Slashdot Mirror
How Earth Resembles a Gooey Confection
Ant contributes a link spotted on Neatorama that may upset middle school Earth Science teachers, writing "LiveScience says Earth's simple schematic is not core, mantle, and crust anymore. It is more like the gooey center of a chocolate morsel harboring peanut butter and honey. Inner Earth is far more nuanced than outward appearances would suggest. A new model is proposed in the May 2, 2008, issue of the journal Science."
It would very much annoy varous anti-intellectual cults if they cared that Gregor Mendel was a quite pious Priest and Augustinian Monk. They like to simplify it all to some joke about Darwin and a monkey but our understanding of evolution owes quite a lot to Gregor Mendel. I suppose the cults can write it all off as evil Catholcism and the evil idea of having an educated clergy - or I suppose evil education in general of which evolution is the soft target.
The "perfect theory" on the other hand is the complete lazy copout of "intelligent design" which can be summed up as "this is all too hard to try to understand - let's just say the God ate my homework". It is perfect because it does not have to do anything so cannot fail - but is really entirely pointless in my opinion. What various anti-intellectuals do not understand is that Theology is about one set of things and Science is about something else. To make things even confusing the area where people driven by religeon fight with people who work with science is often just politics. Religeos groups wanting more control over schools get to take the time from teaching science and use it for Sunday School lessons instead or some odd parody of science like "Intelligent Design". There's a long way between the creepy cults that won't even let their members use a telephone or who argue that the cross is a symbol of Satan and those that are more mainstream but see political advantage in "Intellegent Design" - but I still see it as disturbing anti-intellectualism.