How not to get tenure

Speaking of the Templeton Foundation, it is claimed that the TF(*) was one of the few sources of funding that Guillermo Gonzalez managed to obtain. Indeed, it seems he only managed to bring in $170,000 spread over 5 years, compared to the average of $1,300,000 other ISU physics and astronomy faculty had brought in while they were on tenure track!

GG's failure to bring in normal levels of funding, in addition to a dramatic drop in publication rate and lack of grad student/postdocs, were major factors in him being denied tenure. These are, along with undergraduate teaching, major aspects of being a professional scientist in tenure-track although tenure is not based on a fixed set of rules.

Many good scientists do not get tenure (e.g. Rob Knob of the Galactic Interactions blog), and many good scientists never even get onto tenure-track in the first place. Given that GG appears to have failed to satisfy the requirements in many ways it is totally unsurprising that he was denied tenure at Iowa State University.

That he espoused an unscientific astronomical version of Intelligent Design and had close links to the Discovery Institute was also, quite rightly and quite fairly, another aspect of concern for the the faculty in the Physics department he was attempting to get tenure from. The Discovery Institutes's anti-secular and anti-scientific agenda, coupled with its manifest dishonesty is no secret. The recently revealed emails clearly show that GG's DI/ID links were known and were (entirely fairly) viewed negatively but were not used as a litmus test to "discriminate" against him. Of course, this will not stop Gonzalez and the DI is hijacking a routine and just decision in order to play politics.

After all, the faculty must have been aware of his views when they offered him tenure-track in the first place - they were no secret in the astronomical community - yet he did get a tenure track position. I have no doubt that while the faculty may have viewed GG's views with distaste they would have given him tenure had he satisfied the standard requirements of all tenure track faculty: bring in funding, mentor students and postdocs, be scientifically productive. Guillermo Gonzalez has only himself to blame for his current position.

Gonzalez could have used those tenure track years to engage in peer-reviewed research to develop the concept of galactic habitability and turn it from a poorly-constrained hypothesis into a robust theory. He could easily have applied for grants to pay for several grad students and postdocs to to work with him to expand our knowledge of the role galaxies play in habitable planet formation and evolution.

But Guillermo Gonzalez didn't attempt to further science. Instead he decided to present his speculative and religiously-distorted views of Galactic Habitability to the unsuspecting public as scientific fact through his book "The Privileged Planet", bypassing peer review altogether.

In the mean time real science, done by real scientists, went ahead and left Guillermo Gonzalez behind. The ADS abstract service records 440 astronomy-related abstracts with the word habitable in 2006-2007 alone. If we repeat the search requiring the surname Gonzalez be one of the authors we get 1 abstract, and its a M. Gonzalez, not Guillermo. I have to expand the search to 2000-2007 before the Guillermo Gonzalez(**) appears, and then only in three abstracts, two of which are reviews rather than new work. Again, by way of comparison 107 abstracts contained "Galactic" and "Habitable" in the abstract between 2000 and 2007 (1353 with the word Habitable alone).

If Guillermo Gonzalez really believed that astrophysics did indeed provide convincing evidence of a Designer (specifically a Christian God) why would he have abandoned actual research?

(*) I am informed that the TF fund many good studies the interaction between science and religion, and that the TF is opposed to the "culture war" spin presented by fundamentalists such as the DI. Some of the people they occasionally fund are less rational though.

(**) There is also another Guillermo Gonzalez in professional astronomy.

Anyway, all this politics is tiring. In my next post we'll be back to discussing really interesting stuff. Yup, more on galactic winds!

Bob Park on Paul Davies and the Templeton Prize

Bob Park discusses Paul Davies's infamous Op-Ed (previously mentioned here) and the Templeton Prize in his November 30th "What's New" column.

Protecting NASA research funding

Space News Business Report (at Space.com) discusses Alan Stern's (NASA associate administrator for sciences) changes to restore and protect research funding.

Paul Davies does not know what science is

Paul Davies, best known for exploiting anthropic arguments in the service of religious apologetica and presenting the results to the unsuspecting public as popular "science" books, is at it again: a November 24th Op-Ed piece in the NYT that trots out the old canard that science is based on faith in the same way religion is.

When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance. The laws were treated as “given” — imprinted on the universe like a maker’s mark at the moment of cosmic birth — and fixed forevermore. Therefore, to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin. You’ve got to believe that these laws won’t fail, that we won’t wake up tomorrow to find heat flowing from cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour.

Of course, almost none of this is true, as almost any scientist at any type will quickly tell you.

First of all, the "laws of science" are observed regularities of the way the Universe works, convenient descriptions for human consumption. Indeed, if there were no such regularities then everything we know, including life, could not exist. But that does not mean that a Universe that works differently could not exist.

That nature is ordered such that laws can be ascertained is not an untested assumption (or "faith" as Davies misleadingly but deliberately words it), but a hypothesis that is effectively tested. Even quantum mechanics, with predictions and behaviour that are extremely unusual by everyday standards, is rational and intelligible. Davies statement that "you have to believe that those laws won't fail" is an extremely unusual thing to say - physicists I known don't go around reciting "f=ma" for fear that Newton's Laws will stop working. Imagine if physics on the scale of everyday objects (houses, planets, etc) were not ordered and the so-called laws did fail - you'd work out that was happening pretty quickly.

Why would Davies even make such poorly reasoned claims, why use the word faith for something that is nothing like religious faith (belief without evidence)? Nor is this the only attempt to tie science to religion, specifically Christianity, in the article. The wikipedia article on Paul Davies (as seen at the time of writing on Nov 26th 2007 at 5:30pm EST) is blunt in one (quite probable) interpretation:

Davies recently made his commitment to deism clear in his New York Times Op-Ed, Science on Faith, 24 November, 2007 going so far as to write:

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.

While coyly refusing to name or identify a particular candidate monotheistic religion, equating faith in the supernatural with a faith that the universe is itself real, testable and knowable is essentially a reductio ad absurdum where science can be faulted for not knowing anything if it can't explain absolutely everything. The only motive for making such an absurd argument is to open a crack where the wedge of deism can be inserted into scientific reason, to divide and dominate it. It is essentially a political, not scientific argument, one that advocates deism in exactly the same way as the "intelligent design" religious movement.

Sadly it is unlikely that the hordes of NYT readers who made this article one of the top emailed articles in the last 48 hours will learn just how wrong Davies is.