic.
A classic example is his statement:
“It doesn’t matter what I believe. It doesn’t matter what YOU believe, or Berthault, or JLS, or Richard Dawkins, or Charles Darwin. The difference is that Dawkins, Darwin and I know that belief isn’t reality. You think it is. You “believe” in a god, therefore that god exists, therefore everything that support the belief is true and everything”
Please note, however, nobody apart from GPete was speaking about a god or the oxymoron of belief being a reality.
He says:
“The geologic record comes from geologists. Evolution theory exists independently of the geologic record, though it WOULD have been awkward had geology demonstrated an Earth too young for evolution to have occurred. Good thing it doesn’t.”
Confronted with the empirical proof that the fossil record allows insufficient time for evolution to have occurred, GPete simply states (his “belief”, and that of a others) that it does. He follows up with my previous plea “let’s stick to science, not beliefs”, as if his subjective position was scientific: whilst being the opposite.
No doubt, without providing proof to the contrary he will again turn to polemics to defend his disagreement unsupported by science. But for the benefit of other readers, the laboratory and field proof (not evidence), already given several times in this blog, is that the fossil bearing sediments deposit too rapidly for fossils in the rocks to show any species change. The fossils provide evidence of organisms living together at the same relative time.
The logic of this conclusion lays in the fact that sediments deposit as a function of current velocity.
Incidentally, GPete says:
“Romanovsky (1988) demonstrates the time of deposition can be 0.01% of the ascribed geological time. Such independent sources…”
He comments: “…actually that’s one - creationist - source, not “sources.””
If GPete had looked more carefully at Berthault’s website he would have seen that paleohydraulic analyses by professional sedimentologists (not creationists) in subsequent years show other geological formations dated at a maximum of 0.01 of the stratigraphic time-table.
Peter
- Posted by Peter WildersGPete, sorry to hear that you have reached that stage of grown up-ness where your thinking has become ossified … now don’t tell me it’s from staring at all those old bones.
But onward to the second point you’re making: How is it that science consists of the best fit and not all fits?
- Posted by JLSJLS,
Why do you think Berthault’s idea fits the evidence better than current theory?
And if it isn’t a better explanation, why should it replace current theory?
- Posted by GalapagosPete“So, then, what is belief? According to you, it does not exist.”
JLS, re-read the post. If you still don’t understand the context, you shouldn’t be participating in discussions with grown-ups.
- Posted by GalapagosPeteNow, G.Pete, why do you incessantly switch from reality to faux reality? Here you go trying to bait a trap by insisting that the academic goal is to determine which idea is better, rather than address the claim that Berthault’s idea is valid. It is not a matter of “better” but of validity. How could you miss this? Tricky rhetoric is irrelevant to science, and here I thought you were purporting to be operating in the realm of science and not politics. So explain to me how you do science by employing political rhetoric.
- Posted by JLS