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They sure do have mandated classes in Qatar for religion though. Texas on the other hand, doesn't.

Yes, Texas has mandated teaching of religion in schools.

http://pandasthumb.org/archive...

http://www.slate.com/articles/...

http://io9.com/a-map-showing-w...

I don’t know about you evilutionists. But to me, these stalactites and stalagmites look very much designed. Only dogmatic Darwin worshipers could be dumb enough to believe that these stalactites and stalagmites would know where to start growing so that eventually meet at a point, conjoin, become a pillar and hold the roof of the cave up.

There is symmetry in the formations, symmetry means information, symmetry means reduction in disorder, reduction in disorder is reduction in entropy and entropy can not be reduced by random naturalistic mechanistic processes. If these formations are “natural” then they violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The pathetic inability of the theory of evolution to account for the cave formations completely disproves any credibility the Big Bang Theory might have. It stretches the credulity of the American Public, 62% of whom don’t believe evolution anyway, that these scientists would confidently see amino acids and methane in planets and moons in the sky, when they cant see that mud-to-stalactite evolution is impossible.

Abiogenesis is definitely an unsolved problem - so far. So what? The question of how life got started is logically distinct from how it developed after that start. And evolution addresses that question comprehensively. (Even in the case of the putative examples of 'irreducible complexity' that ID'ers have advanced - e.g. the bacterial flagellum, the clotting cascade, or the vertebrate immune system.)

(Oh, and progress is actually being made on the abiogenesis front anyway.)

I don't care what your pre-conceptions are, science is supposed to embrace and seriously consider all theories.

Young-Earth creationism was considered. For the whole of scientific history, up until the late 1800s when the gathering evidence finally made it impossible for geologists to take the idea seriously.

"Intelligent Design" has also been considered, and so far it has failed the tests. Every proposed example of "irreducible complexity", for example, has been conclusively shown not to be - the bacterial flagellum, the clotting cascade, the vertebrate immune system, and so forth. Cdesign proponentsists" can't even coherently define the 'information' they think living things display.

That's why we say that creationism and ID are not science.

I don't care what your pre-conceptions are, science is supposed to embrace and seriously consider all theories.

Young-Earth creationism was considered. For the whole of scientific history, up until the late 1800s when the gathering evidence finally made it impossible for geologists to take the idea seriously.

"Intelligent Design" has also been considered, and so far it has failed the tests. Every proposed example of "irreducible complexity", for example, has been conclusively shown not to be - the bacterial flagellum, the clotting cascade, the vertebrate immune system, and so forth. Cdesign proponentsists" can't even coherently define the 'information' they think living things display.

That's why we say that creationism and ID are not science.

I don't care what your pre-conceptions are, science is supposed to embrace and seriously consider all theories.

Young-Earth creationism was considered. For the whole of scientific history, up until the late 1800s when the gathering evidence finally made it impossible for geologists to take the idea seriously.

"Intelligent Design" has also been considered, and so far it has failed the tests. Every proposed example of "irreducible complexity", for example, has been conclusively shown not to be - the bacterial flagellum, the clotting cascade, the vertebrate immune system, and so forth. Cdesign proponentsists" can't even coherently define the 'information' they think living things display.

That's why we say that creationism and ID are not science.

Here's a few I use all the time:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/

http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/

http://www.pandasthumb.org/

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/ataglance

http://scienceblogs.com/channel/24-hours/?utm_source=globalChannel&utm_medium=link

http://sciencehack.com/

1) ID is not Young Earth Creationism (YEC), though it is primarily used as a smokescreen by YECs.

I strongly disagree with the first half of this and agree with the second half. Ever heard of cdesign proponentsists?

2) ID is the belief that evolution is mostly true, but that something "interfered" with evolution, allowing it to overcome the statistical challenges to evolving more complicated life.

I assume that by 'statistical challenges' you mean the apparent 'almost-impossibility' of, say, a particular genetic sequence arising out of pure chance. That completely ignores the influence of natural selection.

3) To put it in probabilistic terms, consider the world as being a giant casino filled with slot machines, and every time a jackpot is hit in a slot machine, a new species evolves. ID is the claim that someone is interfering with the odds on the machines, evolution is the stance that enough jackpots will be hit without interference.

That is a pretty simplistic analogy, and as we will see it falls apart under further scrutiny.

4) Put in those terms, it becomes statistically falsifiable (to arbitrary levels of confidence). One simply needs to determine numbers for hitting jackpots / speciation and compare them against the record of events. Or even better, going forward, keep track of the genomes of all species on earth, and see if mutation and speciation rates match theory.

I don't know what is 'simple' about this proposal. For a start 'speciation' is not particularly clear cut. Secondly, how would you go around 'determining the numbers'? What exactly is the prediction of ID that would be falsified by this? Say we come up with a nice curve showing speciation rates against the age of the earth. How about if an ID proponent fits a curve to the data and then uses that as their 'theory'? What has that shown about the hypothesis of a designer? In addition, how about if the designer deliberately chose a rate that is identical to the one 'predicted by evolution' (whatever that means)?

Lastly, you touch on another aspect of a good scientific theory, the ability to make testable predictions. ID does not have this ability at all, unless you count "the designer will make this culture of bacteria evolve faster than evolution 'predicts', but if he/she/it doesn't, never mind, he designed it to be the same anyway".

5) It is possible to develop a statistical method that determines to an arbitrary level of confidence, if species A could have evolved from species B given time duration T.

Hmm, maybe if you ignore the whole of evolutionary biology and genetics, yes.

One very important point that got lost in all the noise is this: we will need a statistical method to determine intelligent design no matter what. Ignore the whole evolution thing - as our skills with genetic engineering move forward, it will be critical to be able to tell if West Nile 2012 is an intelligently designed species or not.

I guess I have been trolled. This can't be serious.

How does evolution explain a four chambered heart? Take away one chamber and the whole thing doesn't work. Add a chamber to a three chamber heart and it fails. Nowhere is there any type of record, fossil or otherwise that explains how a four chambered mammalian heard evolved from a three chambered reptilian heart.

See here. Reptiles have a 3 chambered heart, but some (turtles) show the beginning of the formation of a septum separating the ventricle in two chambers. An article in Nature back in 2009 described the discovery of the genetic mutation that led to complete separation - I couldn't find the link to the Nature article itself, but here's a digest and here are a few quotes. The most important conclusion there is IMHO that there exists a relatively minor genetic change which leads to the formation of the extra heart chambers, advantageous for natural selection

Pianka has stated that his statements were taken out of context, that he was simply describing what would happen from biological principles alone if present human population trends continue, and that he was not in any way advocating for it to happen. The Texas Academy released a statement asserting that "Many of Dr. Pianka's statements have been severely misconstrued and sensationalized" (source). Further, when asked for clarification by the very reporter who publicized his "genocidal rant", Pianka stated "I don't advocate killing people". The reporter chose not to report that statement.

But, of course, it's much more fun to call environmentalists wackos who want to kill humans.

Jones should take a lesson from Richard Lenski (see)
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/06/lenski-gives-co.html

There is an answer that makes a lot of sense. He too has spent 20+ years generating data.

There is legitimate concern that the data would be 'misquoted'. However Jones' answer leaves a lot to be desired.
Compare to Lenski's answer where he does agree to provide data (and perhaps samples?) to legitimate requests.
Even if the request is from a news organization you suspect is out to disprove your conclusions, that is not in itself a valid reason to refuse. If you want your conclusions to be put into action in the real world (i.e. political decisions regarding car emissions, carbon taxes etc.) you should be prepared to go through the political process. Messy perhaps, but necessary.
softcoder.

As an atheist who lives in rural Illinois, where there are plenty of bible thumpers, I would be happy to have a much faster internet connection. It would also hopefully educate the uneducated masses here about such evil sites like the pandas thumb which would help them become less thumperish.

As usual I tried to make a tongue in cheek remark and ended up chewing my tongue. I meant Google’s indexer is so fast. Original posting was made at March 3, 2010 2:09 PM. It was in the index by March 3, 2010 5:08 PM. And it was not even from news.google.com, it is the general web search. Pretty soon Google will tell me that I’m out of milk even before I open the fridge door.

Intelligent design and (young earth) creationism are in general rather distinct

I refer you to "cdesign proponentsists"

They started out the same, and they are still the same.

ID *is* creationism, just with fancy words tacked on and all overt references to the designer definitely being God removed.

This is certainly an oversimplification of Behe/etc, but I do genuinely think it distills their position/actions down decently: "Sure we're being rather cagey about putting forward testable falsifiable predictions nowadays, because all previous attempts(flagella, blood clotting, etc... have been shown to just Not Be True), but really! A designer designed things we see in living things now! Help, help, I'm being oppressed!"

There are few examples of this which have gotten prominent media attention. One ongoing example is that of John Freshwater, an 8th grade school teacher who was found to be a) teaching creationism to his students and b) using a Tesla coil to burn crosses onto students arms. These were among other problems. The district finally got sick of it all and tried to get him fired. The result is a series of lawsuits which are still ongoing. This is getting regular coverage over that The Pandas Thumb http://pandasthumb.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=2&tag=Freshwater&limit=20 due mainly to the fact that Freshwater was promoting Young Earth Creationism. So in this case we have a teacher who was engaged in unconstitutional behavior and also engaging in what might constitute assault and the district still can't rid of him without a massive hassle.

It's "insightful" because he's pointing out a severe weakness in the cdesign proponentsists' plan.

That once they can teach creationism as science because it's an "alternative theory", you can teach ANY alternative theory you want, FSM included.

http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/03/egnorance-combo-arrogance.html

They simply demonstrate that the world and universe contain much evidence of the presence of "design".

Mind sharing with us what this evidence is?

And please don't bring up that old Behe flagellum unless you want to bring some facts to the table.

The Panda's Thumb has more on this. It seems Reiss was misquoted and the victim of alarmist reporting.

I could post my own opinion here, but I think The Panda's Thumb does a much better job of covering this fiasco.

$ sed 's/creationism/intelligent design/g' creationist_textbook.txt

No, They apparently did the cut-n-paste job by hand. And butchered the job.
Linky linky: cdesign proponentsists

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Did the Louisiana law actually INTEND this

The history of this bill and the motivations of the people involved are well documented. The prototype for this bill came from the Discovery Institute, primary home of the fundie anti-science ID movement. Academic_Freedom_bills

The intended purpose of the bill is to aid this sort of Intelligent Design textbook into science class. To introduce bogo-science into the classroom discrediting evolution, to promote Biblical Creationism as the implied remaining alternative to evolution.

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Why is banning organized prayer

Because of the Constitutional right of religious liberty.
An individual right to be free from the force of government being used against you to meddle in religious matters. The force and powers of government may not be used against use for the purpose of promoting or suppressing any religion or any religious belief or any religious practice.

Students have a right to (nondisruptively) pray in school, or not, as they choose.
The force and powers of government may not be used to meddle in that liberty.

or any religious instruction in schools

"Religious instruction" is absolutely permissible, if done properly. Something like "History of Religion" or "Comparative Religion" is quite acceptable, so long the teacher (acting as an official agent of the government) does not attempt to abuse their government-granted powers for the promotion their own favored religion or to suppress any disfavored religion.

the teaching of ID

Because what they are attempting to teach has absolutely no purpose other than as an attempt to push Biblical Creationism. There is absolutely zero scientific educational value or purpose in the materials they are attempting to push. Seriously - these materials have no value in a science class, other than perhaps as a case study in why it fails as science and in identifying pseudoscience/junkscience/fraudscience.

In 1987 the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to push Creationism in the public school science class. Within months of that ruling being handed down the Creationist textbook "Of Pandas and People" went through a cut-and-paste hackjob to remove words like "Creationism" and "Creationists" and replace them with "design proponent". Amusingly one of the draft copies cropped up and it contained the rather amusing phrase "cdesign proponentsists" where they attempted to cut "creationist" and paste in "design proponent".

It is LITERALLY the exact same creationist textbook with the exact same purpose of promoting creationism, simply with the word "creationist" pasted over with a new label. This was literally the birth of ID. The ID movement is literally nothing more than the Creationist movement playing a game, clipping out the word "God" and "creationist" and hiding behind a really cheap Halloween mask called ID, in a deliberate and dishonest attempt to sneak around the Constitutional prohibition against using the government to push religion in the public schools.

The purpose of highschool science class is to teach students an overview of the major fields of science as understood and applied by professionals in those fields. In evolution *is* considered the understanding of biology by some 99.8 or 99.9% of degreed professional biologists. Representing evolution as scientifically controversial is outright dishonest.

The purpose of a highschool science class is to reflect and FOLLOW scientific understanding and the scientific community. It is NOT the place for a highschool science class to attempt to LEAD science. The proper place to legitimately challenge science with something new is in the scientific community by proper scientific work and proper expert peer review checking the quality of that work.

The ID movement has completely abandoned the scientific battlefield because none of their claimed science hold up under expert review. Instead they are attempting to fight this battle in the political arena, and attempting to fight it in the court arena, and attempting to fight it in the highschool classroom arena, and they are attempting to fight it as a Public Relations campaign.

The Discovery Institute and other organizations behind the ID movement, they have millions of dollars a year in funding, and they spend ZERO of it on doing any science. They sped it ALL on politicians and on lawyers and on public relations. Hell, look at this:

We always hear about ID and anti-evolution schemes in the USA.
Can readers in other parts of the world reflect on ID-like movements in their own countries?
How evolution-denial movements fare in Europe for example?

As evolution is considerably more widely accepted around the world than it is in your little pit of idiocy, such movements tend to be less significant.

It is obvious that you appear threatened by the thought that they could be right which explains your position somewhat.

Why would you say that?

But here is the situation as we have it now, if Evolution is the result of some other natural mechanism, we will never know it because the current debate consists of a "i said so, so this is the way it is".

You clearly don't spend much time following the actual work of evolutionary biologists. There's a lot of discussion and debate on all manner questions about the evolution of complex systems and the origin of life. They're not just hanging around and collecting paychecks while figuring out how to persecute Behe and Dembski. The picture you're drawing of the biological research community is simply not an accurate one.

I don't understand why you are insisting victory by default.

Because the intelligent design camp has made absolutely no positive claims that aren't simply framed as evolutionary theory being wrong. They're merely presenting the false dilemma that if evolutionary theory doesn't explain it, then it must be intelligently designed. If you can suggest a single positive, objectively testable claim that they make, I'm all ears.

But the framing of your questioning tells me that you don't even comprehend then claims being made by the ID camp. How do you pretend to be authoritative enough to speak against it if you won't invest the time and effort to argue against the arguments being made?

I have to tell you that the evolution / creationism (now...err..."intelligent design") debate has been something I've followed closely for years. I'll gladly stack my reading list against yours on this one any day. As far as I can tell, the arguments that are being made generally boil down to personal incredulity or, if we're lucky, mathematical hand-waving with questionable assumptions. I'm going to have to skip over your car analogy as it doesn't make the slightest bit of sense to me.

You see, It isn't that evolution wouldn't happen on it's own or without inteligence assisting it, it's that certain complexed parts of it are too complexed to happen naturally by chance.

I appreciate that. My point is that they're simply asserting it and doing very little in terms of real work to support the point.

As for the winning by default, it is simple, find a way to verify that it could happen without an intelligent assist.

That's a big "it" in this case. The flagellum? The immune system? Blood clotting? There is a nearly infinite supply of examples. And progress is being made. Behe's points on these have been answered with possible theoretical pathways. Does that falsify ID? Certainly not. There are always examples of work not yet done and problems not yet solved, and history has shown that if a pathway is suggested for one feature, the ID crowd simply picks up a new feature to harp on. ID simply lives in those crevices that evolutionary hasn't filled in yet. That's why it's not a proper theory of its own but rather a glorified null hypothesis.

I think you are confused. They have been rejected from schools because of a connection to the cheerleaders on the side lines.

I think that you're the confused one on this point. If you look back on the creationism in schools controversy over the past 30 years or so, you'll find the same players cropping up over and over again. There are certainly some legitimate players who honestly think that ID will move in as a theory, but the real power players who are pushing these things into schools are the cdesign proponentsists who have been around since day one, trying to find a legal way of getting creationism into schools. Replace "God" with "designer"

Pure ID (i.e without the superfluous Creationist baggage) is agnostic about the nature of the designer, other than it requires intelligence.

So anyway, why did I use the word paranoid? It seems to me that with notable exceptions*, the Evolutionists I've come across when they're dealing with Creation/Evolution have been badly bitten by the antics of the rabid Creationists. The Evolutionist response to Intelligent Design seems to be disproportionate and often off topic - which looks to be somewhat paranoid about a rabid Creationist resurgence.

It may not be a scientific theory, but the word theory does not have such limitations in general usage.

You want someone to explain a joke?

Creationist believe God created the earth about 6,000 years ago. Some believe that was it, and no changes have occured since then, others believe evolution began occuring almost immediately.

ID'ers believe evolution does happen, but it is guided by the "hand of god".

Yes, there's a lot of overlap between the two groups, and ID was created by creationists to involve god into the evolutionists theories. But its not same thing, and claiming it is weakens your position by making you apear to be a moron.

It is also interesting to note that both Nazis and Ayn Rand Libertarians both get hard over Darwinism for exactly the same reasons. The only difference is that Hitler uses the State to enforce survival of the fittest

Can you point me to statements by "most" design theorists which state that homo sapiens and dinosaurs lived at the same period? I doubt you can. This misrepresentation of Intelligent Design is starting to get old.

Their is no place for religion in modern society. Nobody should expect their irrational fantasies to be taken seriously. Dressing up a bunch of myths and calling them religion does not make them valid. To see blind faith as a virtue is insane. Religious faith should be viewed as evidence of an inability to reason.

Not quite. First, most religions provide a social and moral framework that has (in most cases) survived, adapted, and proven workable over timescales of at least a century. From an evolutionary standpoint, that's progress not trivially to be thrown out. (Track down a copy of David Sloan Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral; reading Pinker's The Blank Slate first might give further perspective.) Second, even blind faith is a survival virtue in some cases. The absolute delusional conviction that you CAN get out of a mess without dying leads one to keep trying, even when the chances are incredibly slim and when lying back and dying would be easier. Religious faith in the sense of acting 100% certain on questions when substantial doubt does exist or the proposition is fundamentally untestable (such as "Does our existence have any higher purpose?"), while understanding that doubt does exist and the answer may be "no", is the moral equivalent of a mathematician specializing in math where the axiom of choice is affirmed.

That said, I would agree that far greater skepticism should be shown to tenets unique to particular creeds (such as the need to eat filet mignon) than to those that nigh all creeds share (such as variants of the Golden Rule); and furthermore, that blind faith in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence -- such as cdesign proponentsists show about Evolution -- is evidence of either inability or unwillingness to reason. But for socializing small children and other simple sociopaths, religion isn't the worst tool out there.

Discovery Institute does not actively support creationism, it is common institute for advocates of Intelligent Design. This is a common misunderstanding to think that ID == Creationism, but when you study its past a little better, you see that first active proponents had no connection to creationist movement.

You are slightly confused. The people who used take-down notices to silence their critics were the Creation Science Ministries run by Kent Hovind. See http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/09/hovinds_goons_u.html . CSE is another another anti-evolution group but different than the DI. Among other differences, CSE is very much Young Earth Creationist(YEC) (that is believing in a world that is about 6000 years old) with all the Biblical literalism thrown in. And Hovind is sufficiently crazy that even many of the other Young Earth Creationists, such as Answers in Genesis (the world's largest Young Earth ministry before a schism they had. Possibly still the world's largest YEC ministry) don't like him. In contrast, the Discovery Institute has Old Earth Creationists as well as Young Earth Creationists united under the big tent that agrees that at least something is wrong with evolution. Thus, they include people like Paul Nelson, a YEC, with Michael Behe who accepts common descent of all life but thinks that God needed to step in to tinker every now and then.

By all means, attack the DI for this behavior, but don't accuse them of doing things done by others.

The Panda's Thumb also has a story about this, along with a video of "Dr." Hovind. Up until a few days ago CSE's website had this disclaimer: "None of the materials produced by Creation Science Evangelism are copyrighted, so feel free to copy those and distribute them freely.", now that disclaimer is gone. Is Hovind trying to retroactively copyright stuff that has been in the public domain for years?

Hovind is currently serving 10 years in prison for tax evasion. One would think that his time would be better spent raising money to appeal his conviction, or getting his sentence reduced; rather than filing fraudulent DMCA takedown notices. Unless Hovind's son is running the ministry now while mum and dad sit in the pen. If that's the case then Hovind's son doesn't appear to be anymore aware of the law than his father was.

>Thus, the eye has arisen independently some 22 times in the tree of life, IIRC.

This was, basically, the claim of the incredibly brilliant and prolific biologist Ernst Mayr (who was still doing award-winning research when he was 96.) However, other sources have indicated that one of the opsin molecules involved only evolved once, so one of the core processes for vision is unique, rather than the full visual system having evolved 22 times in different ways. However, opsin-deficient, blind animals can get their sight restored with algal light-harvesting pigments used in photosynthesis. So, whether or not vision *did* evolve multiple times, it's sufficiently redundant it doesn't seem to rely on specific photoreceptors very much.

I just thought that was interesting. It also probably means the claim of many totally separate evolutions of the eye is false, but it's quite possible there were a couple related evolutions.

Can I just edit that slightly for you?

As if a hundred million anti-evolutionists screamed in error (yet again).

Although I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the "suddenly silenced" part--that never seems to happen, they just get more shrill and more stupid.

The original poster has a point: in English, creationists use the term "evolutionism" far more than non-creationists. Non-creationists just say "evolution". Some speculate that the creationist terminology originated from an attempt to make evolution seem less scientific, since the "-ism" suffix is often used to refer to ideologies or belief systems (such as "creationism"!). This is especially apparent when creationists refer to evolutionary biologists as "Darwinists". Try here (halfway down) and here and here.

Anthony Flew is now, at most, a deist.

The excerpt outlines a web of fake citizens' groups and bogus (but authoritative sounding) research institutes designed to convince laypeople that human causation of global warming is scientifically controversial.

The Panda's Thumb also has a small write-up on this. Although their site seems to be down right now. For those of you who like charts and graphs, PZ Myers has one here. I wish they had of surveyed Canada, I suspect we would rank higher than the US, but not as high as some of the mainland European countries. Perhaps around the same as the UK.

Uncommon Descent, even after their failure in basic statistics this morning, kind of outdid themselves with that post.

The entire complaint there is that the find was called "the missing link". Except... who called it "the missing link"? Well... Fox News.

Fox News manages to disprove evolution sheerly by how they chose to word their headline? Wow. Who would have seen it coming?

This is really the most fascinating thing about the "Intelligent Design" movement. The most extreme and fundamental flaw with "Intelligent Design" creationists is that they simply don't produce anything; year after year while evolutionary biology moves ahead and makes interesting new discoveries, intelligent design creationists keep repeating the exact same mantras over and over, year in and year out, barely stopping even to revise them in the face of refutations. While science goes out and does research, intelligent design creationists sit around and do nothing, because they either already know all the answers or don't care what the answers are.

You'd think intelligent design creationists would be kind of embarrassed of this, and try not to call attention to this. But no. In fact, they take it as a point of pride. Every time evolutionary biologists learn something new, intelligent design creationists-- in particular those at Dembski's uncommon descent blog-- jump on it and claim victory. "Ah ha!" they said. "Evolutionary theory now knows something it didn't before! Why didn't it know that before? This shows how flawed evolution is, that they keep discovering new things!". IDCers see evolution's willingness to learn and constant progress as a sign of weakness, flipfloppery and intellectual bankruptcy. The IDCers themselves, meanwhile, are safe from any such allegations, as each year they remain exactly as ignorant as they were before.

Um, Forrest Mims is a creationist wingnut (and I say that with no offense meant to any nuts that might exist on wings). This article is similarly being spread by people like Dembski. Here's a debunking. Here's more.

There's one minor, itty-bitty difference between Pianka's speech and Forrest's reporting. Pianka said that it's going to happen, not that he wants it to happen. Pianka believes that a worldwide airborne plague is inevitable due to overpopulation, and campaigns to try and encourage population control (esp. in third world countries) are critical. While I don't agree with that, it's a valid argument, and is anything but "I want 90% of the world to drop dead."

"Just the other day, one scientist was cheering for ebola to wipe out 90% of the people to save the animals. Just give me one good reason to trust these people, just one!"

Maybe you should reconsider who you trust and where you get the news. A blog posting with several links regarding what this scienstist actually said is here: http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/04/forres t_mims_cr.html

Maybe the scientist in question is a bit pessimistic, but saying he WANTS 90 percent of humanity dead is inaccurate, and saying he wants your family dead is just trying to get an emotional resonse to some spin on the story.

Maybe you're being emotionally manipulated by your right wing sources? It happens to both sides. (I agree that nuclear power is overdue, btw)

Take a look at http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/11/missin g_link_cd.html

Read all about it here: http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/12/waterl oo_in_dov.html

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

Unless you're talking about Intelligent Falling, then all bets are off. In all seriousness, this is just a little speedbump in the march of progress. The Kansas creationists tried this in 1999, and got voted out. Now they're are back, but they'll be easier to beat this time. Teaching creationism was found to be unconstitutional in Edwards v. Aguillard. In the Intelligent Design (ID) trial in Dover, strong evidence has been presented showing that "ID" is a drop-in replacement for "scientific creationism." For instance, in the ID book "Pandas and People" we have the remains of a word processor search and replace operation with "cdesign proponentsists" being the resulting "transitional fossil," as Pandas' Thumb puts it. The Dover transcripts make for some particularily hilarious reading, especially Mike Behe's testimony, or when members of the Dover school board perjure themselves. We can count on a trial taking place in Kansas very soon, and it will go in much the same manner as it did in Dover. The Kansas Kangaroo Court has already laid the groundwork, providing good evidence on the motivations of the IDers, and how they are indistinguishable from creationists. These guys have shot themselves in the foot so badly that if either Dover or Kansas went to the Supreme Court it is hard to imagine the outcome for ID being any different than it was in the Edwards v. Aguillard decision back in '87. The two dissenters in Edwards v. Aguillard were Scalia (predictable) and Rhenquist, so even with if Roberts and Alito* vote theocratic (unlikely, they seem rational to me, at least) it'll be a 5-4 split with ID losing. IANAL, tho. I think the big take home message of this is that all of us who care about science need to keep up on what the kooks are doing. While I'm fond of following the creationist movement and even have a small collection of creationists books I've picked up from used book stores, I don't have the slightest idea of who is on the local school board and whether they are pro- or anti-science. That's going to change, though.