Also... There's this thing called Barratry. Most of the US legal system has forgotten that it exists.
Barratry refers to repeated harassment via the legal system. It does not apply in this case.
The constitution protects free speech and it protects anonymity, but it does not guarantee anonymous free speech at the expense of the liberties of others.
It strikes me that you could have just Googled "Marcus Cicero" and found everything you wanted to know easier than asking me to do your homework... of course, you seemed to have problems finding Access Research Network on Google, so maybe not.
OK, follow this link On the Nature of the Gods. Here you can download a PDF of the book and read flor yourself. Go to page 51 and read chapter XVI (don't worry it's short). Then go to page 68, chapter XLIV and read the last two sentences.
As for the words "Intelligent Design" together, the first recorded use seems to be in an 1847 issue of Scientific American, but the phrase started to be used somewhat regularly after that... Even Darwin used the term himself... according to Wikipedia.
You don't understand. I don't have a choice. I can't sleep longer than that. It's not like I'm pushing myself. I always joke with my wife that I'm going to sleep-in on the weekends. I turn off the alarm clock, but I still wake up after 5 or 6 hours and there's no way to get back to sleep.
I have no way to know how I would function on 8 or 9 hours of sleep, on a regular basis. The few times that I have slept longer, I wake up with a serious headache.
I'm not saying that I have the mutation, but I rarely need more than 6 hours of sleep each night.
That's not some self-imposed deprivation. It's just the way I'm wired and I've been that way my whole life.
My immune system seems to be great. I rarely get sick, even when others around me are dropping like flies from the flu or whatever bug is going around.
I have a highly suppressed metabolism. Too much so. I have to constantly live on a calorie starved diet and I have to get, at least, 90 minutes of vigorous exercise each day. If I don't, I put on weight quite fast.
I don't seem to have any signs of accelerated aging, in fact, most people guess I'm younger than I am.
My memory seems to be about average. Learning comes pretty easy... for stuff I'm interested in;-)
I have a high muscle mass, but that may have more to do with my exercise regimen than anything else.
All-in-all, it's not a bad problem to have. I have to make some sacrifices that I wish I didn't. When all my friends are going out to lunch every day, I'm in the gym. Also, about once or twice a month I suffer from insomnia; maybe getting only a couple of hours of sleep. When this happens, (sometimes, but not always) I notice a performance hit the next day. However, assuming I get my regular 6 hours the next night, I recover quickly.
Now I'm not claiming that rational thought even comes into play in matters of US budget...
However, I know that with my personal budget, while I'm paying for two kids in college, crossing my fingers that my company will stay afloat, and just generally trying to stay out of debt during this recession, I stopped putting money into my 401K. I don't look at my 401K as a luxury, but it is lower on my list of essentials.
I don't know where the NASA dollars are going to go, but I'm all in favor of some responsible spending...
Starting as early as the Greek philosopher Marcus Cicero, circa 60BC, who some claim made the first recorded references to the concept.
The hoax continued later by such notables as William Paley in 1802, Adam Segwick in the 1860s, George James Allman in 1873, Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller in 1903, Dr. William Fowler in the mid 1950s, Michael Polanyi in 1967, Sir Fred Hoyle in 1982, Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen in 1984...
Hell, even Albert Einstein must have been in on it when he wrote:
Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.
and
The scientists' religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.
All leading up to the coup de grace when the magic bait and switch finally culminated in 1987 when the current ID ruling class spoke up and revealed the gag.
Boy, is my face red!? All this time I thought it was an old concept...
The only thing I don't get is, what's this guy, Steve Fuller, up to?... trying to distance Intelligent Design from creationism? Doesn't he know the jig is up?
What's the point of engaging in these sorts of discussions (not the one you and I are engaged in, but rather the original discussion)? My purpose is to persuade people that their thinking is flawed and that the facts of nature are still consistent with evolution. What's your purpose?
If you attack the mechanics of someone's argument in a pedantic sort of way, you just shut them out. Unless the topic of your discussion is formal logic, you're not going to persuade them of anything.
If you want people to change their way of thinking, you have to approach the meaning of their arguments and show them where their assumptions are flawed (but do so in a non-threatening way). Good science is non-threatening to intelligent theism.
Let's try a little experiment. We'll use Wikipedia's definition of Intelligent Design, just to be as unbiased as possible:
Intelligent design is the assertion that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."
Now ask as many theistic people you can find if they believe in Intelligent Design. Most will say yes. Ask these same people if they are Creationists. Most will say no.
If someone says to you, "The probability of anyone winning the lottery are astronomical", do you get bent out of shape and explain to them that they don't understand probability and that the probability that anyone will win the lottery is quite high, just the probability of YOU winning the lottery is quite low? If you do, then I feel quite sorry for you. If not, then cut these people the same slack.
Which is wrong, as the other person demonstrated.
The very point I make in my next sentence, so you're just being redundant and pedantic.
All I'm trying to say is that, yes, there are fanatics that have adopted the concept of ID and have corrupted many of it's ideas to fit their own religious and political agendas. This outspoken sampling, however does not represent what the mainstream ID movement believes.
Of course, you don't see people openly associating themselves with ID because it's been 'demonized' by both the Creationists and the Atheists. It does not change what they believe... they just tend to keep their mouths shut.
Both Dawkins and Gould, as well as many other Evolutionists have openly made statements proclaiming that it was their understanding of evolution that led to their atheism. People believe what they want to believe for the reasons they want to believe. I understand that evolution is not contrary to theistic beliefs, but when the biggest of proponents for evolution make that association, it's not surprising that uninformed people assume that they cannot believe in both. I know that there are evolutionary scientists that are also theists - I've met a few, but they don't advertise so I have no clue how to find others.
Similarly, there are a lot of people who subscribe to ID but not creationism. Some of them even believe in evolution. I've met them, so I know they exist. These are pretty normal people so I suspect that they are the mainstream, but I don't know how to find them on Google.
Don't assume that just because the first 30 hits on Google revealed only crackpots, that you know what all IDers believe.
On one hand, technically you're right. On the other hand, as long as we're being technical, you're wrong.
First, you are right that from a pure mathematics standpoint, both are are technically flawed. But most people don't use the term "probability" in that way unless it is understood that they are talking in terms of pure statistics and probability theory. It is perfectly acceptable to use the term "probability" in the bayesian sense as it's been used here to express their beliefs about their perception of the likelihood of some evolutionary or pre-evolutionary sequence of events. Since these people don't profess to know the actual individual probabilities of each event in the sequence or, in fact, even to know all of the events in the sequence, one cannot seriously assume that they meant to use the term "probability" in the strictest sense.
However, you are right and they are wrong, technically. Feel free to bask in your intellectual superiority.
OK, I hope you're through basking, because now I'll share with you where you went wrong.
I understand your point, but it demonstrates that you don't understand the ID point. The real point that the IDers want to make is that they think the evidence shows that some of the events required for life have a probability of zero. Therefore, your argument becomes a logical fallacy known as "assuming the consequent". Since these complex living entities exist, there must have been the right sequence of natural events that happened to cause them to exist, therefore any discussion of probabilities is moot. But that argument requires you to assume( and your debaters to agree) that only a natural sequence of events, all with probabilities greater than zero, could have occurred.
I believe their use of the term "probability" is just fine for the argument that they are trying to make. I don't happen to agree with their belief that any of these events have a probability of zero. Therefore, I don't think it is productive to beat them up about the misuse of a mathematical term. Instead I choose to challenge them to consider that what they perceive is improbable might be highly probable under the right conditions.
Umm... I didn't say Neptune can't support life. I said that the experts say that it can't support plate tectonics. The inference you were supposed to make is that a Neptune sized planet in an appropriate orbit around an appropriate star might not be able to support life, all other things being consistent with the support of life, because it could not have plate tectonics that recycled organic materials.
But thanks for clearing up that business about a freezing ball of gas... I'm sure someone learned something.
Other surprising claims from this conference: that the Sun may not be the ideal kind of star to nurture life, and that the Earth may not be the ideal size.
The second part of this is interesting because just the other day I was watching a program on the Discovery Channel and they claimed that the Earth was exactly the right size to support life. Their claim was that plate tectonics are an essential ingredient for recycling organic material necessary to sustain life over billions of years. They also claimed that smaller planets do not have sufficient gravity to sustain plate tectonics (e.g. Mars) and that more massive planets have too much gravity (e.g. Neptune).
You don't have enough information to comprehend the selective advantages
You make assumptions about the limits of evolution
It makes you uncomfortable within your belief system
Just because you can't think of a reproductive advantage, doesn't mean there isn't / wasn't one. The details of the selective pressures that drove most evolutionary changes are lost to unrecorded history.
You assume that snouts can only evolve 0.2cm in a single generation but, perhaps they can, with the right mutation, lengthen 20cm within one generation.
You assume that blow holes moved fractions of centimeters per eon from some other uncertain location, but perhaps they simply erupted from the back of the existing breathing apparatus in one evolutionary jump.
To be sure, the evolutionary evidence for most dramatic body plan changes seems to support the slow and incremental, but there is evidence that evolution can take dramatic steps in shorter periods of time.
Just because an idea makes you feel uncomfortable, doesn't mean you should reject it. Most great steps in human thought were initially rejected as untenable because they challenged the existing belief systems.
I may be reading between the lines here, but it sounds like you're saying that you have doubts about evolution because you perceive poor design? Making a slight leap of faith, I'm going to assume that you favor a designed-by-God explanation for life as we know it?
So if you perceive poor design, what does that say about the designer? Maybe, instead, there is an error in your assessment of what makes a good design? Whether you think these traits have evolved or were created by God (or both), it is pointless to argue that they make no sense. We can only ask, why do they make sense?
Here's how the Access Research Network defines Intelligent Design:
Rather than trying to infer God's existence or character from the natural world, it simply claims "that intelligent causes are necessary to explain the complex, information-rich structures of biology and that these causes are empirically detectable."
Just because you are only exposed to the rantings of fanatics - don't assume you know the whole lot. If I only listened to Richard Dawkins' and Stephen J. Gould's views on evolution, I might come to the conclusion that acceptance of the theory requires me to become an atheist.
You are confusing what a small minority (Creationists) did to exploit ID to justify their means, not necessarily what all IDers believe. I've met many people who align themselves with ID conceptually. These people are intelligent, non fanatical, and often well versed in the sciences. They just happen to believe that God (or some divine intelligence) was responsible for some of the elegant complexities of the universe.
Still, you make the mistake assuming that the processes involved are random. Mutations are random, evolution is not random.
Consider this analogy for pointing out the error of your thinking. I take a bunch of tiny sugar crystals and dissolve them in water. Sugar crystals are made up of many sugar molecules. Once dissolved, the molecules of sugar are fairly randomly distributed in the solution. Now let's say I tie a string to a stick and let the string dangle in the sugary water solution. Then I boil off the water, I will notice sugar crystals reforming on the string. Some of these crystals will be much larger than the tiny crystals you started with (this is how to make rock candy, BTW).
Sugar has a natural tendancy to form into crystals. Structured things can come from random processes under the right conditions.
I'm not trying to discourage you from your belief in God. I just want to make sure you don't close your mind because you underestimate how clever he might have been in the creation of the universe.
Most intelligent theist that believe in evolution, don't make the probabilities argument about evolution from one 'species' to another. They make the probability argument about the first self-replicating entity capable of evolving. Their argument is that the necessary complexity of that first entity is beyond reasonable probability of benign natural forces and must therefore have been created by an intelligent designer...
So the question isn't about some mythical alligator but rather a particular mythical single cell prokaryote... What are those odds?
You are confused. Creationism is a very specific set of Christian beliefs. Most Christians are not Creationists, yet they believe that "God did it". Many theists are not even Christians and therefore not Creationists, yet they believe that "God did it".
Similarly, Intelligent Design represents a broad range of beliefs. Just because some fundamentalist fanatics decided to adopt it, doesn't mean that everyone that supports ID are fundamentalist fanatics.
Creationists believe that God created the universe because the Bible says so. ID simply says that evolution is not sufficient to explain everything we see in biology and "tries" to apply information theory and reason to the question of how it all happened.
I'm not defending ID or Creationism, just pointing out that they are not trivially the same and it is a huge mistake to assume that all people that support ID are Creationist.
Interesting that you should say this. Poorer battery life for laptops is one of the reasons our IT department listed for rejecting Vista. I work for a major tech company and technically, it's their laptop.
Asking questions about benefits, promotions, dress code, and other ephemera will signal to the interviewer that you may only be interested in drawing a paycheck...
I disagree about some of this. Asking about benefits shows a sense of responsibility and mature thinking. Most interviewers will not look at this as simply interested in a paycheck.
Asking about dress code just shows that you want to fit in and be part of a team and helps you prepare to augment your wardrobe, should you get the job.
When I interview job candidates, I usually make it a point to describe the various dress code expectations for different roles and situations (e.g. don't wear shorts and flip-flops in customer meetings). I also try to highlight the key points in the benefits plan, but always probe to make sure that they get all of their questions answered and may even take them to talk to someone in the benefits office.
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Barratry refers to repeated harassment via the legal system. It does not apply in this case.
The constitution protects free speech and it protects anonymity, but it does not guarantee anonymous free speech at the expense of the liberties of others.
Not fabricating DNA, but certainly fabricating DNA evidence .
It strikes me that you could have just Googled "Marcus Cicero" and found everything you wanted to know easier than asking me to do your homework... of course, you seemed to have problems finding Access Research Network on Google, so maybe not.
OK, follow this link On the Nature of the Gods. Here you can download a PDF of the book and read flor yourself. Go to page 51 and read chapter XVI (don't worry it's short). Then go to page 68, chapter XLIV and read the last two sentences.
As for the words "Intelligent Design" together, the first recorded use seems to be in an 1847 issue of Scientific American, but the phrase started to be used somewhat regularly after that... Even Darwin used the term himself... according to Wikipedia.
You don't understand. I don't have a choice. I can't sleep longer than that. It's not like I'm pushing myself. I always joke with my wife that I'm going to sleep-in on the weekends. I turn off the alarm clock, but I still wake up after 5 or 6 hours and there's no way to get back to sleep.
I have no way to know how I would function on 8 or 9 hours of sleep, on a regular basis. The few times that I have slept longer, I wake up with a serious headache.
I'm not saying that I have the mutation, but I rarely need more than 6 hours of sleep each night.
That's not some self-imposed deprivation. It's just the way I'm wired and I've been that way my whole life.
My immune system seems to be great. I rarely get sick, even when others around me are dropping like flies from the flu or whatever bug is going around.
I have a highly suppressed metabolism. Too much so. I have to constantly live on a calorie starved diet and I have to get, at least, 90 minutes of vigorous exercise each day. If I don't, I put on weight quite fast.
I don't seem to have any signs of accelerated aging, in fact, most people guess I'm younger than I am.
My memory seems to be about average. Learning comes pretty easy... for stuff I'm interested in ;-)
I have a high muscle mass, but that may have more to do with my exercise regimen than anything else.
All-in-all, it's not a bad problem to have. I have to make some sacrifices that I wish I didn't. When all my friends are going out to lunch every day, I'm in the gym. Also, about once or twice a month I suffer from insomnia; maybe getting only a couple of hours of sleep. When this happens, (sometimes, but not always) I notice a performance hit the next day. However, assuming I get my regular 6 hours the next night, I recover quickly.
I regularly rely on less than 6 hours of sleep per night
with generally no impairment in waking function.
I've been like this my whole life.
Now I'm not claiming that rational thought even comes into play in matters of US budget...
However, I know that with my personal budget, while I'm paying for two kids in college, crossing my fingers that my company will stay afloat, and just generally trying to stay out of debt during this recession, I stopped putting money into my 401K. I don't look at my 401K as a luxury, but it is lower on my list of essentials.
I don't know where the NASA dollars are going to go, but I'm all in favor of some responsible spending...
Wow, what an incredibly clever hoax!
Starting as early as the Greek philosopher Marcus Cicero, circa 60BC, who some claim made the first recorded references to the concept.
The hoax continued later by such notables as William Paley in 1802, Adam Segwick in the 1860s, George James Allman in 1873, Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller in 1903, Dr. William Fowler in the mid 1950s, Michael Polanyi in 1967, Sir Fred Hoyle in 1982, Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen in 1984...
Hell, even Albert Einstein must have been in on it when he wrote:
and
All leading up to the coup de grace when the magic bait and switch finally culminated in 1987 when the current ID ruling class spoke up and revealed the gag.
Boy, is my face red!? All this time I thought it was an old concept...
The only thing I don't get is, what's this guy, Steve Fuller, up to? ... trying to distance Intelligent Design from creationism? Doesn't he know the jig is up?
What's the point of engaging in these sorts of discussions (not the one you and I are engaged in, but rather the original discussion)? My purpose is to persuade people that their thinking is flawed and that the facts of nature are still consistent with evolution. What's your purpose?
If you attack the mechanics of someone's argument in a pedantic sort of way, you just shut them out. Unless the topic of your discussion is formal logic, you're not going to persuade them of anything.
If you want people to change their way of thinking, you have to approach the meaning of their arguments and show them where their assumptions are flawed (but do so in a non-threatening way). Good science is non-threatening to intelligent theism.
Let's try a little experiment. We'll use Wikipedia's definition of Intelligent Design, just to be as unbiased as possible:
Now ask as many theistic people you can find if they believe in Intelligent Design. Most will say yes. Ask these same people if they are Creationists. Most will say no.
Of course there's a mainstream.
I couldn't agree more.
If someone says to you, "The probability of anyone winning the lottery are astronomical", do you get bent out of shape and explain to them that they don't understand probability and that the probability that anyone will win the lottery is quite high, just the probability of YOU winning the lottery is quite low? If you do, then I feel quite sorry for you. If not, then cut these people the same slack.
The very point I make in my next sentence, so you're just being redundant and pedantic.
All I'm trying to say is that, yes, there are fanatics that have adopted the concept of ID and have corrupted many of it's ideas to fit their own religious and political agendas. This outspoken sampling, however does not represent what the mainstream ID movement believes.
Of course, you don't see people openly associating themselves with ID because it's been 'demonized' by both the Creationists and the Atheists. It does not change what they believe... they just tend to keep their mouths shut.
Both Dawkins and Gould, as well as many other Evolutionists have openly made statements proclaiming that it was their understanding of evolution that led to their atheism. People believe what they want to believe for the reasons they want to believe. I understand that evolution is not contrary to theistic beliefs, but when the biggest of proponents for evolution make that association, it's not surprising that uninformed people assume that they cannot believe in both. I know that there are evolutionary scientists that are also theists - I've met a few, but they don't advertise so I have no clue how to find others.
Similarly, there are a lot of people who subscribe to ID but not creationism. Some of them even believe in evolution. I've met them, so I know they exist. These are pretty normal people so I suspect that they are the mainstream, but I don't know how to find them on Google.
Don't assume that just because the first 30 hits on Google revealed only crackpots, that you know what all IDers believe.
On one hand, technically you're right. On the other hand, as long as we're being technical, you're wrong.
First, you are right that from a pure mathematics standpoint, both are are technically flawed. But most people don't use the term "probability" in that way unless it is understood that they are talking in terms of pure statistics and probability theory. It is perfectly acceptable to use the term "probability" in the bayesian sense as it's been used here to express their beliefs about their perception of the likelihood of some evolutionary or pre-evolutionary sequence of events. Since these people don't profess to know the actual individual probabilities of each event in the sequence or, in fact, even to know all of the events in the sequence, one cannot seriously assume that they meant to use the term "probability" in the strictest sense.
However, you are right and they are wrong, technically. Feel free to bask in your intellectual superiority.
OK, I hope you're through basking, because now I'll share with you where you went wrong.
I understand your point, but it demonstrates that you don't understand the ID point. The real point that the IDers want to make is that they think the evidence shows that some of the events required for life have a probability of zero. Therefore, your argument becomes a logical fallacy known as "assuming the consequent". Since these complex living entities exist, there must have been the right sequence of natural events that happened to cause them to exist, therefore any discussion of probabilities is moot. But that argument requires you to assume( and your debaters to agree) that only a natural sequence of events, all with probabilities greater than zero, could have occurred.
I believe their use of the term "probability" is just fine for the argument that they are trying to make. I don't happen to agree with their belief that any of these events have a probability of zero. Therefore, I don't think it is productive to beat them up about the misuse of a mathematical term. Instead I choose to challenge them to consider that what they perceive is improbable might be highly probable under the right conditions.
Umm... I didn't say Neptune can't support life. I said that the experts say that it can't support plate tectonics. The inference you were supposed to make is that a Neptune sized planet in an appropriate orbit around an appropriate star might not be able to support life, all other things being consistent with the support of life, because it could not have plate tectonics that recycled organic materials.
But thanks for clearing up that business about a freezing ball of gas... I'm sure someone learned something.
The second part of this is interesting because just the other day I was watching a program on the Discovery Channel and they claimed that the Earth was exactly the right size to support life. Their claim was that plate tectonics are an essential ingredient for recycling organic material necessary to sustain life over billions of years. They also claimed that smaller planets do not have sufficient gravity to sustain plate tectonics (e.g. Mars) and that more massive planets have too much gravity (e.g. Neptune).
Your examples are only confounding because
Just because you can't think of a reproductive advantage, doesn't mean there isn't / wasn't one. The details of the selective pressures that drove most evolutionary changes are lost to unrecorded history.
You assume that snouts can only evolve 0.2cm in a single generation but, perhaps they can, with the right mutation, lengthen 20cm within one generation.
You assume that blow holes moved fractions of centimeters per eon from some other uncertain location, but perhaps they simply erupted from the back of the existing breathing apparatus in one evolutionary jump.
To be sure, the evolutionary evidence for most dramatic body plan changes seems to support the slow and incremental, but there is evidence that evolution can take dramatic steps in shorter periods of time.
Just because an idea makes you feel uncomfortable, doesn't mean you should reject it. Most great steps in human thought were initially rejected as untenable because they challenged the existing belief systems.
I may be reading between the lines here, but it sounds like you're saying that you have doubts about evolution because you perceive poor design? Making a slight leap of faith, I'm going to assume that you favor a designed-by-God explanation for life as we know it?
So if you perceive poor design, what does that say about the designer? Maybe, instead, there is an error in your assessment of what makes a good design? Whether you think these traits have evolved or were created by God (or both), it is pointless to argue that they make no sense. We can only ask, why do they make sense?
Not defending, just reporting...
Here's how the Access Research Network defines Intelligent Design:
Just because you are only exposed to the rantings of fanatics - don't assume you know the whole lot. If I only listened to Richard Dawkins' and Stephen J. Gould's views on evolution, I might come to the conclusion that acceptance of the theory requires me to become an atheist.
You are confusing what a small minority (Creationists) did to exploit ID to justify their means, not necessarily what all IDers believe. I've met many people who align themselves with ID conceptually. These people are intelligent, non fanatical, and often well versed in the sciences. They just happen to believe that God (or some divine intelligence) was responsible for some of the elegant complexities of the universe.
Still, you make the mistake assuming that the processes involved are random. Mutations are random, evolution is not random.
Consider this analogy for pointing out the error of your thinking. I take a bunch of tiny sugar crystals and dissolve them in water. Sugar crystals are made up of many sugar molecules. Once dissolved, the molecules of sugar are fairly randomly distributed in the solution. Now let's say I tie a string to a stick and let the string dangle in the sugary water solution. Then I boil off the water, I will notice sugar crystals reforming on the string. Some of these crystals will be much larger than the tiny crystals you started with (this is how to make rock candy, BTW).
Sugar has a natural tendancy to form into crystals. Structured things can come from random processes under the right conditions.
I'm not trying to discourage you from your belief in God. I just want to make sure you don't close your mind because you underestimate how clever he might have been in the creation of the universe.
Most intelligent theist that believe in evolution, don't make the probabilities argument about evolution from one 'species' to another. They make the probability argument about the first self-replicating entity capable of evolving. Their argument is that the necessary complexity of that first entity is beyond reasonable probability of benign natural forces and must therefore have been created by an intelligent designer...
So the question isn't about some mythical alligator but rather a particular mythical single cell prokaryote... What are those odds?
You are confused.
Creationism is a very specific set of Christian beliefs.
Most Christians are not Creationists, yet they believe that "God did it".
Many theists are not even Christians and therefore not Creationists, yet they believe that "God did it".
Similarly, Intelligent Design represents a broad range of beliefs. Just because some fundamentalist fanatics decided to adopt it, doesn't mean that everyone that supports ID are fundamentalist fanatics.
Creationists believe that God created the universe because the Bible says so. ID simply says that evolution is not sufficient to explain everything we see in biology and "tries" to apply information theory and reason to the question of how it all happened.
I'm not defending ID or Creationism, just pointing out that they are not trivially the same and it is a huge mistake to assume that all people that support ID are Creationist.
Interesting that you should say this. Poorer battery life for laptops is one of the reasons our IT department listed for rejecting Vista. I work for a major tech company and technically, it's their laptop.
I disagree about some of this. Asking about benefits shows a sense of responsibility and mature thinking. Most interviewers will not look at this as simply interested in a paycheck.
Asking about dress code just shows that you want to fit in and be part of a team and helps you prepare to augment your wardrobe, should you get the job.
When I interview job candidates, I usually make it a point to describe the various dress code expectations for different roles and situations (e.g. don't wear shorts and flip-flops in customer meetings). I also try to highlight the key points in the benefits plan, but always probe to make sure that they get all of their questions answered and may even take them to talk to someone in the benefits office.