Sunday, June 18, 2006

Ivory-bill comments deleted from Cornell website?

That excellent Amy Lester comment thread mentioned here has now been deleted.

You may not realize that that comment thread was actually hosted on a Cornell website (Designparadigm). More details are here.

Update 1: Elsewhere on the Designparadigm website, I found this request from Amy:
I just wished to implore the Powers That Be to leave the “hobbit” thread intact for future reference.

The ivory-billed woodpecker story is a fascinating topic for philosophers of science for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the opportunity it provides to get close to the ground floor of what (I respectfully believe) is surely going to be the Bigfoot of the 21st century.

Many of issues related to the debate about evolution are present — the sufficiency of evidence for proving certain claims, what constitutes an “extraordinary claim,” what constitutes a reasonable interpretation of data, who qualifies as a “scientist,” the standards for “peer review” as a function of the “sexiness” of the work, etc., etc.

There is an interesting blog devoted to the topic (I wish I had found it earlier!):

http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/

Comment by Amy Lester — June 14, 2006 @ 10:42 pm
Update 2: According to a commenter, the "offending" dialogue may have been moved to a different place (here).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I haven't compared it verbatim, but it appears that blog just moved the "offending" dialogue to a different place here: http://designparadigm.blogsome.com/2001/01/20/47/

Anonymous said...

It looks to me like all the comments are there, albeit with a few unrelated "unfriendly" comments about creationists tossed in that arose in different threads.

I guess that page qualifies as the "Bathroom Wall" of the Cornell Creationists website, where facts go to die.