olegt
Posts: 1405
Joined: Dec. 2006
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| Quote (silverspoon @ July 18 2008,14:44) | Where does Luskin get this from?
In his EV news & views column he wrote:
| Quote | | Pigliucci's comment sure sounds like damage control. In fact, according to Suzan Mazur, a journalist experienced in covering evolution who was invited to report on the conference, there is patently politically-motivated damage control taking place. |
(my bolding)
According to Pigliucci journalists were not invited. Help me out here, ftk. Is Luskin mistaken yet again? |
Again, it appears quite likely that Luskin misunderstood what Mazur was saying. Here's an excerpt from Mazur's article Altenberg 16: An Exposé Of The Evolution Industry cited by Luskin:
| Quote | Pigliucci again brought up the subject of the Austrian talks at our meeting and suggested I contact organizers in Europe to see if press was being invited. Later realizing something extraordinary might be brewing, I contacted Konrad Lorenz Institute.
I got Werner Callebaut on the phone. Callebaut is a Belgian philosopher and KLI’s scientific manager. He was friendly – like his autobiography on the institute’s web site – and told me that he knew the paper I was writing the evolution debate piece for. He also said that one or two journalists did attend KLI sessions sometimes.
Callebaut has been involved with KLI workshops for years. He knows the public is interested in such intellectual events and he has coordinated radio shows of these kinds of brainstorming conversations in the past. Callebaut’s Altenberg paper is on non-centrality of the gene.
I next received the letter of invitation from KLI that was originally sent to A-16 scientists. It was signed by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd Mueller and described the talks as "a major event" and "a major stepping stone for the entire field of evolutionary biology".
[Emphasis mine --OT]
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One might conclude from the last paragraph that Mazur was invited. That wasn't the case, however. She simply had a copy of the invitation letter sent previously to the 16 participants. Here's yet another of Mazur's articles, The Invite -- "Altenberg 16" Evolution Summit, containing the invitation letter in full. This paragraph makes it clear that the letter is addressed to the participants and not to a journalist:
| Quote | | The goals of the workshop are two-fold: first, to bring a highly stimulating group of people together in Vienna to foster an open dialogue about the MS and the EES. Second, to produce a high-impact edited book (published by MIT Press), having the ambitious aim of providing a laboratory for ideas about what the EES might eventually look like. Since the intention is to have the book out for the Darwin anniversary year 2009, a prerequisite for accepting participation will be to agree to have a manuscript ready for the time of the workshop. |
Casey, you're overworked. Slow down, dude.
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