Bill! This is a perfect opportunity for plush toy deployment! Get on the horn with Ellerbee and get on the show.

Nick News Explores Issues Surrounding the Teaching of Evolution and Intelligent Design in Schools

Nick News with Linda Ellerbee: God, Science, Politics and Your School – Sunday, Jan. 22, 8:30 p.m. (ET/PT) on Nickelodeon

NEW YORK, Jan. 11 /PRNewswire/ — In Nick News with Linda Ellerbee: God, Science, Politics and Your School, airing on Nickelodeon, Sunday, Jan. 22, 8:30 p.m. (ET/PT), award-winning journalist Linda Ellerbee and Nick News take a look at the on-going controversy surrounding the teaching of the theory of intelligent design alongside the theory of evolution in public school science classes.

“The goal of this show is not to debate the issues of evolution, intelligent design, or creationism,” said Ellerbee. “We just want to give kids a better understanding of what all the shouting is about, not to mention the court cases that have resulted already, and some that are shaping up. We also wanted to hear from kids affected by these disputes.” Read More ›

Broward County will be selecting a new biology book soon. One has a few paragraphs on Intelligent Design in it. We can have none of that! Critics say they don’t want intelligent design in schools because it’s based on faith, not science. So publishers of the second book, Biology: The Dynamics of Life, have offered to remove the page containing the passages. And Superintendent Frank Till has said he would cut the page to eliminate the controversy if teachers pick the book. Read The Whole Article Here

http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060110_bee_fight.html

Proponents of intelligent design, which holds that a supreme being rather than evolution is responsible for life’s complexities, have long criticized science for not being able to explain some natural phenomena, such as how bees fly.
……….
Proponents of intelligent design, or ID, have tried in recent years to promote the idea of a supreme being by discounting science because it can’t explain everything in nature.

“People in the ID community have said that we don’t even know how bees fly,” Altshuler said. “We were finally able to put this one to rest. We do have the tools to understand bee flight and we can use science to understand the world around us.”

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. . . “There are cultural forces at play here which go very deep,” Dembski said. “This is about our creation story, how we came about.” Dembski cautioned that any school board that adopts intelligent design in its curriculum must justify it on scientific, rather than religious, grounds to survive a legal challenge. http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060111/NEWS0101/601110436

. . . Dembski is the author of “The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design” and a senior fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture in Seattle. Organizers asked three Kansas University scientists critical of intelligent design to also speak at the event, but all declined. Brown said organizers could have used corporate funds distributed by the university for the event if there had been KU scientists on the roster. Brown said he offered to change the speaking format to make the invitation more attractive to the KU professors, but that didn’t work. MORE

Two biology textbooks with 2004 copyright dates feature Haeckel’s faked drawings (slightly redrawn and colorized). They are: Raven & Johnson, Biology Sixth Edition (ISBN: 0072921641) Voet & Voet, Biochemistry (ISBN: 047119350X) Further evidence for the longevity of evolutionary theory.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/the-blue-mountains-passage-that-made-darwin-wonder/2006/01/10/1136863239665.html

Randomness Is Unpredictability
Antony Eagle
Exeter College and Oxford University, Oxford OX1 3DP, UK
antony.eagle@philosophy.oxford.ac.uk

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2005 56(4):749-790; doi:10.1093/bjps/axi138

The concept of randomness has been unjustly neglected in recent philosophical literature, and when philosophers have thought about it, they have usually acquiesced in views about the concept that are fundamentally flawed. After indicating the ways in which these accounts are flawed, I propose that randomness is to be understood as a special case of the epistemic concept of the unpredictability of a process. This proposal arguably captures the intuitive desiderata for the concept of randomness; at least it should suggest that the commonly accepted accounts cannot be the whole story and more philosophical attention needs to be paid. Read More ›

Hubert Yockey, who at the Mere Creation conference in 1996 expressed to me some sympathy for ID and indicated at the time that he was not publicly coming out in favor of ID because he thought he could do the movement more good by working on his own program, has steadily been reversing himself on ID. Note that his love for the other side has not increased either. Here’s his latest. Scientific Reality vs. Intelligent Design’s False Claims—The Problem Is Getting Caught in Behe’s Tar Baby, Not Darwin’s Black Box Nuclear physicist and bioinformatician Dr. Hubert P. Yockey shows why Michael Behe and his ilk are wrong in his books, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life (Cambridge University Read More ›

Paul Kurtz’s skeptic organization has just announced its next cruise, this one to Alaska. Join the Center for Inquiry Explorers Club “with a rich line-up of events and activities, a stellar cast of speakers, entertainment, and breathtaking excursions, all aboard the luxurious Holland America Westerdam.” The top-billed speaker is Barbara Forrest (go here for details).

Fairly balanced reporting of the recent conference Dr. Dembski attended:

On a recent Tuesday evening, Moshe Tendler, an influential Orthodox rabbi and Yeshiva University biology professor, ambled onto the stage at Kovens Conference Center in North Miami. A stately figure with a wispy white beard and heavy glasses, he surveyed the 300-strong crowd of scientists and intellectuals — most clad in yarmulkes and dark suits with tallith tassels dangling about their waists — and urged them to spread the word that Darwin was wrong. “It is our task to inform the world [about intelligent design],” he implored. “Or the child growing up will grow up with unintelligent design…. Unintelligent design is our ignorance, our stupidity.” Read More ›

It appears that Ken Miller is contacting people about how I got the copy of that check for $7000 that Playboy Enterprises made out to Michael Ruse for writing a pro-evolution anti-ID article (go here for an image of the check). He could simply have asked me. Hef is actually a long-time Chicago buddy of mine (he and my Dad were at the UofI in Champaign-Urbana after WWII). Hef showed it to me the last time I was at the Mansion. Read More ›

From yesterday’s state of the commonwealth address by Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky: Our founding fathers recognized that we were endowed with this right by our creator. So I ask, what is wrong with teaching “intelligent design” in our schools. Under KERA, our school districts have that freedom and I encourage them to do so. This is not a question about faith or religion. It’s about self-evident truth. http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060110/NEWS0104/601100335/1008

People writing things like this are not welcome here. The two-faced Mr. Christopher will fit right in at Panda’s Thumb.