Yes, friends. This is what our beloved country, the U.S. of A. has come to: pure, bull-headed ignorance.We have 50 percent of a population that willingly votes for Elmer Gantry for president.
Good Lord. As with most things, the devil is in the details. El Presidente Jorge Bush playing the role of U.S. Preacher-in-Chief, ala "Elmer Gantry" is bad enough.
But the fallout down the line is worse. Parents in Dover, Pennsylvania, have been forced to sue to keep their public school district from classifying and teaching "Intelligent Design" as science comparable to the theory of evolution. Yes, the wingnuts on the far right simply don't want to teach "ID" for what it is--another name for religion-based creationism. They want to call it SCIENCE.
Why, didn't you kow that Noah had dinosaurs on the Ark?
So, feeling good about America's future? Yes, I am sure that the future of science in America is just dandy.
This is from an article in The Times of London. This paper does a great job of covering this kind of crap--their editors aren't afraid of the right-wing crazies the way too many American newspaper editors now are.
An excerpt:
Parents take stand on Darwin versus God in school
From James Bone in New York
PARENTS in a rural Pennsylvania town are mounting the first legal test of the controversial theory of the origin of life known as intelligent design.
Eleven parents are suing the Dover school board for requiring teachers to cast doubt on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and to offer intelligent design as an alternative.
The landmark case, dubbed Scopes II, comes eight decades after the infamous Scopes “monkey trial” in which a teacher named John Scopes was convicted of illegally teaching evolution in a Tennessee school, rather than sticking to the biblical version of the creation. Lawyers on both sides expect the case to go all the way to the US Supreme Court.
Conservative Christians are pushing intelligent design to bypass the 1987 ban on creationism in schools. It argues that Darwin’s theory of natural selection cannot explain the emergence of highly-complex life forms, and that a higher intelligence must have created them.
The parents’ lawyers told the court in the nearby city of Harrisburg that intelligent design was merely “a 21st-century version of creationism”.
Read the entire article in The Times of London World section.
Good luck to the parents in Pennsylvania who are standing up to the religious wingnuts.
http://aftertherevolution.blogspot.com/2005/09/were-dinosaurs-on-noahs-ark_27.html?showComment=1127865360000#c112786539832841360'> 7:56 PM
Intelligent Design, the idea that life is too complex to have come about naturally and therefore must have been helped along by an “intelligent designer” aka “God” is very bad for Christians. The problem is that the design is not perfect. No part of life is perfect.
Oh don’t get me wrong, it works well. Infact it’s been extreamly successful as you and I are a testament to. But it’s far from perfect. The very mechanism that allows reproduction to be successful, also is responsible for tremendous missery and grief.
The fact is that DNA does not copy accurately 100% of the time. Infact it’s extreamly predictable statistically speaking that a given number of genes will mutate from generation to generation. Of course on an individual basis it’s about as random as the lottery.
Even when dealing with trisomies - where an entire extra chromosome containing thousands of genes gets copied - the rate of conception is predictable - about 20%. Birth rates of course very depending on environmental factors and age of the mother, but again extreamly predictable when looking at a population as a whole. The chances of having a child born with trisomy (like Down Syndrome or Edwards Syndrome) are 1 in 100 for a mother in her mid to late 30’s (yes I’m intimate with the statitics).
From a “designers” point of view you don’t expect your design to generate perfect reproductions each time - you have tollerences. But surely the ID crowd is not insinuating that God is “tollerant” of a less than perfect design?
This is the rub. Copying genetic material is the very basis of reproduction - the basis of life. And it’s not perfect. Therefore the design is not perfect. If you say that God is behind the “intelligent design” you are saying that God is not perfect - which goes against the very definition of what “God” is.
On the flip side from the Evolution Theory point of view, these predictable (yet random on an individual level) mutations are the very drive that allows populations of species to adapt to changing environments.