“Should public schools teach Intelligent Design along with Evolution?”
http://www.bu.edu/com/greatdebate
Wednesday, November 2, 2005, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Tsai Performance Center, Boston University
685 Commonwealth Avenue
Visit this page to view a live webcast of the debate:
http://realserver.bu.edu:8080/ramgen/encoder/greatdebate.rm
The Debate Participants:
Affirmative
Edward H. Sisson, Esq.
Partner, Arnold and Porter, Washington, D.C.
Mr. Sisson advised witnesses at the Kansas evolution hearings.
Professor Bill Dembski, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute’s Center […]

Deteriorata (old National Lampoon song)
http://www.nationallampoon.com/flashbacks/deteriorata/default2.asp
You are a fluke of the universe
You have no right to be here
And whether you can hear it or not
The universe is laughing behind your back
GIVE UP!
Designorama
You are the product of design
Every hair on your head is numbered
You are irreplacable and have every right to be here
Whether you can hear it […]

In the July 9th, 2005 issue of The New Scientist, there appears the following passage quoting Brown University’s Ken Miller:

Robert Pennock’s Nature article with Richard Lenski on the evolutionary program AVIDA does not mention Michael Behe, irreducible complexity, or intelligent design (for a critique of that article, go here). And yet, when Pennock criticizes ID, the first thing he does is point to that article as a refutation of ID and, in particular, Michael […]

Fitness among Competitive Agents: A Brief Note
By William A. Dembski
The upshot of the No Free Lunch theorems is that averaged over all fitness functions, evolutionary computation does no better than blind search (see Dembski 2002, ch 4 as well as Dembski 2005 for an overview). But this raises a question: How does evolutionary computation obtain […]

Dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge deny.
http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/d/dodgeball-script-transcript-ben-stiller.htm

“Michael Borowitz, at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, says: ‘The shapes of the major clusters are often similar but in any system there is noise, and those noisy dots are in the same place too. That’s hard to explain by biology. It is very difficult for me to believe that […]

The “TurnItIn.com” website allows teachers quickly and easily to identify plagiarism in student papers: http://turnitin.com/static/products_services/plagiarism_prevention.html.

Yes, we’ve read it. But the claim that 70,000 Australian scientists oppose ID is comparable to saying that hundreds of thousands of U.S. scientists oppose ID because the AAAS has formally denounced it. Here’s something just in from an Australian colleague:
One issue which has really been irritating is the ‘error’ which appeared in the national […]

This Saturday Casey Luskin is scheduled to debate Nick Matzke of the NCSE at 10 am (pacific time) on the Ron Insana show (http://www.westwoodone.com/talk_ron_insana_bios.htm). The debate topic? ID of course.

Dear Colleagues:
NABT has recently received several requests from the media (including CNN television and the Baltimore Sun newspaper) to interview teachers who have been pressured by parents, principals, school boards, etc. either to soften or eliminate the teaching of evolution or to include intelligent design into their curricula. If you have had this experience […]

Fred Plans To Devolve — Bacteria More Respectable
by Fred Reed
http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=113836
I read with what would be despair if I cared enough that the courts, this time in Pennsylvania, are again getting their knickers in a knot over Evolution. Oh help. There must be another planet somewhere upon which to hide.

For IMMEDIATE RELEASE on October 26, 2005
Citizens Have Right to Present Proposed Evolution Policy at School Board Meetings
School Officials Must Answer in Court for Alleged Religious Discrimination
Sacramento, CA In an important legal victory for citizens seeking to improve how evolution is taught in public schools, a federal judge has ruled that California citizens have a […]

Here’s a report on the recent Prague ID conference by someone on the ground from our side — quite a different perspective from the AP report that appeared in the NYTimes and elsewhere.
On Saturday, October 22, 2005, almost 700 people from 18 nations gathered in Prague (Czech Republic) for a conference on “Darwin and Design”:
http://www.darwinanddesign.org
The […]

Provine Talks on Intelligent Design Debate
Defends theory of evolution
October 26, 2005
by Brian Kaviar
Sun Staff Writer
From http://www.cornellsun.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/10/26/435f266296320
William Provine, the C.A. Alexander Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, gave a lecture entitled “Evolution and Intelligent Design” at Alpha Delta Phi fraternity last night. The lecture came on the heels of Interim President Hunter R. Rawlings III’s […]

Denyse O’Leary on her blog is arguing that Stephen Jay Gould would never have signed on with the National Center for Science Education’s Selling Evolution’s Project Steve, whose signatories agree that “there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence” (go here for the […]

October 24, 2005
‘Intelligent Design’ Supporters Gather
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:23 p.m. ET
PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) — Hundreds of supporters of ”intelligent design” theory gathered in Prague in the first such conference in eastern Europe, but Czech scholars boycotted the event insisting it had no scientific credence.
About 700 scientists from Africa, Europe and the United […]

[Note: Even though I own the domain name overwhelmingevidence.com, I cannot take credit for these songs — I wish I could, but I can’t.]
OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE
(to the tune of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”)

The single most important factor in determining future population is the total fertility rate (TFR). The TFR is defined as the average number of babies born to women during their reproductive years. A TFR of 2.1 is considered the replacement rate; once a TFR of a population reaches 2.1 the population will remain stable assuming […]

Here’s a fun piece about monkeys typing Shakespeare. It’s been out for a decade but it’s worth worth looking at in case you haven’t seen it (and worth taking a second look at even if you have): http://www.nutters.org/docs/monkeys.

Go here: http://www.aclupa.org/legal/legaldocket/intelligentdesigncase/dovertrialtranscripts.htm.

Here’s a note from a colleague in the biological sciences:
I’ve been following this issue off and on for about 20 years, but I haven’t been in the thick of it like you. Has it ever been this hot in the scientific community or the public at large? I get the sense we have entered into […]

On October 21, President Hunter R. Rawlings III of Cornell University issued a “State of the University Address” that was devoted entirely to, as he perceives it, the threat of ID (go here for his address). Cornell’s IDEA Club has now officially replied (go here).

In 2002, Samuel Chen, then a high school sophomore in Pennyslvania, invited Michael Behe to speak at his high school (the event is described here under the title “Darwin’s Dictatorship”). Chen has since graduated and is now a college student at Baylor. Here are his thoughts about the ongoing ID trial Kitzmiller v. Dover — […]

Design theorists who are religious believers are often charged with duplicity for not explicitly identifying the intelligence that they claim is responsible for certain forms of biological complexity with the God of their religious faith. But this charge is itself ill-intentioned. As far as the science of ID goes, there is no way to get […]

Okay, it’s finally becoming clear why all the backlash against ID. No, it’s not that ID is raising the wrong questions. No, it’s not that ID has been shown to be false (certainly Kirschner & Gerhart haven’t shown that). It’s that IDs proponents are, in the words of Marc Kirschner, “ill-intentioned.” Ah, yes, the […]

[From a colleague:] Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerharrt are important players in the evo-devo movement. They have a new popular book that is just out titled The Plausibility of Life (Yale, 2005). It summarizes a good deal of work in their earlier textbook and several important articles. In the new book, the authors […]

[From a colleague in Germany:] Recently your name in connetion with ID did appear in several (liberal) newspapers here in Germany, mostly of course accompanied by unqualified critic. You surely experience this yourself often enough in the US, lately I saw e.g. a scientist and ID-opponent on the O’Reily Show (Fox News) directly attacking ID […]

This academic year may be pivotal for Cornell University (a school at which I spent half a year doing research on probability theory back in 1986) as its president just spent nearly the whole of his State of the University Address speaking about intelligent design:

From a contact in Australia:
Last night on TV and today in all newspapers ID was derided as “not science.” See below the transcript of our ABC National Broadcaster’s treatment of ID in the program “Catalyst” last night: www.abc.net.au\cayalyst. It is followed by a specially timed letter for all Australian Newspapers today proclaiming “It’s not Science” […]

Check out http://origins.mcmaster.ca/about.html. Will ID get a fair hearing at this institute?