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foraker

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Norman_Clyde Gumby

Norman_Clyde

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IMO a lot of the people who can't swallow evolutionary theory are much like the clergy in the 1500's, who said it was blasphemy to claim the Earth orbits the Sun. The objection being, apparently, that Man can no longer imagine himself to be the center of the universe. These days, the vast majority of religious people have come to accept that Earth revolves around the Sun; they don't see this idea as incompatible with Christian beliefs, but somehow evolution is another matter. But both scientific theories place humankind in a much broader context than the biblical one. After all, if previous species have evolved and become extinct, what makes us so special?

The other thing about Darwinian theory that probably irritates people like Tom DeLay is that they would rather not think about how much they and their colleagues, in their endless grasping for social dominance, are behaving just like chimpanzees.

ashw_justin Gumby

ashw_justin

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All trying to feel like we have a little piece of divinity inside of us. How vain... the pathetic fallacy. But hey, why not? If evolution and biology are correct (which they are) then nothing about us really matters, so we might as well teach/believe in whatever the hell makes us happy. Like "God." Besides, it helps to keep all those damn little delinquents in line. God forbid people were to realize that there really are no consequences.

Cobra_Commander Gumby

Cobra_Commander

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The funny part of this is how fox news uses the phrase:

 

"The theory of intelligent design says life on earth...."

 

Last time I checked a theory was the result of repeated experimentation yielding consistent data. Or in the case of observations on the universe, a theory must at least be falsifiable.

j_b Gumby

j_b

Posted
Posted

Design for Confusion

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: August 5, 2005

 

I'd like to nominate Irving Kristol, the neoconservative former editor of The Public Interest, as the father of "intelligent design." No, he didn't play any role in developing the doctrine. But he is the father of the political strategy that lies behind the intelligent design movement - a strategy that has been used with great success by the economic right and has now been adopted by the religious right.

 

Back in 1978 Mr. Kristol urged corporations to make "philanthropic contributions to scholars and institutions who are likely to advocate preservation of a strong private sector." That was delicately worded, but the clear implication was that corporations that didn't like the results of academic research, however valid, should support people willing to say something more to their liking.

 

Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim - that tax cuts have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they pay for themselves - has never been backed by evidence. He would later concede, or perhaps boast, that he had a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit."

 

"Political effectiveness was the priority," he wrote in 1995, "not the accounting deficiencies of government."

 

Corporations followed his lead, pouring a steady stream of money into think tanks that created a sort of parallel intellectual universe, a world of "scholars" whose careers are based on toeing an ideological line, rather than on doing research that stands up to scrutiny by their peers.

 

You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well when deployed against the hard sciences.

 

The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-reviewed research, but aren't. And behind it all lies lavish financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil.

 

There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that nonscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science?

 

Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.

 

Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're elitists who think they're smarter than the rest of us.

 

Which brings us, finally, to intelligent design. Some of America's most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for the Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't been enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The theory of evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the country isn't ready - yet - to teach religious doctrine in public schools.

 

But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that the scientific consensus has shaky foundations?

 

Creationists failed when they pretended to be engaged in science, not religious indoctrination: "creation science" was too crude to fool anyone. But intelligent design, which spreads doubt about evolution without being too overtly religious, may succeed where creation science failed.

 

The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory. That, together with the political muscle of the religious right, may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/05/opinio...and&emc=rss

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