Crisis averted

Education | Baylor avoids repeating an anti-ID purge from years before | Mark Bergin

Robert J. Marks fully endorses the vision of Baylor University. The distinguished professor of engineering left his longtime position at a secular school four years ago to help Baylor realize its ambitious aim—namely, to achieve the status of a top-tier research institution without compromising its distinctly Christian worldview.

To that end, Marks recently created a lab dedicated to evolutionary informatics, the study of whether Darwinian processes like random mutation and natural selection can generate new information. He published his findings on a university-hosted website, believing the research to be both top tier and consistent with Baylor's Baptist heritage.

But some members of the Baylor community took issue with Marks' conclusions, which place limits on the scope of Darwinism and offer scientific support for the theory of intelligent design. These ID opponents, who remain unidentified, complained to Dean Ben Kelley of the School of Engineering and Computer Science, who promptly pulled the plug on Marks' lab and took down the accompanying website.