The good folks at Radio Open Source, who I have worked with in the past (and who are involved in that little imbroglio with another group with whom I am associated), is having a big special on Intelligent Design. I was asked to be on the show, but I will be off doing other things, but should you have a question or comment you would like aired, go put it in the comments section.
You can find the links to listen along there.
*** Update ***
Creationism and intelligent design are going to be studied at the University of Kansas, but not in the way advocated by opponents of the theory of evolution.
A course being offered next semester by the university religious studies department is titled “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies.”
“The KU faculty has had enough,” said Paul Mirecki, department chairman. “Creationism is mythology. Intelligent design is mythology. It’s not science. They try to make it sound like science. It clearly is not.”
Hehe.
SomeCallMeTim
Good man, John. Lydon hosts an excellent program, and they should be getting a lot of support from the Net.
JWeidner
As a side note to this, I just saw on MSNBC that the University of Kansas is going to offer a class that treats ID as mythology….
scs
I disagree. ID is a ‘pseudoscience’, like phrenology. Let’s all use more accurate terms I say.
Lines
The bumps on my head told me to bomb Iraq
scs
The old “bump blaming” defense huh? It seems to work well, unless you’re in Texas.
JWeidner
Actually, I think I like ID better as a mythology. I much prefer to think that Zeus is watching over us all, ready to smite us with a thunderbolt.
Much cooler to have a legion of gods ready to interfere in day to day business, creating heroes, and seducing ladies.
ppGaz
Perfectly legitimate, if the Democrats had access to the same phrenology charts that you did.
John S.
I can dig it.
scs
.
Alright! One convert. And ppGaz, blame the Senate Phren Comm. for not sharing.
TallDave
They should really keep ID in Sunday school and seminaries. Its proponents have some very nicely constructed arguments and raise some legitimate concerns with evolution, but in the end it’s nonfalsifiable.
The Disenfranchised Voter
Once again liberal academia is imposing its leftist agenda upon the population. I’m sick of these intellectual bastards pushing facts and studies down my throat. All the evidence for ID that I need can be found in one book, and that book is the word of god.
Mike S
heh
SeesThroughIt
Hahaha! Good on ya, K.U. Hate your basketball team, am a new fan of your religious studies department.
W.B. Reeves
How “inflexible”.
Michael Newdow
What? There is RELIGION being studied at a public university?
Taxi! To the courthouse, and step on it!
Brendan Greeley
Hey guys, this was great. We had a technical problem, but Chris read some of jweidner’s comments on the KU course out over the air. You can get the audio here.
Sojourner
Worse than that – liberal facts.
Ancient Purple
GASP!
Gold Star for Robot Boy
Well, yeah.
Steve S
Someone better get David Horowitz on the phone to tell him about the evil Liberal professors at KU!
knayte
This news makes me giddy like a little school girl. I actually attend the University of Kansas. Kinda picks me up after the horrible last two days of basketball.
knayte
Actually, now that I think about it, I could very easily see this class being extremely political and vitriolic. I don’t think I would want to take this course. I imagine the people who will take it will be smug, self-righteous pricks. And I say this as a person who loathes ID.
At any rate, I’m still rather proud of my school for the idea.
Sine.Qua.Non
I don’t know.
Yesterday, I was summoning the spirits of thesis writing, and they managed to come through and I finished that bastard. You know, it had nothing whatsoever to do with 10 months of research, book summaries, point and cross point validation, organization, analysis, a solid hypothesis, and writing ability. NONE I TELL YOU!
Jackmormon
Is ID even sufficiently developed to be a mythology? Complex enough to be a pseudoscience? From everything I’ve read about it, it takes scientific evidence and then pushes too far into fantastical first causes. It’s too hedged about with polemics and logical games to inspire the imagination, to my eye.
Richard Bennett
It would be more appropriate to teach ID as an example of propaganda, and it’s followers as examples of brainwashing. To call it simply “mythology” is to be too kind.
JWeidner
Thank you Zeus, you have brought me fame and fortune!
Jcricket
Ra-men.
bago
This is truly a class that will be touched with his noodly appendage.
Slartibartfast
From Natural History (hardcopy); written by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. There’s also a series of position papers (from opposing points of view) on their website (link on front page). I haven’t waded through all of that yet.
BlogReeder
John, you have to be really careful with this kind of reckless blogging on things you don’t know about. ;) I mean look at what happened to Scott Adams.
Intelligent design part 2
Dexter
I agree. It has its place, but maybe not in a science class. It’s not science, but it’s also not the crazed “mythology” that some on the left call it.
Walker
It is more than just the lack of predictive power.
ID proponents have sophisticated logical fallacies that are hidden because they break the big question up into smaller questions. Their research into the smaller questions looks like real science. In Dembski’s case, his papers on random walks in a uniform probability space is legtimate (but not interesting) mathematics. However, the individual pieces don’t fit together to give the result they claim it does.
Jcricket
I would alter this statement as follows (additions in bold)
Seriously. There are two classes of ID claims. Those that are scientific (Bacterium Flagellum, Irreducible Complexity, evolution not observed, radioactive dating problems, fossil record gaps, etc.) have all been shown to be false or a misrepresentation of the facts about evolution they claim to “refute”. And those that are not scientific (God guided evolution, science is a religion, etc.), which simply have no place in science class.
Moreover, even if any of the specific criticisms of evolution raised by ID proponents were true, that wouldn’t point to a fatal flaw in evolutionary theory. Merely some more facts that need to be better explained. Think about other areas of science: The existence of black holes required a change in our understanding of gravity, time, etc. but not an elimination of Newtonian mechanics as a theory that explains most of the ordinary world’s workings. Light itself has properties of both particles and waves, but that lack of clarity doesn’t cause us to posit that it’s simply not possible there’s a scientific explanation for that.
If you read the scientific literature on evolution (something Scott Adams apparently thinks isn’t credible because it’s not written for lay people) you’ll see lots of controversy and discovery “around the edges” – designed to investigate specific unsolved issues in evolutionary theory, or to extend the theory into new areas (like how trade markets “evolve”).
The basics of evolution are simple, and easily understood. The support for evolution is deep and overwhelming (1000s of peer-reviewed articles, and nearly 150 years of research in many different fields). The ability to explain the details is compromised only by the false controversy that ID has created.
BTW, Stephen Jay Gould did some great lay-person writing on Evolution, as did Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. Even Carl Sagan had some great stuff (“Demon Haunted World”) about science vs. psuedo-science, and why the latter is so appealing to lay people.
BIRDZILLA
All the evolitionists can show for their efforts are a few bone fragments and some fossels with out one single bit of proof to support this evolutionay poppycock idea
Slartibartfast
Yes, they have “a few” bone fragments in the same sense that there are “a few” pieces of rock orbiting between here and Saturn.
They can spell (and think!), however, which goes a long way toward making an actual point.
The Disenfranchised Voter
How can I possibly make parody posts of the religious right when the actual posts by the religious right are such tough competition?!
Slartibartfast
The religious right posted here? All I saw was a lone idiot.
The Disenfranchised Voter
Sorry, a representitive of the religious right. You are correct he/she was a lone idiot, but then again isn’t the religious right just a plethora of “lone idiots”? Heh.
BIRDZILLA
The kansas JAYHAWK to evolutionists NUT CASES