The Travels and Rants Journal

Last night I watched most of the excellent Nova documentary on PBS about the Pennsylvania “Intelligent Design” case from a couple of years ago. The program exposed in well-presented detail the standard line of faulty reasoning used by the right to try and sneak “creation science” into public schools.

Here’s a blog article from TPM Cafe by Greg Anrig, Jr. about the show and the right wing’s strategies of deceipt: Conservatism’s Unintelligent Design:

Ultimately, of course, Judge John Jones ruled that intelligent design is grounded in theology rather than science, and thereby would be unconstitutional to teach in public schools. He was subsequently subjected to death threats. After the town’s voters ousted the school committee members who had tried to introduce intelligent design, Pat Robertson issued a warning: “I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God. You just rejected him from your city.”

Like someone in the program said (better than I will), the real winner here is science. There are countless branches of scientific research that rely directly on genetics and evolution, and we as a culture can’t afford to pretend that science doesn’t exist just to appease some wingnut crazies who wouldn’t know scientific methods if they jumped up and bit ‘em on the right ass cheek.

Nova is such a wonderful program - I’ve enjoyed it since I was a kid. PBS and Nova deserve a great deal of credit for their thorough and well-presented explanations, and for taking on this topic that is sure to bring them heat from the anti-intelligence crowd.

Keep shining a bright light on the wackos. The more information the better.

From the archaeological record: