For anyone who can get it, tonight (8pm) PBS will be showing a Nova episode on that hilarious court case from 2005 where the Intelligent Design folks received a thorough judicial whomping in a small town in Pennsylvania. I expect a hearty discussion afterwards, or at least a few posts involving communal pointing and laughing at ID.
For those who don’t remember, a few nuts tried to get ID into the public school science curriculum, met opposition from the teachers and other parents, and a few national organizations, both wingnut like the Discovery Institute and honest, upright defenders of all that is good and true like the…oh, hell, National Center for Science Education, I think it is - something like that…subsequently got involved. Spoiler: The judge ruled that ID was religion in disguise and couldn’t be taught in a public system science class.
Damn, I may have already missed it. I’ll have to wait for the rerun.
Edit: Oh wait. I just remembered why I didn’t pay any attention to the debate back in O five. Because I can’t stand idiots like that. Seriously the only reason I would even think of watching this is to see if there were people in that debate as batshit crazy as the regular D&D players hanging around the local comic book store. (which I like to call the AD&HD players)
I followed that trial in print only, and the recreation is pretty accurate.
It was somewhat surprising that Behe didn’t put a better show then – the astrology episode was a killer.
Yet ID has so many proponents in the upper echelons of state power, that using the cliché of “the battle won, but the war continues” would be appropriate in this case.
I like how the “champion” of ID is some professor of <i>law</i>. No professor in a biology-related field with any real understanding of the subject would touch ID with a ten-foot pole
