good comment

over at the black kettle a commenter nicely sums up the core issue with the Intelligent Design "argument", such as it is:

"It is easy to find gaps/holes/flaws in this theory; however, arbitrarily assigning these gaps in the theory as support for intelligent design is not really good science.

Your theory is incorrect Therefore, ours is correct.

This article only goes to point out problems with the theory of evolution, but in no way does it relate it back to Intelligent design. There seems to be a logic, that if evolution is wrong, therefore intelligent design is correct.

Flaws in the theory of Evolution do no support intelligent design.

Unknowns about evolution do not support intelligent design.."

Flaws in specific aspects of evolutionary theory add absolutely no weight to intelligent design. It must stand or fall on its own as a hypothesis. It fell.

Antievolution bill in Mississippi dies | NCSE

Another small victory for the Enlightenment.

NCSE: "Mississippi's House Bill 586, which if enacted would have required 'scientifically sound arguments by protagonists and antagonists of the theory of evolution' to be presented in the state's schools, died in committee on February 2, 2010, according to the legislative website."

please take our useless notions seriously

Apparently they've got religious nuts up in Canada as well. I looked in on a particularly virulent Christianist site, Black Kettle, and tried to engage in a bit of an argument over their Lying for Darwin post.  Several of my comments were scrubbed, which is I suppose is typical for a religious site (they live for censorship).

The point they were trying to make is that I need to read a 700 page book on intelligent design, Signature in the Cell, before I can criticize its thesis (i.e. the Magic Man did it).  The point I made, which was deleted, was that I don't need to read every holocaust denial treatise, astrology primer, or witch hunting manual to understand that these ideas are false.  Reliable, authoritative analysis has banished these nonsensical notions from academic circles.  It would be foolish to introduce Holocaust denial to a classroom as a subject worthy of debate, no matter how many idiots howl for its validity.

Science is a process that elevates theories that work and discards ideas that don't.  You don't see many alchemists around any more.  Intelligent Design and creationism are not useful to explain existing data or make any predictions.  As ideas they have no value. If they did, they would be in use.  I can guarantee few businesses desire profit more than the pharmaceutical industry.  I can also guarantee not a single private sector lab is spending a single dollar testing the validity of Intelligent Design as a useful concept for drug discovery.  Intelligent Design, like its parent Creationism, is a shallow attempt to insert religious doctrine into science education. It won't work, because it doesn't work.

among the believers

at war with the enlightenment

a trip to a Creation Museum in Vanity Fair:

"The Creation Museum isn’t really a museum at all. It’s an argument. It’s not even an argument. It’s the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism. This whole building is devoted to the literal veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis: God created the world in six days, and the whole thing is no more than 6,000 years old. Everything came at once, so Tyrannosaurus rex and Noah shared a cabin. That’s an awful lot of explaining to do. This place doesn’t just take on evolution—it squares off with geology, anthropology, paleontology, history, chemistry, astronomy, zoology, biology, and good taste. It directly and boldly contradicts most -onomies and all -ologies, including most theology."

a little later

But we should cut the creationists a little slack, because every new bit of evidence, every discovery, is a nightmare for them. Take the ark. The big-boat business poses all sorts of questions. But, again, they’ve got answers. There are models and plans and layouts of the vessel. You can walk through a part of the hull. There’s biblical carpentry and weather reports. And the dinosaurs are on board. (They were probably small ones, the museum helpfully adds.) But recently scientists found a new giant rat and a fanged frog in Papua, New Guinea, so now some Noah-ists have to redesign the amphibian quarters. The rats probably sort themselves out. O.K., so you get everybody aboard, 10 million creatures, times two, without the neighbors’ noticing. Where did the water come from? You have to flood the whole world. Did they import water from the Scientologists? No: it came from underground. There is a great reservoir, presumably for flooding purposes, under our feet. I assume that’s where it went back to. Why don’t we drill for it to water Phoenix? (By the way, the flood is where we get fossils from. That’s all the dead stuff, caught in mud.) When the waters abated, the animals got off, stretched, and walked around the world eating one another’s children. I’m not making this up. Nobody’s making this up. This is what happened.