PUBLIC MARKS from multilinko with tag evolution

An article in Tuesday's New York Times notes that proposed legislation which would have 'stress[ed] that not all scientists agree on which theory regarding the origins of life, or the origins or present state of the human race, is correct;' has failed by a 46-28 vote in a Republican-controlled state House of Representatives.

The Roman Catholic Church has restated its support for evolution with an article praising a U.S. court decision that rejects the "intelligent design" theory as non-scientific. The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said that teaching intelligent design -- which argues that life is so complex that it needed a supernatural creator -- alongside Darwin's theory of evolution would only cause confusion.

Any scientist hoping that the Dover verdict would keep the teaching of evolution out of controversy and courts for a little while has got to be disappointed with recent developments. The Dover verdict stated plainly that Intelligent design was not science, and didn't belong in a science class. Politicians in several states already seem intent on testing whether the ruling will apply more broadly than Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, a public school district in El Tejon, California, has taken different approach in a high school course: teach ID, but don't call it science. Taking a cue from suggestions made in the wake of Dover, they called the course the "Philosophy of Design." Both the class and the lawsuit it spawned came to an end today, but it's worth examining in detail, both because I haven't found it summarized well elsewhere, and because it points to where the controversy over the teaching of evolution might be headed.

Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing down real science, but their arguments don't hold up

In the past few days there have been three major stories in the ongoing battle between proponents of Evolution and proponents of Intelligent Design, with each side taking what they considered important victories in the battle. Those of you who follow Nobel Intent are probably already familiar with two of these issues, but the matter is important enough that I wanted to cover it here on the NewsDesk.

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson warned residents of a rural Pennsylvania town Thursday that disaster may strike there because they "voted God out of your city" by ousting school board members who favored teaching intelligent design.

Pellegrino University professor emeritus Edward O. Wilson, a scholarly giant of biodiversity and sociobiology, remains at heart a teacher. His latest lesson concerns the continuing consequences of Charles Darwin’s “timeless and consistently inspirational” science. At a moment when discussion of evolution and “intelligent design” preoccupies American political discourse to a surprising degree, shedding more heat than light on the nature of life and life science, Wilson invites the serious public to do what far too few of us have done: to read what Darwin wrote.

the theory of evolution does explain the evolution of complex biological organisms and phenomena, and the above argument from design, which dates from the 18th century, has been decisively refuted. Rehashing the latter explanation and refutation is not my goal, however. Those who reject evolution are usually immune to such arguments anyway.

Is "intelligent design" a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science? Wouldn't such a hoax be impossible? No. Here's how it has been done.

When President Bush plunged into the debate over the teaching of evolution this month, saying, "both sides ought to be properly taught," he seemed to be reading from the playbook of the Discovery Institute, the conservative think tank here that is at the helm of this newly volatile frontier in the nation's culture wars.

As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

If you are in ninth grade and live in Dover, Pennsylvania, you are learning things in your biology class that differ considerably from what your peers just a few miles away are learning. In particular, you are learning that Darwin’s theory of evolution provides just one possible explanation of life, and that another is provided by something called intelligent design. You are being taught this not because of a recent breakthrough in some scientist’s laboratory but because the Dover Area School District’s board mandates it. In October, 2004, the board decreed that “students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin’s theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design.”