Dear Steve,

Your magazine's lively online service, Forbes.com, has been attacked by biologist Dr. Jerry Coyne for allowing several scientists who support intelligent design to dissent from an other-wise fawning parade of Darwinists who appeared in your spaces to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/12/evolution-creation-proof-opinions-darwin_0212_jerry_coyne.html

Coyne compares your carrying articles critical of Darwinian theory to support for Holocaust denial, among other extremities. He says you have "debased journalism as well as science."

Oh, my.

Actually, it is instructive to have Coyne exhibit in public the spirit of angry censorship that now pervades Darwinian science. Behind the scenes Coyne and his colleagues have intimidated a number of other media from publishing or interviewing scientific contrarians. It has become a trend.

There even was a legal effort by several Darwinists to block the showing of the 2008 Ben Stein film, Expelled. Fortunately, they were unsuccessful. Recently, a telephone call from Richard Dawkins helped inveigle the president of the University of Vermont to dispense with Ben Stein as one of this year's commencement speakers. Stein's crime was to defend the academic freedom of intelligent design scientists in his film.

The academic left's assault on free speech and academic freedom is often accompanied by adhominem attack, as in Coyne's repeated false characterization of Dr. Michael Egnor of SUNY (Stonybrook)--one of your recent writers--as a "creationist". Egnor further is a mere medical doctor, in Coyne's telling, not a "genuine scientist" like Coyne.

In reality, Dr. Egnor is, indeed, a well-known neurosurgeon, but he also is a distinguished neuroscientist. He not only teaches, but he also has conducted pathfinding research with an intelligent design perspective. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford, Harvard, and UCLA, among other leading institutions, and his discoveries about the manner in which blood flows into the brain after head injuries have influenced surgical practice.

Who is Jerry Coyne to question the bona fides of such a man?

Forbes proudly calls itself "The Capitalist Tool," and you personally have dedicated yourself first and foremost to the advancement of freedom in many arenas, especially economics.

You don't need to be reminded, therefore, that there have been places and times where the arguments for capitalism and against socialism have been banished--by definition!--from economics classes, exactly as Darwinists want to forbid the weaknesses of Darwinian theory from being heard in America's high schools and to prevent scientists who support intelligent design from being employed at universities--or read on the pages of your publication.

There is an arrogant, almost totalitarian mentality among certain scientists and Coyne is a prime example. There is a coercive ideology behind their calculations that challenges all friends of liberty.

With best regards,

Bruce Chapman