Designing intelligent petitions too taxing for Brits

Kansas's revolving door policy of school science continues to spin and welcomes Darwinian evolution back into schools. Intelligent Design has to sit outside for a while and think about what it said:

First, we hear from God's PR man:

Quite frankly I am amazed that this is still getting press. My pastor is indeed quite amused with the theory of ID. I still do not understand how people cannot bring evolution into the fold of creationism. Put simply, God created man from dust (check out the bible), said dust in todays language is DNA.

The tripping point here is where he created man in his own image, ( so ok, mabey God looks kinda like a primate, cause Jesus certainly wasn't a white guy with blonde hair and blue eyes), we honestly don't know and prolly never will know what God looks like till the day we die, so we can argue that one till were blue.

From here we can diversify some stuff. God is all knowing and ever-present/omniscient. Even still does that mean that he wants to diddle around with every bloody thing that's on the planet on a constant basis? Nooooooo, that's why he created stuff like ecosystems, and weather systems and other wonderful stuff that we still cannot explain satisfactorily to keep the bloody planet running.

Bringing this arguement back to evolution; God decided on this semi-automated way of having the critters he created change over time to help them adapt to their environment, otherwise he would be constantly bothered from his rugby and cricket matches on the telly and would have to have the angles program his vcr for him (yes....God's vcr does blink 12:00). This method is called evolution.

We know that evolution exists because we can prove that creatures change over time to better suit their environment and survive.

The main pissing point between "Evolutionists" and "Creationists" is the fact that 90+% of our DNA is extreemly close to other primates and mice are a second cousin (This remind you of a particular TV series?) This annoys the creationists becuase they do not have a solid thesis on how this can be, so they trash talk evolution as though it is only a theory. Evolution is a natural law. What is a theory is the evolution of mankind.

Regards, Glen

"The ID camp is very well organised: a day after the new standards were announced, the Intelligent Design Network presented the school board with a petition protesting the changes. It contained the signatures of almost 4,000 parents."

That's a lot of "X"s.

Morely

Hi there. As a faithful Reg reader who happens to live in Kansas (born and raised here, I might add), I think I'm qualified to address this.

Most people abroad may not know this, but Kansas has an elected school board. This means that every couple of years, The People of Kansas get to vote in whatever whackjob they like to fill positions. For the last few years, my great home state has been in the throes of trying to decide if it's going to be run by moderate or conservative Republicans.

In the last 8 years, the school board has changed hands accordingly. So when the bible-belt conservatives take over, the standards have excluded evolution (or at least downplayed them). And then when the moderates take over, they put it back in.

The fact of the matter is most teachers just keep teaching the same thing, so the students aren't hurt by all this. With all the pressure on testing performance incurred by NCLB (No Child Left Behind - don't even get me started), there's not a lot of time and effort put into flip-flopping on curriculum. Not to mention that it takes years for any curriculum change to take hold, anyway. And as many times as the standards have changed, as you noted, there's hardly been enough time for local school districts to enact a new science curriculum of any kind.

I just wanted to let you know that not all citizens of Kansas are bible-thumping, anti-science, ultra-conservative "nutters", like the rest of the world seems to think we are.

Disclaimer: I'm a registered Democrat, vote often as possible, believe Darwinian Evolution theory is good science, employed by a state (of Kansas) university, and my wife is a teacher.

Seth

What?! No mention of the flying spaghetti monster... Hang your head in shame Ms Sherriff! Oh and pray for his noodly forgiveness!

Steve

Ramen.

Exradia's technology may or may not protect you from EM fields, but it might just keep the lawyers at bay. Or not, of course:

"To date, there is no known case of a life being saved by the presence of life jackets on aircraft" Not quite true. Late last century (gotta love that phrase) a plane from an African airline was hijacked, with the hijackers insisting the plane be flown to Australia. Despite the pilot trying to make them understand that since the plane had only been fueled for a short in-Africa flight there was no way they would get anywhere near Australia, the hijackers would not desist.

Not surprisingly, the plane ran out of fuel over the ocean and had to ditch in the water (with foresight, the pilot had managed to divert the plane just far enough off course to have it ditch next to a holidy-resort island). Many of the plane's passengers were held afloat by their life-jackets long enough to be rescued.

As a rather sad side-note, subsequent investigation showed that just as many were killed by their life-jacket... in panic, and despite the urging of the flight-crew, these passengers inflated their life-jackets BEFORE exiting the plane - and thus found themselves trapped in a sinking airplane between the rising water and the lowering roof, their inflated jackets making movement near impossible.

Aubry

But could the Exradia chip itself produce harmful radiation? Has it been proved safe itself? So the employer could be sued for 'inflicting unproven technology' on the hapless employee. Damned if you ad and damned if you don't. Either way, the lawyers win. Again.

Ken

Frankly, it sounds rather like something out of Catch-22. Somebody please run down to Joseph Heller's grave to check it for rotation.

Richard

That's all folks. ®