I blogged here about the Speccie editor Fraser Nelson’s strange decision to screen the pseudoscientific and propagandistic film House of Numbers as a “Spectator debate”.
Ben Goldacre and Sunder Katwala claim, on Twitter, that the Spectator has now cancelled the event. Sunny Hundal, over at Liberal Conspiracy, says:
Update: Just got off the phone with someone in Spectator magazine’s events department.
The screening of the film House of Numbers has been cancelled as of today because several panel members pulled out at the last minute. They said that would have left the discussion “unbalanced”.
“Unbalanced?” That’s an understatement. The whole thing reeked of pseudo-contrarianism and a hopeless attempt at mischief-making, rather than any serious desire to debate scientific theories.
I note that the link for the event on the Speccie website is now broken, but here is the cached page.
And I await the next round of “denialism” by the folks over at Old Queen Street. Sunder Katwala speculates on the Next Left blog:
Forget Aids. Forget climate change even. There is surely one yet bigger question where the science seems entirely settled — yet is ideologically contested — and where those attempts to question the consensus then generate a vociferous scientific backlash.
“Whenever any debate hits this level, I get deeply suspicious,” writes the editor.
So how long, I wonder, before we might now expect the Spectator to ask another question:
Is the theory of evolution really all it is cracked up to be?
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