Eugenie Scott says Bring on the Darwinian Thought Police

It isn't enough to do the right thing and say the right thing; you must also think the right thing, now and forevermore. And who gets to decide whose thoughts are right enough?

Eugenie Scott, president of the NCSE (the National Center for Selling Evolution), nominates herself. Scott objects to Marcus Ross receiving a Ph.D. in geosciences from the University of Rhode Island.

Here's the situation:

[Ross's] 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 Ross--oh, the horror!--is a creationist. So the question arises: "Should it be obligatory (or forbidden) for universities to consider how students will use the degrees they earn?" What if Ross goes out into the world, sporting a Ph.D. from a reputable secular university, and publicly makes a case for creationism?

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.”

Case has worked tirelessly to ensure that Kansas high school students are not exposed to the evidence against Darwinism; yet even this man blanches at the idea of establishing an ideological litmus test for gifted young scientists. Other, more prominent Darwinists have no problem with thought police.

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.”

On the basis of science? But Ross's scientific work was "impeccable." It's his religious beliefs to which Scott objects.

For more discussions of this situation, see Bruce Chapman; MikeGene; Macht; Krauze; David Heddle; and Macht again.