“Intelligent design talking points” are now legitimate science?

_{Denyse O'Leary

February 2, 2012

Darwinism, News, science education}

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In “Texas’ evolution teaching meets science standards” (Austin Statesman, February 2, 2012) Don McLeroy, a former State Board of Education chairman, points out, regarding the muchy-contested Texas science standards,

The big story concerning the release of the Fordham Institute’s “State of the State Science Standards 2012” is not the overall grade that Texas received but that the controversial high school evolution standards were described as “exemplary.”

See also: Darwin lobby trashed Texas evolution standards, but Fordham Institute says they’re mostly okay

Here are the changes that drew such ridicule at the time, but not this week. The board added two standards: “Analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning the sudden appearance, stasis and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record,” and “Analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning the complexity of the cell.”

The fact that, after three years, these standards have not even been challenged, supports the findings of the Fordham report and not the hysterical statements made at the time of their adoption by some evolutionists.

[= The standards were “intelligent design talking points.”]

Thus, Texas high school evolution standards have passed the test of time and have been proven to represent sound scientific reasoning and legitimate science.

Semi-amusingly, this allows for a final observation. Because Texas evolution standards represent legitimate science, and because, according to [Darwin lobbyist] Eugenie Scott, they include “intelligent design talking points,” does this mean she would now argue that “intelligent design talking points” represent legitimate science?

McLeroy may have trouble getting her attention, asshe gets up to speed on climate change.

You can’t comment there, but you can here.

Comments

Correction: The DI is OK with anyone believing what [he] wants to believe. Normally, I wouldn't bother correcting a syntactical typo, but the current obsession to seize on trivial matters as a way to avoid substantive dialogue calls for it.StephenB_{February 6, 2012
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You must really think I’m a moron.
Nope. There isn't any doubt. BTW when did I ever say the DI is advocating Islam?Joe_{February 6, 2012
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--DrRec: "Which religious dogmas?" Yes, what religious dogma(s) does the Discovery Institute hope to impose on public education? --"My my, are you going to pull a JoeG and tell us the DI is advocating Isalm?" Please focus. --"You must really think I’m a moron." Please do not tempt my lower nature. --"Especially since I’ve already linked to the founder of ID, and the DI website, which is quite specific in its endorsements." No link you have provided will provide information that would support your claim. --"But let us flip the question." No, let us answer the question. --"But let us flip the question. What religious dogmas is the DI ok with? Be specific." The DI is "OK with" anyone believing anything they want to believe. --"Hinduism? Scientology? Paganism? Atheism?" --"Please endorse all you find acceptable…." I don't endorse or accept any of these world views as being true, but I do acknowledge a person's right to believe in one of them or to embrace ID science as an intellectual complement to his/her world view. I will be happy to answer any question or any follow up (and provide remedial education on the subject of ID)--on the condition that you will answer my question: What religious dogma does the Discovery Institute seek to impose on public education.StephenB_{February 6, 2012
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According to Dawkins, Provine, Dennett, et al., evolutionism = atheism. Take it up with themJoe_{February 6, 2012
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Which religious dogmas? My my, are you going to pull a JoeG and tell us the DI is advocating Isalm? You must really think I'm a moron. Especially since I've already linked to the founder of ID, and the DI website, which is quite specific in its endorsements. But let us flip the question. What religious dogmas is the DI ok with? Be specific. Hinduism? Scientology? Paganism? Atheism? Please endorse all you find acceptable....DrREC_{February 5, 2012
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"Darwinist/atheist ***" Reinforcing the point. Evolutionary biology=atheism only in those who have bought into "creationist subterfuge." Clearer thinkers, like Francis Collins, realize the use of methodological naturalism to investigate the world in no way invalidates supernatural personal beliefs.DrREC_{February 5, 2012
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--DrRec: "Right. Eugenie Scott, EXPLICITLY saying the goal of the NCSE is not to promote atheism, as evolution and theism aren’t in conflict is TOTALLY equivalent to the mission statements of the DI I’ve posted above." Does this mean that you are never going to back up your earlier claim and tell us which religious dogma(s) the Discovery Institute hopes to impose on the public schools.StephenB_{February 5, 2012
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champignon, 3rd-rate minds consider 10 seconds wasted on dignifying trivia, time well-spent.Axel_{February 4, 2012
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Eugenie Scott, who, according to Wikipedia, has been the NCSE's executive director since 1987, is an atheist and a signer of the Humanist Manifesto. The Humanist Manifesto pledges allegiance to "blind watchmaker" evolution?the same archaic evolution the NCSE fights to keep unchallenged in the classroom. AmericanHumanist.org - Humanist Manifesto III
Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change. Humanists recognize nature as self-existing. We accept our life as all and enough, distinguishing things as they are from things as we might wish or imagine them to be. We welcome the challenges of the future, and are drawn to and undaunted by the yet to be known.
I think it's safe to say that Eugenie Scott's association with the NCSE and their agenda is closely linked to her atheistic humanist worldview. Scott, and those like-minded (the running joke known as Nick Matzke, for example), are using Darwinian evolution as a Trojan horse to peddle their religious agenda in the classroom. The Discovery Institute is doing nothing more than challenging this anti-scientific, atheism-in-a-cheap-tuxedo indoctrination by bringing critical thinking into the classroom. For that, all decent people should thank them. Than you, Discovery Institute. Keep kicking Darwinist/atheist ***. It's much appreciated.Jammer_{February 4, 2012
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Axel,
It is normally the mark of a second-rate mind to fail to prioritize what one chooses to remember, and what one allows to lapse into desuetude or quasi-desuetude.
First-rate minds bother to get their facts right, particularly when it only takes a 10-second Google search to do so. Third-rate minds are too lazy to bother, but instead spend their energies justifying their laziness with pompous, long-winded rationalizations.champignon_{February 4, 2012
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As has been said of economics, materialism makes astrology look respectable.Axel_{February 4, 2012
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"I was making a point which continues to escape you. Institutions set goals; methodologies do not. Thus, it is wrong to write about ID’s religious goals without differentiating between motives and methods. Do you finally get the fact that ID methodology has no goals?" DrREC's failure to differentiate between motives and methods bears a curious resemblance to the clumsy confusion of his confreres (described in a wonderful Guardian cartoon, as members of the Covenant of the Double Helix*) between processes of evolution/natural selection (whether true or false), and the motive power, the dynamism propelling them. * http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2010/sep/17/pope-benedict-xviAxel_{February 4, 2012
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"You know SO much about them and their membership but can’t even get the name right. Odd." Not at all. It is normally the mark of a second-rate mind to fail to prioritize what one chooses to remember, and what one allows to lapse into desuetude or quasi-desuetude. What we choose to forget, at least forget the details of, is as important as what we choose to store in our minds. Our cerebrally-oriented, autonomic intelligence generally takes care of that, in any case, except, presumably in the case of people with a photographic memory. But that would surely be confined to the printed word, rather than more extended professional activities; which presumably however could be re-learnt, perhaps more easily, if not more perfectly. Michael Schumacher's giving it a go, anyway. Children tend to be the only thorough-going intellectuals, since they desire knowledge and understanding for their own sake, which perhaps explains their generally superior, visual memory of the positions on a table of playing cards, to that of most adults, for example. Our memories have bigger fish to fry. And they would not include the precise name of a self-styled humanists' organisation.Axel_{February 4, 2012
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DrREC:
By the way, if the NCSE is ” INDIRECTLY promoting atheism!” by teaching scientific fact, is the solution to lie?
Unfortunately the NCSE does not promote the teaching of scientific fact.Joe_{February 4, 2012
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JDH: Thankyou for your response. Firstly, in your first paragraph you seem to have missed my point:
Yes, I do that for a living. Notice that sentence. “We write…” The best counter example you can think of is something that only an intelligent being could write???. No computer ever generated its own program. Intelligent beings needed to program it. I don’t know what point you were trying to make but I have to grade that comment as an epic failure and that example as proving my point. You try to dissuade me of believing in intelligent design by bringing up something that only exists because of intelligent design???
I am most assuredly NOT "try[ing] to dissuade me of believing in intelligent design"! (for a start I do not think that intelligent design is falsiable; for a second I think there's a real sense in which we are "intelligently designed"). Rather, tou set an interesting challenge, to which I am attempting to respond, namely your statement that: "I just don’t see how a truly thinking person comes to an atheist position. Sorry, no matter how many times people try to explain it I just don’t see it." You set out your own logical argument for theism, and I am trying to unpack that argument in order to discover where, in your logical chain, we may diverge. So I brought up the example of an agent that can make "rational decisions" but which does not, at least in what I take to be your understanding of the term, have "free will". I am well aware of the fact that computer programs are written by intelligent agents, and did not argue that they are not. My point is that we write them so that they can "make rational decisions" - those decisions are not ours, are not the work of an agent with (putatively) free will, but of a non-free-will-possessing computer program. We delegate, in other words, the decision-making to a computer, trusting that the decisions it will make will be rational (and with justification - after all, we programmed it so that it would make rational decisions). So I think that is the one logical slip in your reasoning: a decision-maker does not have to have "free will" in order to make a a rational decision, ergo, the ability to make a rational decision is not evidence of free will. It may well be evidence that the rational-decision-maker was intelligently designed, but I am not, at present, arguing either way, on that. I am simply saying that the fact that we are able to make rational decisions is not, in itself, evidence that we have free will. God, in other words (I am not advancing this argument, just drawing yoiur attention to its validity) could be an Intelligent Designer, and we the computer programs it designed, able to make rational decisions, as yours do, but without free will. Do you see my point?
As for the definition of random that is simple – a sequence where there is no correlation over time. We know that human beings generally do not do things randomly. In fact I have a friend who told me the story of a statistics prof who the first day of class assigned the homework problem of tossing a coin 50 times and writing down the results. He could always tell the students who did the actual assignment and those who faked it ( just wrote down what they thought were random H’s and T’s ). The reason is because all the students who faked it wrote correlated sequences. They would never write enough long sequences of H’s or T’s but would vary the HTHHTH much more than a random sequence would.
Correlate with what? Let me say what I think you are in fact saying (which is not something normally indicated by the word "correlate" which requires a minimum of two variables, cf it's derivation from "co-" and "relate"). The old chestnut of the stats prof works like this: the way you can tell whether a student had cheated or not (and you can only do this probabilistically, not definitively) is in a series of coin tosses, the probability of each toss is independent of what has gone before. What human beings do is that they tend to up the probability of a change in toss as a function of the number of same-tosses that have elapsed. In other words, the probability distribution of a human-generated pseudo-random series differs from that of an actual series of coin-tosses. But that doesn't mean the human-generated series is not random. It may well be, it's just that it tends to follow a different probability distribution from the results from a real coin-toss. But the same is true of other patterns that are non-intelligently generated, and which you might think of as "random", for instance, the occurrence of the next patch of sunlight on the kind of day that has lots of small patchy clouds and a brisk breeze. If you sat on a rock on that day, with a timer, and noted, every minute, whether the sun was out or in, you'd get some kind of random series. But it would look far more like the product of a human "random" series than a series of coin tosses, because the sizes of the clouds has a non-flat probability distribution. That doesn't mean the sizes aren't "random", unless you are using the word "random" to mean "with a uniform probability distribution". And apparently you aren't :) Oddly there is an exactly opposite example of a cheating detection method to your stats prof example, namely the use of Benford's Law. Benford's Law states that most data generating process result in a non-uniform distribution of digits, whereby the frequency of numbers beginning with a given digit is inversely proportion to the value of that digit. If a human cheats in some way - fakes the data - then the Benford distribution of numbers will tend depart from that given by Benford's law. In other words, human interference will tend to produce a more uniform distribution of initial digits than that suggested by a "natural" process. This technique has been used to detect election fraud, for instance.
OTOH contingent processes are demanded by the initial conditions. Water poured into a flume has only one direction it can go. Now in a (strictly natural setting ) ( a place where no intelligent causal agent can change the outcome ) what we get is a combination of random events and contingent events.
Well, you are using "contingent" in a rather special way. A series of events can certainly be totally contingent on initial conditions, but it can also be totally contingent on incidental conditions as well. "Contingency" in other words, refers to any outcome that depends ("is contingent on") any other event, whether that other event was an initial condition or something that happened along the way. And, as we know, from quantum mechanics, that the world seems to be fundamentally indeterminate, then there can be no events in the universe that are entirely dependent on "initial condictions". So I don't think your definition works here. What I think is a more coherent approach to the concepts of "Chance" and "Necessity" (and while I am a great admirer of Monod, I think his title, not well translated into English, has given us a misleading dichotomy that is not a dichotomy) is to regard "necessary" events as events that are contingent on very few others, possibly only one, whereas "chance" events are events that are contingent on a vast number of individually low probability events, and that there is therefore a continuum, not a dichotomy, of events with probability of p(A|B), where A is the event we are interested in, and B is the event that has the greatest causal relationship to it. Events that have a p of near 1 are "necessary" events, while events with a lower p are "chance" events. If p equals zero, we have a totally non-contingent event. But the point is that it's a continuum, not a dichotomy. No event is entirely contingent on another (as we know from quantum physics) and many events are contingent on a large number of events. And the result is that events take place with a probability that conforms to a probability distribution. Some of these distributions are flat, but very few, in nature. Most have a characteristic curve (Gaussian, or Poisson being the two commonest). I'll address your Rivers in a new post :) Cheers LizzieElizabeth Liddle_{February 4, 2012
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---"Dr. Rec: "Collins is a theistic evolutionist." Well, not exactly. A Theistic Evolutionist, strictly speaking, is one who believes that God used evolution to create man's material body from the bottom up using material processes and then intervened to implant an immaterial soul from the top down. This is the position of John Paul II, who was a true TE in the classical sense. A Christian Darwinist, who tends to pose as a TE, is one who believes that God used evolution to create BOTH man's body and soul from matter, which is illogical and impossible. This is the position of Miller, Collins, and others. It cannot be reconciled with Christianity. Collins is very confused because he believes his position to be the same as JPII. ---“No. Lets get simpler. I’m unaware of a ” Secular Humanist Association” Google turns up the New Orleans or Victoria Secular Humanist Association. Maybe you mean the American Humanist Association? You know SO much about them and their membership but can’t even get the name right. Odd.” LOL: You were unaware of a Secular Humanist Association, but when you Googled and find one, you were scandalized because I didn’t also mention the American Humanist Association, or the Secular Humanist Society, or the Council for Secular Humanism, or a number of other organizations both national and local, all of whom support the Humanist Manifesto and embrace Darwin’s pseudo scientific paradigm. Getting back to substance, why do you think I alluded to Barbara Forrest, who is a member of the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association? I was making a point which continues to escape you. Institutions set goals; methodologies do not. Thus, it is wrong to write about ID’s religious goals without differentiating between motives and methods. Do you finally get the fact that ID methodology has no goals? --“Regardless, you have a case where some evolutionary biologists happen to be members of secular organizations. As opposed to a movement founded on getting religion into school, and the destruction of methodological naturalism." You really are behind the curve on this one. The signers of the three Humanist Manifestos made sure that their pseudo science of Darwinism was injected in the schools a hundred years ago and they continue to intrude themselves to this day. Would you like for me to name names? Methodological naturalism, on the other hand, is only about 25 years old. It is a petty rule that Darwinists invented a few years ago in order to counter the ID movement. ---“You really wish we were half as bad as you know you are.” I didn't say that you were bad. I just said that you were in error. --- I’m the one saying the DI explicitly employs ‘scientists’ for the purpose of overturning materialism and introducing religious dogma into schools.” Well, yes on the overturning of materialism, but not on the intrusion of religious dogma. Let's test your claim. Which religious Dogma (Dogmas) is the DI trying to introduce to the schools? Be specific.StephenB_{February 3, 2012
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JDH: "This would be design detection." In the same sense that the stat teacher would detect design is a student handed back a paper with 50 T's written on it.junkdnaforlife_{February 3, 2012
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The intelligent human being in River 2 is told to make a choice. Either direct every leaf into the eddy, or direct every leaf so it avoids the eddy. He can make either choice, but once he makes the choice, he must stick with the same choice for every leaf. Merely by observing a few leaves and whether they correlate or not, you can tell which choice he made. His choice is just that. A choice. Yet it alters a strictly natural (unintelligent) event from being uncorrelated to being correlated. The whole process has become neither random or contingent. Everything depends upon the choice made by the intelligent human being. The same exact experiment will yield very different results by the introduction of an intelligent being. As a matter of fact, someone observing many runs of the experiment could probably tell that some intelligent being was determining the outcome. This would be design detection. Of course you could believe that the human being making the choices was somehow dictated by natural processes that were either contingent or random. But to believe this takes a mind bending amount of faith. Any reasonably intelligent human could decide to do everything the same after that first choice. For the each trial of the experiment, either always direct the leaf into the eddy, or always direct the leaf to avoid the eddy. To suggest that this was somehow dependent on some physical and chemical properties,stretches the limits of credulity. We are beings that can do things which are neither random nor contingent. To disbelieve that is to misunderstand so many things. Without the ability to make non-random, non-contingent choices, encoding is impossible. I am able to communicate to you over this medium of the internet solely because i am able to string together a large number of processes which select the next letter in this reply. These individual choices to select each letter are not contingent. I don't have to write certain symbols due to initial conditions. Eye ken eeven deecide two missspell efry werd inn won sentense. You will still get the meaning. They certainly are not random. Once you allow for actions which are not random, and not contingent, you enter the world of rational choice.JDH_{February 3, 2012
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Exposing Darwinism as a ‘degenerate science program’ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LpGd3smTV1RwmEXC25IAEKMjiypBl5VJq9ssfv4JgeM/edit?hl=en_US Falsification Of Neo-Darwinism by Quantum Entanglement/Information https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p8AQgqFqiRQwyaF8t1_CKTPQ9duN8FHU9-pV4oBDOVs/edit?hl=en_US Shoot Materialistic Atheism is a 'science stopper'; Why should the human mind be able to comprehend reality so deeply? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qGvbg_212biTtvMschSGZ_9kYSqhooRN4OUW_Pw-w0E/edit?hl=en_USbornagain77_{February 3, 2012
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DrREC, perhaps you would do well to realize that Darwinism is a pseudo-science, that should be taught in astrology class!bornagain77_{February 3, 2012
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We write computer programs that do this all the time, because computers do that kind of calculation much faster and more thoroughly than we can.
Yes, I do that for a living. Notice that sentence. "We write..." The best counter example you can think of is something that only an intelligent being could write???. No computer ever generated its own program. Intelligent beings needed to program it. I don't know what point you were trying to make but I have to grade that comment as an epic failure and that example as proving my point. You try to dissuade me of believing in intelligent design by bringing up something that only exists because of intelligent design??? As for the definition of random that is simple - a sequence where there is no correlation over time. We know that human beings generally do not do things randomly. In fact I have a friend who told me the story of a statistics prof who the first day of class assigned the homework problem of tossing a coin 50 times and writing down the results. He could always tell the students who did the actual assignment and those who faked it ( just wrote down what they thought were random H's and T's ). The reason is because all the students who faked it wrote correlated sequences. They would never write enough long sequences of H's or T's but would vary the HTHHTH much more than a random sequence would. OTOH contingent processes are demanded by the initial conditions. Water poured into a flume has only one direction it can go. Now in a (strictly natural setting ) ( a place where no intelligent causal agent can change the outcome ) what we get is a combination of random events and contingent events. To understand the difference between the two processes consider the thought experiment of trying to correlate how long it takes a leaf dropped into a river to reach a certain point, based on how far upstream it was dropped in. River 1 is a smoothly flowing river. A plot of time to reach the end point vs. location upstream is highly correlated. It actually just becomes a plot from which you can determine the velocity of the flow at each point. River 2 has a large eddy current. A plot of time to reach the end point vs. location upstream is a scatter diagram. Everything depends upon how many times the leaf went round in the eddy. The eddy wipes out any causal relationship between how far upstream the leaf was started and how fast it will reach the end point. Now let's put an intelligent human being in the midst of the experiment on River 2.JDH_{February 3, 2012
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By the way, if the NCSE is " INDIRECTLY promoting atheism!" by teaching scientific fact, is the solution to lie? If the world was much more "demon-haunted" (to borrow from Sagan), why we'd have so many more believers. Why scientifically explain the seasons, or dawn, or the tides, or thunder, or rainbows, or hurricanes, or the age of the universe or the earth, or geology, or anything, when you could leave people TRUE BELIEVERS (tm) with no rational ability to explain those things?DrREC_{February 3, 2012
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Right. Eugenie Scott, EXPLICITLY saying the goal of the NCSE is not to promote atheism, as evolution and theism aren't in conflict is TOTALLY equivalent to the mission statements of the DI I've posted above. That some scientists pointing out that a materially explicable world, that isn't "demon haunted" makes atheism viable isn't the fault of science. Maybe an outcome of science that conflicts with some faiths, but so did disproving a flat earth, a geocentric universe, or a young Earth.DrREC_{February 3, 2012
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Here you go DrREC; Eugenie Scott, very deceptively, denies that Darwinism and faith are in conflict in any way early in the EXPELLED movie, and in this segment of EXPELLED we have direct testimony that neo-Darwinism led to a atheistic worldviews of some leading proponents of Darwinism. Thus, whether Scott is honest or not the fact is that NCSE is INDIRECTLY promoting atheism! Scientists renounce God...why? - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpJ5dHtmNtUbornagain77_{February 3, 2012
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" The Discovery Institute ....can, at least indirectly, promote Theistic ...values" You think it is the DI's goal to INDIRECTLY promote theism? "The worldview of scientific materialism has been pitted against traditional beliefs in the existence of God, Judeo-Christian ethics and the intrinsic dignity and freedom of man. Because it denies the reality of God, the idea of the Imago Dei in man, and an objective moral order, it also denies the relevance of religion to public life and policy. .... defend the importance of Judeo-Christian conceptions of the rule of law," "“new atheists” have enlisted science to promote a materialistic worldview, to deny human freedom and dignity and to smother free inquiry. Our Center for Science and Culture works to defend free inquiry. It also seeks to counter the materialistic interpretation of science by demonstrating that life and the universe are the products of intelligent design and by challenging the materialistic conception of a self-existent, self-organizing universe" http://www.discovery.org/about.php Find me an equivalent quote from the NCSE website on atheism, and I'll concede the point.DrREC_{February 3, 2012
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"Collins embraces Darwinian evolution, which is, by definition, unguided." Let me correct that for you---Collins is a theistic evolutionist. He uses methodologically naturalist methods to study evolution, but personally believes it is guided. He doesn't propose the "guidance" as a studyable science. "I didn’t say that the Secular Humanist Association employs evolutionary biologists (as in putting them on the payroll), but rather that it employs pseudo science to advance its atheistic aims." No. Lets get simpler. I'm unaware of a " Secular Humanist Association" Google turns up the New Orleans or Victoria Secular Humanist Association. Maybe you mean the American Humanist Association? You know SO much about them and their membership but can't even get the name right. Odd. Regardless, you have a case where some evolutionary biologists happen to be members of secular organizations. As opposed to a movement founded on getting religion into school, and the destruction of methodological naturalism. You really wish we were half as bad as you know you are. But back to.. "I didn’t say that the Secular Humanist Association employs evolutionary biologists (as in putting them on the payroll), " I know you didn't. I'm the one saying the DI explicitly employs 'scientists' for the purpose of overturning materialism and introducing religious dogma into schools.DrREC_{February 3, 2012
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--DrRec: "I have more respect for Dr Collins'wits. And his personal belief isn't that evolution is unguided." Collins embraces Darwinian evolution, which is, by definition, unguided. Scientifically, he is very talented, but philosophically, he just doesn't measure up. How else can one explain his attempt to reconcile unguided Darwinian evolution with Christianity, which is compatible only with guided evolution. ---"I am not aware of a Secular Humanist Association that employs evolutionary biologists with the stated goal of advancing atheism." I didn't say that the Secular Humanist Association employs evolutionary biologists (as in putting them on the payroll), but rather that it employs pseudo science to advance its atheistic aims. Definition of "employ" = First Definition: a. To engage the services of; put to work: agreed to employ the job applicant. b. To provide with gainful work: factories that employ thousands. Second Definition: To put to use or service. [See Synonyms of use] That I was using the second definition should be evident in the fact that I was referring to ideas (Darwinian evolution) not people (evolutionary biologists. The idea was to dramatize the point that institutions (The Discovery Institute and the Secular Humanist Association) set goals and can, at least indirectly, promote Theistic or Atheistic values respectively, but that ID Methodologies ("irreducible complexity, "Specified complexity" etc.) or anti-ID methodologies (Darwinian evolution) do not. This is the context in which the Wedge document should be understood, that is, as a cultural initiative. Barbara Forrest has made a cheap career out of distorting the differences in order to publicize the lie that "ID science is all about promoting religion, as if a scientific methodology had the power to promote anything. Fortunately, the fact that she persuaded a stupid judge to agree with her is fast becoming a piece of irrelevant history.StephenB_{February 3, 2012
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I'd really like to think so!Bydand_{February 3, 2012
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Well, that may come out of the definitions of "random" and "necessary" and "rational choice".Elizabeth Liddle_{February 3, 2012
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"Is saying I have a “irrational fears of creationist subterfuge” engaging me as a scholar" Interestingly, I didn't say that about you, but about the NCSE.johnnyb_{February 3, 2012
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