Search for the "silver lining".
 :) 
As obscure or as obvious as it might be, the silver lining is often the only practical tactic for maintaining personal peace of mind (and consequent peace with others).  Even a delusion is better than nothing, and delusion is sometimes the only source of hope.

In this case I think, the "silver lining" is the open door to healthy public debate, here as elsewhere.  Even if it takes multiple millennia, ultimately the only possible destination is "Truth".

I'm just wondering how much longer it will take for our species to take the strain off the battle for food, and realise that coming to terms with adequate global food supply (properly administered, computerised) is the only place justice and civilization can truly begin?  Intellectual semantics are ancient Greek to me.  

I wonder if members of this List could not collectively and progressively put together a counter DVD. This List alone produces much discussion that might be a starting point and some like yourself have done a great deal in creating copy that might be turned to good effect. I am not much good as an artist but I feel sure we can find the creative people to assist in that.  Actually burning the DVDs are no great problem these days although the base material is what takes the time. There are the resources such as Pandas Thumb etc. that I imagine would be available to assist in this.

Looking at the Church, Hillsong, for instance they earn a great deal of money from working the music charts as do others, charts that are largely a CON. What we need is a disc that appeals to the prols and perhaps to the P&C's where possible, most reasonable teachers I suspect would lend support. I wouldn't see JWH and his crew lending any support though.

As I say we produce much information that receives only limited exposure.
Just some rough thoughts to stimulate the thinking!

David Maddern wrote:

I dont know quite how you would make a DVD of what the Evolutionary View is of our existance. I suspect that the only practical way of doing it is by debunking their "logic"  But that would be playing into their hands, playing catchup to their crap.

You have a very good point though. Alone, each of us has a body of  knowledge, but not THE body of knowledge that has been built re this subject.

A conversation is ok, because one can stear response to something known.

But a mass monograph is a different thing. Do you perhaps mean a Biology DVD, because surely a school has books that do this, as well as TV programs recorded.

Gerald Cairns replied to David Maddern:

What I had in mind was How To hands on type of approach that could be under pinned by a science explanation a bit like the CSIRO Science Mail service. This is very good as far as it goes but we need more in depth information and exposure. My grand children are bored silly with the current science
approach. The trouble with this being done by a group of individuals they can become a serious legal target and that is real downer, fortunately it doesn't Karaoke!  :-)  However, there is wealth of information at our disposal if we can find the right vehicle. In another place I have referred to a contact with the SBS a few years ago and they said it was Free to Air Service but you had to have an acceptable production. I did not have the time to take this offer up.

You could have added the oxymoron "Queensland Health" to that list.

Kevin McKern wrote:

Same old shite.....

The "Intelligent Design" anti-evolution movement distances itself from traditional creationism, and insists it's not based on religion. For example, Mark Edwards, a spokesman for the Discovery Institute (the leading "Intelligent Design" think tank), said of the 2001 PBS Evolution series, "The final episode paints a picture that the only critics of Darwinian theory are these guitar-strumming hillbillies in Kentucky who are creationists, and that's just not true. We're glad we're not part of that stereotype." [link] Author Louis Freedberg writes "he [Phillip Johnson, Discovery Institute Advisor] avoids answering pointed questions, including his views on just who the intelligent designer is. 'It certainly could be God, a supernatural creature, but in principle it could be space aliens of high intelligence who did the designing,' he says. ... He won't say whether he is or isn't a creationist. 'I won't answer that. That's like asking me if I was ever a member of the Communist Party.' ..." [link]

Please consider then, if you will, the following information about two media companies, Illustra Media and Discovery Media. One of the companies has produced a slick new video featuring the leading lights of the intelligent design movement, carefully crafted to appear scientific, non-religious and suitable for public schools and PBS. The other company produces overtly religious videos, and makes no bones about its evangelistic Christian mission. Are these companies, perhaps, related?  Read on...

http://www.nmsr.org/smkg-gun.htm

With the Einstein centenary, another disproved hypothesis to compare & contrast is the (a)ethereal one.

Looking at a whole series of ways that opinion has changed in science (e.g. sorcerer/gods/spirits - miasma - germs), and why, and the importance of it happening, might be one way to help take the particular sting out of the "science just keeps chopping and changing and isn't absolute truth" accusation.

see also
     skepdic.com/science.html
     www.wsu.edu/~brians/hum_303/bronowski.html
     www.ratbags.com/skepticism
     www.ronrecord.com/Quotes/bronowski.html
     www.eighty.btinternet.co.uk/page30.htm

This might be so but the prols don't necessarily know this. Maybe we can get some high profile scientists to do TV Doco a bit like the Three Tenors and perhaps and send these Nits back into their dungeons.

to Merrill Pye:

Just as long as you remember that the Chair of Alchemy is mine when it is set up! 

to Derek Williamson:

That seems a good start but you have to have a "bait" or palpable benefit to keep them interested. Science can be absolutely fascinating or plain bloody awful depending on the delivery, I have experienced both. If my corporate ventures were more substantial I would be prepared to fund a prize but that is out of the question for the time being. If I achieve my dream before they put me in my box I might just set a perpetual prize but .....! I don't just mean a prize for the high achievers either.

and to David Maddern:

I guess the way I look at this is that although the ID/Creationists get right up my nose on a positive note they are providing an opportunity to "do them over"! It is up to us to respond collectively.

I am reminded of my dealings with bureaucrats and the many wins I have had over them, won virtually all of the clashes, still a couple to go though. What you must do when attacked by a bureaucrat is to answer the challenge promptly and vigorously. You must not ignore them otherwise their lies about you will stand a truth at least in their eyes and some others. You must split the reply up into separate but significant issues using each as a basis for a separate communication. This broadens the front and in the case of bureaucrats who love burying people in paper work this defeats them because they ultimately reach a point at which they cannot afford the time for the subject and you win. It does however take determination and diligence to do it.


I have buried more than a few and some never learn.

Jim Edwards posted:

In my opinion the science of evolution needs no defence and by defending it  scientists implicitly concede that it does, thus indirectly legitimising the case of the creationists.

Given that attack is the best form of defence, why not organise a co-ordinated attack, not just on the Discovery Institute, but on all forms of theism?  This would involve many disciplines, from Anthropology to Zoology, and would take the form of a detailed analysis of how the idea of gods first arose in human consciousness, through the dissection of all the religious literature to provide non-supernatural explanations for the alleged manifestations of gods, to a psychological cum political explanation for the behaviour of religious people throughout history.

Such an enterprise would probably require some kind of international think-tank with more resources than any of us could provide, but maybe someone knows a millionaire somewhere who would like to see the noosphere cleansed of the pollution of religion.

Ian Musgrave wrote:

Depends on who you aim it for. if it is for high schools there is a hack of a lot of work to ensure that it meshes with the curriculum, is educational level appropriate (the ID DVD rattles off a lot of stuff that you would not expect students to encounter before University), and brings in appropriate supporting evidence (The pro-ID DVD take on the bacterial flagella is one of breathless -Looks it's REALLY complicated, without mentioning any of the studies on its evolution at all).

A general public DVD would be easier, but you still need an awful lot of co-ordination to arrange graphic work, get thematic oversight etc. etc. but this doesn't address the educational challenge of a conservative Christian group trying to get creationist propaganda into the science curriculum.

Putting together DVDs is not beyond a talented group such as ourselves, but it is a lot of hard graft. I put a lot of hard work into an online book that would counter Johnathon Well's book of distortions, but the project collapsed spectacularly. And that was just an online book.

As for the web page idea, there is already lots of evolution web sites, and good evolution portals out there. There is also several on line evolution games (including one where birds eat peppered moths). Perhaps an Australian portal to the best educational sites about evolutionary biology could work, but it would need to be sponsored by education groups and biology societies to make it a useful education resource (again, not impossible, but it requires a bit of though, planning and liaison with educational authorities and professional bodies).

In the meantime, writing letters works well.

Ian Musgrave replied:

The issue  is not going to go away see: creationist DVD faces school fight

http://creationevolutiondesign.blogspot.com/2005/08/creationist-dvd-faces-school-fight.html

from an ID friendly person. Is there any of the science educators here who knows if this is being monitored

Perhaps I'm not on the same planet, but I simply cannot see the issue of
"Monastic Tentacles of Pseudo-intellectual Propaganda as any big deal.  Then
again, maybe it is because I don't have any kids 'fragile eggshell minds'
(-James Douglas Morrison) for concern for a future warped by untruths. **

Ivan Sayer wrote:

Not immediately we won't because we've already done that.  However they may actually get revisited.  When I was an undergraduate in 1964, my Math lecturers puffed their chests as they told us how Cauchy
Weierstrass and Cantor had finally vanquished the 'infinitesimal'.  Just as they were doing so Abraham Robinson rehabilitated it.

1)  I support your opposition to ID creationism 100%.

2)  However, I suggest a more nuanced and wily view of the possibilities would do us no harm.  I beg you to remember that the triumph of Evolutionism is a relatively recent phenomenon.

A large number of the world's population, possibly a majority speak languages in which the theory isn't even stateable. The trouble with enthusiasts for the current scientific consensus is that they are always forgetting that they too are a tiny minority, and, that they joined that minority by being way luckier than most.

3)  Suppose we invite some of this crowd to defend their opinions on this list.  If they won't, we know what to say about that.

Basically, I'm with Ray.  We have to prove that our faith in modest and sceptical recourse to evidence is more resilient than their charge for ideological control.

Personally, I have faith that reasoned argument is better than what these guys have - but that is still faith, a faith I have to yet to transmit to them.

Lynne Kelly noted:

And it is for this reason I think we may be worrying too much. To get into schools, the teachers have to add the ID stuff to what they already teach in an overcrowded curriculum. To get into senior biology, where evolution is taught, it has to go through control boards filled with biology teachers with science degrees.

I would be astounded if the ID DVD had any impact at all.

There needs to be vigilance, but I have faith in science teachers (bias here - I am one!) that this won't make it into our classrooms other than in schools which already have a strong religious bias - in which case it is already a bigger issue than just the ID people.

Just my optimistic eight cents worth.

Ray Stevens commented:

In one of those flickers of lucidity which leaves the fruit of an idea tree but only an inexplicable mist of the trunk, branch and leaf through which it got there, you know, where reverse engineering can prove your psycho....

Intelligent Design is an anomaly, an artifact, synthesised by the observer as it stretches the subjective fact of its own recognition of "normalcy" to fit the preconceptions of a sense of otherness which is not at all a fact of the apparent common source of the known cosmos.

I'm going to struggle if I try to elaborate on this any further by any verbal means without invoking notions of a Pantheistic & Big Bang singularity equivalence, where "you are me and I'm am you, and we are the
walrus"...

I may just be crazy, but it "felt" like the logic was right, at first, a bit....

and:

That sort of stuff Derek, is so strangely curious I can almost feel it like the magnetic and electric cross hairs of EMR.   I think the universe we know is as stable as it is because of the fine balance between conflicting opposites, in ideas as much as in chemistry and physics.  But then, I've also not quantum dilated any distance from anode, cathode and neutral....

As would I - but these people are determined and dangerous.

Yes.

Vigilance is essential.
It's all about ideology and power.
We know, via history, that the enemies of reason have a poor record in improving the human condition.
First they will burn books then soon, very soon after, they will burn people.*

Ian Musgrave posted:

already exist

www.talkorigins.org
www.talkdesign.org
www.pandasthumb.org

Ian Musgrave wrote:

Brendan Nelson has been given one of these DVDs, and it has been reported that the supports its distribution (wait 'til tomorrow to see if this is reported in the news though)

So it is timely that ID has been revealed as Creationism in disguise. A court case in the US over teaching ID has revealed that ID was a re-badging of creationism forced by court setbacks for the creationists. The following is taken from a draft press release by the National Centre of Science
Education with their permission.

The brief of the case Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School Board where this is revealed is here publicly to download: http://www.ncseweb.org/kitzmiller/  (WARNING the brief is a HONKING BIG PDF the ancillary stuff is very interesting though)

SUMMARY:

1. The first book advocating "intelligent design" (ID) was the 1989 book Of Pandas and People.

2. In a just-filed brief opposing summary judgement in the district court case on the constitutionality of ID, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the plaintiffs reveal that Pandas began as an explicitly creationist work, and only switched to arguing for "intelligent design" after the Supreme Court banished "creation science" from public schools in the 1987 Edwards decision.

DOCUMENTATION:

Point #1: The term intelligent design' (ID) was first systematically used in the 1989 book Of Pandas and People. This book, produced by the Texas-based Foundation for Thought and Ethics, was intended as a supplementary biology textbook for public school classes. (see: "Of Pandas and People, the foundational work of the 'Intelligent Design' movement," online at: http://tinyurl.com/a9yka )

"A decade has passed since Of Pandas and People's second edition appeared in print. Written by Percival Davis and Dean Kenyon, this book was the first intelligent design textbook. In fact, it was the first place where the phrase 'intelligent design' appeared in its present use."

-- Jon Buell (2004), Preface to The Design of Life, the "third edition" of Pandas. Available on an Wayback Machine version of William Dembski's website (http://tinyurl.com/9xtg6)

Point #2: According to the plaintiffs' brief: 
"Intelligent design followed the Supreme Court's rejection of creation science as night follows day: At the time that Edwards was decided, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (a publisher of Christian texts) had been developing Of Pandas and People as a creationist work to advance the FTEs religious and cultural mission. After the Supreme Court rejected the proffered expert opinions in Edwards claiming that creation science is 'science,' Kenyon and FTE took their draft textbook (which advocated for creationism) and, with all the elegance of a word processor's algorithm, replaced references to 'creationism' with the new label 'intelligent design.' When they issued Panda's first edition just two years later, they presented intelligent design as if it were a new intellectual endeavor rather than merely a rechristening of creationism. But Pandas defines 'intelligent design' exactly as an earlier draft had defined 'creationism.'" (footnotes omitted)

and:

and evowiki http://www.evowiki.org/index.php/Main_Page

Just discovered Bad Science at the Gruniad

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/story/0,12980,1536986,00.html

go have a look, it's fun Then have a look at this entry at Cosmic Variance

http://cosmicvariance.com/2005/07/24/silly-talk-about-science/

Stealth has ever been their way -- in about 1982, I was in the Directorate
of Studies of the NSW Department, and a couple of creeps were trying to
flex their muscles -- little tricks like watering down evolutionary
statements to say things like "a few scientists have a theory that .  .  ."
but when the dogs were set on them, we uncovered a wider agenda.
In about 1993, an attempt was made to take over a branch of the Science
Teachers' Association of NSW.  It took a deal of jumping up and down to
amend that.  I believe that a continuing vigilance is all that is needed.
Without it, we may be lost. Non pasaran!  Or if you prefer, j'y suis, j'y
reste.

Joanne Skinner wrote:

I have been watching this discussion and the paranoia and opposition to ID and Creationism is in the same realm as the Muslim cleric who said that no religion except Islam should be tolerated.

Is this still a free country or not?  Where freedom of thought exists?

People do have the right to disbelieve evolution -especially if they think it is nonsense scientifically.  They have the right to believe in a Creator God, but not necessarily creation science.

There are a lot of thoughtful Christians with a scientific mindset.  That is why I joined this list in the first place, but there is not a lot of science discussed, especially astronomy which is my interest.

There could very well have  been a universal disaster and most of all the things we see in the sky haven't been there for eons.  Don't we even today, studying the far reaches of the universe, have to have , not certain knowledge but, faith that those stars and galaxies are still there?

Would it or should it make any difference to our understanding or basic interests if they weren't?  Why doesn't it affect our science, philosophy, religion or anything else for that matter not knowing for sure that all those stars and galaxies are still there?

Is it fair to just assume they are there for the sake of argument and science.  And how does that affect the argument between science and the creationists that assume there is a God and assume he created the universe which science is assuming is still there?

Tony Legg responded:

Joanna, I think you are missing the point.  The objection is to having ID taught as part of the SCIENCE curriculum.  No-one is objecting to any religious beliefs; people can believe what they want and certainly have the right to criticise evolution, but must do so on scientific and not religious grounds.

Gerald Cairns commented:

I don't have any difficulty with your argument other than that even our level headed guardians and their organisations can be subverted by ignorant proletarian opinion delivered via a pollie who has only one thought to his brain - how to get re elected next time and that is a numbers game. We unfortunately need to play numbers too, though like you I prefer the other kind.

Susan Wright added:

I'm just reading 'the science of discworld III: Darwin's Watch' by pratchett, stewart and cohen. It'd be a good book to take into the classroom to talk about intelligent design and it has wizards in it too :-)

There are some footnote references to other books which provide "detailed and thoughtful rebuttals of the main contentions of the intelligent designers".

Thanks for the discussion it's been good to follow - my own 2 cents are - possibly it would be good to talk about ID in the classroom but maybe in the context of learning about scientific process and what leads to a sound hypothesis v what leads to a wobbly hypothesis.

Ivan Sayer, replying to Jim Edwards:

So, Evolution is now so obvious that Darwin and Huxley wasted their time defending it ?  Come on Jim, you can do better than that!  Every human mind ever born is born totally ignorant.  That being so, our defenses of major truths and our attacks on major falsehoods have to be perpetually re-enacted.  When the re-enactment works, you call it education.

Ivan Sayer wrote to Joanne Skinner:

Yup!  This point seems important to me.

According to me, if we turn the whole population of Australia on to dogmatic Evolutionism, we have gained precisely nothing. 

 There is, as it seems to me, a primary problem in the teaching of science that doesn't get enough discussion.  A secondary science teacher has to teach science in such a way as to be useful to 
people, a majority of whom will *not* be professional scientists.

There are probably people who are wonderful mothers or fathers and first class truck drivers who believe in ID - it just doesn't impinge all that much on the lives that they live.

 What good science teaching might add to such lives is a certain awareness of the complexity of things and the fact that it is possible for fully engaged minds in contact with evidence to come to different conclusions.  The rush to give the current scientific consensus the status of religious dogma just won't do.

Gerald Cairns replied:

In general I agree with you but when the threat becomes potentially too serious for mere mortals to combat it may require the intervention of higher souls but that does not need to include debating them. For the same reasons now I have completely switched off from the ABC "Second Opinion" it is just too demeaning for the professionals to try to deal with the quackery propounded. A few expletives here and there would jazz it up a bit.
 

Paul Williams replied:

I believe that Gould was correct - as is Dawkins now. 
Neither Gould nor Dawkins were ever scared of publicity.
Giving publicity to those who desire it - to share a stage, on equal footing, with those who really need publicity - plays their game.
We shouldn't give them what they want.

Anecdote:

A number of years ago, I fell for the trap of debating ID proponent Paul Nelson on a US science list.  I spent literally hundreds of hours wasting my time (and the list's time), as it turned out.  They move the goalposts. They are dishonest. They crave publicity and power. They should not be given what they do not deserve.

It is not about science. It is all about politics and power.

Jim Smart added:

The Creation Vs Evolution problem is not going to go away. It receives another mention in todays SMH

See:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/too-much-gravity-not-enough-light/2005/08/16/1123958064959.html

Ian Musgrave has promised us that something is now happening in the background. His efforts are to be applauded.

In my pre-retirement days as a Science Teacher the teaching of evolution was a topic that gave me considerable concern.  I found the idea of evolution an intellectual delight following trips at about the age of about 8 or 9 to the Australian Museum and Taronga Zoo together with some comments from a very wise old aunt. Junior Science as we now understand it was not taught as such in NSW high schools in pre-
Wyndham Scheme days.  Evolution was well covered in my B.Sc. at UNSW in the early 1960s.

As a teacher I found it easy to teach the concepts of Darwinian Evolution to the brighter and more interested students but found it much harder to convincingly get the concepts over to less interested and less able students. How does one sell Darwin to a girl in say 10.5 whose main interests in life are talking about boyfriends, becoming a hairdresser and going to the local Pentecostal Church with Mum? Talking about the overwhelming evidence for evolution in the scientific literature falls on deaf ears. Bringing up the arguments of R.Dawkins , S.J.Gould et al, exquisite as they are, simply does not work with somebody who simply asserts that God dun it. I would like to share with list members a strategy that I found worked with almost all students.

My partner has a 10 cm thick Bible that her family had brought out from Scotland in the late 19th century. I would take it into a class and in a 
loud clerical voice read out the first chapter of Genesis, explaining the meaning of all the strange words such as firmament etc. I would then explain that all societies have answers to questions like where did we come from, what is the sky, why are there plants and animals.  Aboriginal people have Rainbow Serpent stories, Indians talk about reincarnation etc. The Bible story is just one such explanation put together by people of a tribe that lived in the Middle East about 3000 years ago. Bearing in mind the lack of any scientific instruments it was a not unreasonable answer to the nagging questions about our origins at that time.  I would then explain that most of the modern things that teenagers like such as cars, computers, television, Walkmans, iPods etc result from modern science. and  that  the same science now has a much better explanation for the age old question of our origins. The book that I was reading from clearly looked very old and it was easily believable that the ideas in it were old too. This introduction was not disrespectful to the students from fundermentalist religious families - I took their Book into account - but was also believable by the majority of students.

During the teaching of evolution I emphasised the big part Darwin's visit to Australia in 1836 played in the formation of his ideas. His trip across the Blue Mountains was very important in his thinking about the age of the earth - he contemplated the view of the Jamison Valley from Wentworth Falls and asked why is it so. The correspondence of an Australian animal  with a clearly different European animal in each ecological niche (e.g. kangaroo & deer etc) also impressed him.

Ivan Sayer replied to Paul Williams:

> I believe that Gould was correct - as is Dawkins now.
> Neither Gould nor Dawkins were ever scared of publicity.
> Giving publicity to those who desire it - to share a stage, on equal
> footing, with those who really need publicity - plays their game.
> We shouldn't give them what they want.

and to Ian Musgrave:

Thanks for the websites - I've developed a taste for bllsht in small doses.

But, if what you say here is true - and, from what I've seen you're dead right - why do we have a problem.
a) If you need advanced (and incorrect) information theory or detailed knowledge of the Cambrian Explosion - this stuff has no place in secondary anyway.  If the Brendan Nelsons of this world can't see that then we really have an enormous problem.
b) If they haven't got their basic science right - all you need, surely, is a statement from a couple of reasonably believable professors bearing
witness to this fact.

If our pollys are so corrupt that such simple points carry no weight then we have a problem much wider than this single issue.  (Yes - and such things have happened before.)

I'm still arguing for the view that either this problem has some simple solutions or it's way bigger than you are making it.

David Maddern to Jim Smart:

It seems to me that how you sell Darwinian Evolution to girls is to pick on one of their services.

Bring it home. Natural selection on hairdressing businesses. the fittest, ie able to change with fashion, live to reproduce (start another outlet). Or natural selection acting on churches in Australia  Show them that the mechanism is bigger than all the churches.

Ian Musgrave noted:

It just gets worse

Here is an opinion piece from the Melbourne age. It's infuriating because just about everything in it is completely false.

<http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/lets-have-a-proper-scientific-debate/2005/08/17/1123958129538.html?oneclick=true>

I'll quote some sentences under the fair use policy for those who don't have access, then my response.

"The concept of intelligent design was developed by non-Christian scientists such as molecular biologist Michael Behe, not because of the 
presuppositions of faith but because science took them there" Untrue, see below

"Take the case of Rick Sternberg, who was hounded out of his job as editor of the Smithsonian Institution's journal after publishing a piece 
sympathetic to intelligent design theory." Untrue, see below

These are just a few representative pieces, the whole article is like that,

===========my response===========================================

In the Age Opinion page of 18 August, Religion Editor Barney Zwartz asks for a proper scientific debate on Intelligent Design Creationism. 
Scientists will welcome that, when the Intelligent Design Creationists get around to producing some science, instead of recycling the centuries old failed arguments of Reverend Paley and producing fancy DVD's. Intelligent Design is about public relations and political influence, not science. 

Zwartz appears to have been caught up in the Intelligent Design publicity machine, as almost every item of alleged fact in his article is from the ID play list, and deeply, incredibly wrong. Intelligent Design was a carefully crafted response of the creationist movement to avoid legal scrutiny in the US; it first appeared after the Edwards vs Agulliard decision struck down the teaching of "Creation Science". Michael Behe is a Catholic, not a non-Christian, and the first outing of his ideas was in a creationist textbook. All of the key players in the ID creationist movement, Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, Jonathon Wells and William Dembski are conservative Christians who have openly spoken of their theological agendas. Rick Sternberg was not hounded out of his job as editor; he had already come to the end of his term as editor and retired. These are all matters of fact, and can be readily checked. (see web links at the end) 

The current flap about ID creationism is because its proponents want it taught in the school science curriculum. The scientific opposition is not one of dogma, but of real concern over the subversion of the process of science to teach something that has no evidential support.

Yours sincerely

Ian Musgrave; chapter contributor, '"Why Intelligent Design Fails", Rutgers University Press.

www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Catalano/box/behe.shtml

http://www.ncseweb.org/kitzmiller/

http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2004/09/the_meyer_2004_medley.html

http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/01/antony_flews_conversion_to_deism_an_update.html

and replying to Ivan Sayer:

Because people preconceptions are a powerful buffer against reality (try to talk someone out of astrology for instance)

a) If you need advanced (and incorrect) information theory or detailed
knowledge of the Cambrian Explosion - this stuff has no place in secondary
anyway.  If the Brendan Nelsons of this world can't see that then we
really have an enormous problem.

b) If they haven't got their basic science right - all you need, surely, is
a statement from a couple of reasonably believable professors bearing
witness to this fact.

If our pollys are so corrupt that such simple points carry no weight then
we have a problem much wider than this single issue.  (Yes - and such
things have happened before.)

I'm still arguing for the view that either this problem has some simple
solutions or it's way bigger than you are making it.

*snigger*

Is under 11 too early to be letting them know that now survival is a capital gain sort of thing thanks to human environmental manipulation, "survival of the fittest" requires a mercenary black widow mentality?

To ensure maximum provision for off spring. She needn't go as far as pickling him for an after dinner snack.

and:

Ian Musgrave posted:

List member Margaret's letter got in. Mine didn't.

http://www.theage.com.au/letters/index.html

No one covered the errors of fact, and I suspect Barney won't print a clarification, so these errors of fact will stand and this is what people 
remember. This is why we are losing the fight against ID and associated nonsense.

Ivan Sayer to Cynthia Ma:

Two things

I)  So what frightens Catholics about techtonic plates ?  I can understand what frightens a dumb Catholic about the big bang.  (Though if I remember right, Catholic Scientists had a hand in that theory.)  But what's anti-religious about a little continental movement now and then ?

II)I suspect this describes the source of our problems.  Your bad teachers were taught by similar and so on back.  Actually, being a good teacher is hard yakka, and becoming one is harder still.  The last class who listened to me on basic calculus probably got their money's worth - but when I think of some of the lessons I delivered in my first three years -  I don't have to describe them, you've done it.

Julienne replied:

This is precisely what I thought yesterday after voting , I was
about to send Nelson an e-mail in protest when I suddenly realised that
he had not qualified WHERE he thought ID should be taught, i.e. what part of the curriculum it should be taught in.

Ray Stevens noted:

The Liberal Party supports a lot of things, both in a "qualified" and "evangelistic" manner, which I wouldn't, if they were "Papal Bull, hesitate to consider fair toilet paper so long as the print didn't rub off.

*shrug* Nelson, as all of us, will take his opinions and passions to the grave too, and the weeds will grow over, lichen and erosion conceal his name.... and "this too shall pass"

Write to her via her ministry (or better yet the department she represents but to her as minister not the dept head). The government has codes of conduct, ministerial correspondence registers etc, and access
via freedom of information. This means they have to record your correspondence and respond within a reasonable time frame and you can access records on this via FOI. Then if they don't you can raise it with other relevant members, for example the opposition or minority party senate members.

Julienne replied:

 
Janet Cumming responded to Gerald Cairns:

I may have to have another listen when the item gets posted on the RN web site, because I thought he said that ID was the tsunami, arriving from the US, and they are just being carried along with it.  I got the impression he was not what Fran was expecting, and his explanation of ID was rather stilted (for want of a better word).  I thought they should have had someone to give the scientific side of the argument, so I hope they follow up with a response tomorrow.

Gerald Cairns added:

Have you no compassion for the guy? Its not every day you get hit by tsunami, pity it didn't wash all the DVD's away. :-))

Thanks for RN link but it will have to wait until my broadband is working - soon I hope. I have been anticipating this sort of service since around 1982!!!! Maybe the IDers can help.

On 16/8/2005 Ian Musgrave posted:

Well, the past week started well, with the Campus Crusade for Christ trying to distribute the Intelligent Design creationist propaganda  "Unlocking the Mystery of Life" DVD's to high schools for inclusion in the science curriculum. Then the Federal Minister for Education no less backed the teaching of ID (although he didn't make clear if it was to be in science class or not). Various education groups have mobilized, so things aren't looking too grim. OTOH the ABC Radio National virtually gave ID a free plug 
on the morning breakfast show, You can listen to it here

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/brkfast/stories/s1437625.htm

A few of us have been trying to get some response going, but we haven't heard anything yet.

Sheesh, what a week.