Darwin Day

It's a celebration, bitches!

Everybody wish the original Chuck D there a happy birthday. He'd be 199 today.

You can look here, here, here, and especially here for more interesting things about Darwin's continuing influence.

Also, I believe it's Abraham Lincoln's birthday. He's known for being the only right-facing president on US coinage. Among other things.

Wow

Creationists amaze me. They are simultaneously a scary and ridiculous foe. You'd think that the following "logic" would completely discredit them, but it's surprising and depressing that this is what passes for a convincing argument (and, for that matter, thought itself) with lots of people. Anyway, watch and be amazed:





And, yes, that's washed-up 1980's sitcom actor Kirk Cameron learning about how we and the banana are designed for one another. I wonder what these people have to say about pineapples. Or all those poisonous-to-human fruits.

Mimicry



About two minutes in, you'll get to the mimic octopus, which is one of the most remarkable critters in the world. This short clip doesn't do it justice.

Ponder the power of natural selection as you watch. Enjoy!

Nerd Shit

We're gonna need a bigger fryer.

Tyrannosaurus rex = Gallus domesticus?

Perhaps. This story is fascinating.

US researchers have identified microscopic traces of soft tissue taken from a 68 million-year-old T-rex fossil in a startling discovery that is yielding clues to evolutionary links between dinosaurs and birds, a study released Thursday said.

The tiny protein fragments were extracted from the leg bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex that was discovered in the western state of Montana in 2003, but it wasn't until recently that scientists were able to definitively identify them as traces of prehistoric dinosaur collagen.

The collagen should have degraded millions of years before according to conventional wisdom, but paleontologists at North Carolina State University were fairly confident that what they had was the "barely detectable" remains of dinosaur soft tissue based on their chemical and molecular analyses.

However, they could not definitively say that, so they turned to biochemist John Asara at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical School in Boston to make that determination.

It took Asara a year and a half, but he was finally able to sequence the amino acids in the collagen proteins - a proxy for DNA analysis - and conclude that the T-rex femur did indeed contain traces of collagen, a fibrous protein found in bone.

When the researchers compared those amino acid sequences to those of similar proteins in several contemporary animals, they found that the T-rex sequence had similarities to those of chickens, and to a lesser extent frogs and newts.

That finding bolsters a recent and controversial proposal that birds and dinosaurs are evolutionarily related, and change that hypothesis to a theory, the researchers said.

Sixty-eight million year old soft tissue? Amazing.

I wasn't aware that the dinosaur-bird link was "controversial." I thought it was pretty much accepted as fact. But I'm not a paleontologist, either.

Can you imagine the amount of hot sauce you'd need for Buffalo-style T-rex arms?

I'm sure you all know that the Tyrannosaurus was just about the biggest, baddest dinosaur to wander around in the Cretaceous. But what's the biggest predator that's ever lived on earth? No fair using Google.

Stupid Shit Sunday

Oh no! A dumbass Texas legislator was right after all! Aieeeee!

Texas, which is competing with Florida for the title of Worst State Ever, gives us another reason to vote for the Lone Star And Extra Chromosome State in this year's balloting.

The reason has a name, and it's Warren Chisum. That's a hell of a manly name, for those of you who are fans of The Duke. But we're not talking about a wronged rancher. No, no. Today, we discuss a goddam idiot Texas State Legislator who is convinced that evolution is part of a rabbinic kabbala conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids (okay, I stole that last bit from Dr. Strangelove).

I promise you, I'm not making any of this up. Well, other than the bodily fluids part. Which probably isn't too far off the mark, though.

Check it out here. Here's a copy of the dickbag's memo (warning: PDF). Here's the site to which the memo refers (warning: will make you stupid). They are extremely proud of their idiocy:

The Earth is not rotating...nor is it going around the sun.

Those are their words. Not mine. Couldn't get much clearer than that, no?

Warren Chisum couldn't even come up with the memo himself. He took it (credited, though) from a Georgia state representative.

Wow. Copernicus and Darwin are part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the Old Testament...that was written by Jews.

Do they even bother to think this shit through?

In other stupid news, some librarians are up in arms because a children's book uses the word "scrotum."

The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.

Yet there it is on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and reopened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children’s books. The controversy was first reported by Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine.

On electronic mailing lists like Librarian.net, dozens of literary blogs and pages on the social-networking site LiveJournal, teachers, authors and school librarians took sides over the book. Librarians from all over the country, including Missoula, Mont.; upstate New York; Central Pennsylvania; and Portland, Ore., weighed in, questioning the role of the librarian when selecting — or censoring, some argued — literature for children.

“This book included what I call a Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope, but they didn’t have the children in mind,” Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian in Durango, Colo., wrote on LM_Net, a mailing list that reaches more than 16,000 school librarians. “How very sad.”

The book has already been banned from school libraries in a handful of states in the South, the West and the Northeast, and librarians in other schools have indicated in the online debate that they may well follow suit. Indeed, the topic has dominated the discussion among librarians since the book was shipped to schools.

--snip--

Ms. Patron, who is a public librarian in Los Angeles, said the book was written for children 9 to 12 years old. But some librarians countered that since the heroine of “The Higher Power of Lucky” is 10, children older than that would not be interested in reading it.

“I think it’s a good case of an author not realizing her audience,” said Frederick Muller, a librarian at Halsted Middle School in Newton, N.J. “If I were a third- or fourth-grade teacher, I wouldn’t want to have to explain that.”

Authors of children’s books sometimes sneak in a single touchy word or paragraph, leaving librarians to choose whether to ban an entire book over one offending phrase.

In the case of “Lucky,” some of them take no chances. Wendy Stoll, a librarian at Smyrna Elementary in Louisville, Ky., wrote on the LM_Net mailing list that she would not stock the book. Andrea Koch, the librarian at French Road Elementary School in Brighton, N.Y., said she anticipated angry calls from parents if she ordered it. “I don’t think our teachers, or myself, want to do that vocabulary lesson,” she said in an interview. One librarian who responded to Ms. Nilsson’s posting on LM_Net said only: “Sad to say, I didn’t order it for either of my schools, based on ‘the word.’ ”

Booksellers, too, are watchful for racy content in books they endorse to customers. Carol Chittenden, the owner of Eight Cousins, a bookstore in Falmouth, Mass., said she once horrified a customer with “The Adventures of Blue Avenger” by Norma Howe, a novel aimed at junior high school students. “I remember one time showing the book to a grandmother and enthusing about it,” she said. “There’s a chapter in there that’s very funny and the word ‘condom’ comes up. And of course, she opens the book right to the page that said ‘condom.’ ”

It is not the first time school librarians have squirmed at a book’s content, of course. Some school officials have tried to ban Harry Potter books from schools, saying that they implicitly endorse witchcraft and Satanism. Young adult books by Judy Blume, though decades old, are routinely kept out of school libraries.

Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. “I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”

“At least not for children,” she added.

Scrotum. Inappropriate for children to know that word. Even the 50-or-so percent of children who have them.

In case you overlooked it early in that quote, this book won the Newbery Award.

And note all these chickenshit "teachers," who are dreadfully afraid to, you know, teach.

For Warren Chisum and these dipshit librarians, I offer a combination of their pet issues: A flattened scrotum:

Ow.

Darwin Day!

Happy Birthday, Chuck!

Make sure to celebrate Darwin's birthday today.

Read this.

Then go to a local pub and determine which of your brain cells are fit enough to survive. If you catch my drift.

A Simple Post

Evolution in action, cetacean-style.

A child with measles, a disease easily preventable by vaccination. Without treatment, measles can be deadly. However, a parental refusal of the vaccine, for whatever reason, is NOT an example of evolution. Ask a biologist if you don't believe me.

It seems that a Muslim doctor is urging British Muslims to forego vaccinating their children against childhood diseases--he claims that the animal-tissue derivatives in the solutions violate the dictates of the Koran. I disagree with this analysis, as I do the thoughts of Christian Scientists or Scientologists--or with Evangelical Christians who dismiss the HPV vaccine. (Because it might lead to immorality, you see. Better to punish sex with death than to oh, I don't know, protect life, I guess.) Glenn Reynolds, that bastion of clear-thinking libertarianism, weighs in and shows his ignorance and racism yet again. I direct you to Glenn Greenwald, who bitch-slaps Reynolds here.

Idiot in action.

Save us from these morons. How do they end up teaching law?

Nerd Shit

No, you can't have one of these as a pet.

Here's something from the NY Times about the effects of the end Permian period mass extinction on the complexity of marine life.

[N]ew research suggests that [the mass extinction] was followed by an explosion of complexity in marine life, one that has persisted ever since.

Moreover, it happened quite suddenly, according to the study, which was led by scientists at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and published in the current issue of the journal Science. The shift to complicated, interrelated ecosystems was more like a flip of a switch than a slow trend.

The researchers detected the change by analyzing records of marine fossils from 1,176 sites around the world, which are part of a new international archive, the Paleobiology Database (pbdb.org).

They found that marine life before the biggest global die-off, the Permo-Triassic extinction, was evenly split into two types of communities: simple ones, in which most species were anchored in place and got by without interacting with neighbors (like eating them or being eaten by them), and complex ones, with many interrelationships.

But since then, complex communities filled with grazers, scavengers, predators, burrowers and other mobile creatures have been three times as common as simple ones, said Peter J. Wagner, the lead author of the study.

The shift essentially took the oceans from a norm in which anchored (or sessile) creatures, including brachiopods and sea lilies, filtered food carried in currents to one dominated by roaming (or motile) fauna like snails, urchins and crabs.

Dr. Wagner said it was not clear why this particular extinction spasm had this permanent effect on the character of communities, while others did not.

A 2002 study led by Richard K. Bambach, an emeritus professor at Virginia Tech, found the general shift to a higher abundance of motile fauna from the early Triassic Period onward, but it did not examine patterns in individual communities.

But Dr. Wagner said motility was an enduring characteristic of the more variegated biological webs.

“The increased diversity of mobile species would have contributed to more complex ecological communities,” he said. “With sessile guys, everybody is just living next to one another and that’s it. With mobility and higher metabolism, you bump into each other more often, both literally and figuratively, and you end up with a greater number of potential interactions.”

I know, I know. The Dimetrodon was not a marine life form. But damn, they look cool.

The end Permian extinction was the most significant one in the history of life on Earth. The dinosaur mass extinction (end Cretaceous) was chump change in comparison.

And when are we due for another mass extinction?

Don't look now, but we're in the middle of it. And guess what else? We're the cause! Woo hoo! Go humans!

Double Reverses and Idiocy

Eastercapp

Jon is absolutely right about the ESPN MNF crew's stupidity regarding the Saints' lone offensive TD last night (And yes, I just used three different abbreviations in one sentence. Woo hoo.). I thought it was Tony K. and Mike Tirico, but Stuart Scott is an idiot by anyone's standards, so throw him in just for good measure. For the record, there is a double reverse, but it involves yet another handoff.

Someone who, inexplicably, gets this right is Gregg Easterbrook of TMQ. However, Easterbrook is so fucking stupid about so many other things, it's difficult for me to give him credit, even when he's clearly right. So I'll just move on to Easterbrook's dumbassery in action. Here's an example of Easterbrook's idiocy from the same column:

Of course, one must suspend disbelief when it comes to superheroes. But what TMQ always wonders about X-Men, Superman, the Flash and the rest is: Where are the body organs that support their powers? I'm willing to believe a superhero can fly, but where is the organ that provides propulsion? Supposedly Earth's yellow star activated in Kal-El powers that he would not have had under the red sun of Krypton. But still, some internal organ must produce the energy for his heat vision and the thrust for his flying and so on. In "Superman Returns," Supe can even fly faster than light, a power he lacked in the comics; apparently some organ too small to even bulge under his skin propels him to warp speed. Really, there must be some physical point of origin for a superhero's power. Storm must have a body organ that projects force fields that control weather. Iceman must have a body organ that can reduce temperature very rapidly, plus shed heat so Bobby doesn't boil. Where in their physiques are these organs?

Beyond that, the X-Men premise defies scientific thinking about natural selection, which holds that new organs develop very slowly across hundreds of generations. Assume some body organ can allow Shadowcat to walk through walls or Colossus to change his skin to steel: it's unimaginable such an organ could arise de novo in a single mutation. Many generations of relatively minor mutations would be required before a novel body organ could come into full functionality. Biologists from Richard Goldschmidt of the early 20th century to Stephen Jay Gould of the late 20th have speculated there is an as-yet-undiscovered natural mechanism that enables accelerated evolution. Otherwise it's hard to imagine how creatures lived through long chains of generations with still-evolving incomplete organs, since incomplete organs should be a fitness disadvantage and thus render their possessors less likely to reproduce. Unless the X-Men are an argument for intelligent design! The intelligent-design crowd believes natural selection can produce minor alterations in existing forms but cannot produce new organs or new species; a higher intellect controls that. The sudden, drastic evolutionary jumps depicted in the X-Men movies and comics sure feel like intelligent design. In fact one of the most interesting X-Men, Nightcrawler, asserts that the very rapid evolution he and his friends experience could not occur naturally and must be the result of God intervening for reasons not yet known. (Emphasis mine)

What the fuck?

Why is this bullshit in the middle of a column that's supposed to be about this weekend's NFL action?

There's so much wrong with this, it's hard to know where to start. Easterbrook likes to show us all that he has a soaring intellect, and that he just can't be tied down to the pedestrian task of sportswriting, I guess. He's a douche. First of all, it's a goddamn comic book movie. You take biology lessons from comic book movies at your own peril. Second, there isn't any differential reproduction in the "X-Men" world, from what I understand, so you don't have to worry about the evolution of complex organs. The "mutations" that give these characters their superpowers are, essentially, just MacGuffins. Third, he grossly misrepresents SJ Gould's "punctuated equilibria" idea as being some sort of "undiscovered natural mechanism that enables accelerated evolution." Huh? That's not what Gould meant at all! Fourth, he repeats the stupid saw that can be boiled down to the dumb-ass question "What good is half an eye?" It's better than none at all, you stupid bastard! Geez. Smarter people than I have addressed this question many times, and you'd think that bullshit question would've been put to bed by now. Finally, he gets around to making a case for Intelligent Design. What a fuckhole.

You know what really makes me want to cry about all of this?

Slate.com employs Easterbrook as a science writer. Even though he's been fucking savaged by people who actually know what they're talking about.

Can I have one of Easterbrook's jobs? I promise to be shallow, incurious, and incompetent, and I'll work for half his salary.

Just in Time for Lunch

And you thought you had bad luck with the opposite sex.

Sexual cannibalism. And it's not even a story about Germany! Man, this stuff must make evolutionary biologists happy. The unlucky male insects & arachnids? Not so much.

Across the eastern United States, a gruesome ritual is in full swing. The praying mantis and its relative, the Chinese mantis, are in their courtship season. A male mantis approaches a female, flapping his wings and swaying his abdomen. Leaping on her back, he begins to mate. And quite often, she tears off his head.

The female mantis devours the head of the still-mating male and then moves on to the rest of his body. “If you put a pair together and come back later, you’ll just find the wings of the male and no other evidence he was ever there,” said William Brown, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia.

--snip--

Some sexual cannibals, including female Chinese mantises, actually eat a lot of males. “One study estimated that 63 percent of the diet of females are male mantids,” Dr. Brown said. “So they’re the main food source.”

Wow. Sixty-three percent. Still, you gotta admire the male mantis' sense of purpose. Headless, and he still gets it on.

I could go on here about how this is a good illustration of the power that genes have over behavior, and how they are more interested in their own survival than that of the bodies in which they inhabit, but I won't.

You may breathe a sigh of relief now.

Meteorites? Fuck a Buncha Meteorites.

Yeah! Fuck the meteorites! Humans can do better!

That's right, bitches. We are responsible for the bestest mass extinction in a loooooong time.

OSLO (Reuters) - Humans are responsible for the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs and must make unprecedented extra efforts to reach a goal of slowing losses by 2010, a U.N. report said on Monday.

Habitats ranging from coral reefs to tropical rainforests face mounting threats, the Secretariat of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity said in the report, issued at the start of a March 20-31 U.N. meeting in Curitiba, Brazil.

"In effect, we are currently responsible for the sixth major extinction event in the history of earth, and the greatest since the dinosaurs disappeared, 65 million years ago," said the 92-page Global Biodiversity Outlook 2 report.

Apart from the disappearance of the dinosaurs, the other "Big Five" extinctions were about 205, 250, 375 and 440 million years ago. Scientists suspect that asteroid strikes, volcanic eruptions or sudden climate shifts may explain the five.

A rising human population of 6.5 billion was undermining the environment for animals and plants via pollution, expanding cities, deforestation, introduction of "alien species" and global warming, it said.

It estimated the current pace of extinctions was 1,000 times faster than historical rates, jeopardizing a global goal set at a 2002 U.N. summit in Johannesburg "to achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction in the current rate of biodiversity loss."

"Unprecedented additional efforts' will be needed to achieve the 2010 biodiversity target at national, regional and global levels," it said. The report was bleaker than a first U.N. review of the diversity of life issued in 2001.

NOT ABATING

According to a "Red List" compiled by the World Conservation Union, 844 animals and plants are known to have gone extinct in the last 500 years, ranging from the dodo to the Golden Toad in Costa Rica. It says the figures are probably a big underestimate.

"The direct causes of biodiversity loss -- habitat change, over-exploitation, the introduction of invasive alien species, nutrient loading and climate change -- show no sign of abating," the report said.

Despite the threats, it said the 2010 goal was "by no means an impossible one."

It urged better efforts to safeguard habitats ranging from deserts to jungles and better management of resources from fresh water to timber. About 12 percent of the earth's land surface is in protected areas, against just 0.6 percent of the oceans.

It also recommended more work to curb pollution and to rein in industrial emissions of gases released by burning fossil fuels and widely blamed for global warming.

The report said, for instance, that the annual net loss of forests was 7.3 million hectares (18 million acres) -- an area the size of Panama or Ireland -- from 2000-2005. Still, the figure was slightly less than 8.9 million hectares a year from 1990-2000.

And it said that annual environmental losses from introduced pests in the United States, Australia, Britain, South Africa, India and Brazil had been estimated at more than $100 billion.

About 300 "invasive species" -- molluscs, crustaceans and fish -- have been introduced to the Mediterranean from the Red Sea since the late 19th century when the Suez Canal opened.

It gave mixed overall marks for progress on four key goals.

It said there was "reasonable progress" toward global cooperation but "limited" advances in ensuring enough cash and research. It estimated that annual aid to help slow biodiversity losses sank to $750 million from $1 billion since 1998.

And it said there was "far from sufficient" progress in better planning and implementation of biodiversity decisions and a "mixed" record in better understanding of biodiversity.

Damn straight. I mean, I don't think we'll ever match the Permian mass extinction, when between 90-95% of everything on the Earth died (including about 70% of all land families--families!), but we're some mass-extinctionin' motherfuckers. Go humanity!

Of course, our fearless leaders say: Global warming? What global warming?

I mean, isn't Jesus gonna come back next week? Who the hell needs to worry about anything stupid like environmental stewardship?

Stupid Shit Tuesday

Here at Punch and Jude, we round up stupid shit so's you don't have to go looking for it yourself. Community service, that's what we're all about.

We've been talking a lot about not-so-Intelligent Design lately, and that is one giant, steaming heap of stupid shit. That shit's so stupid, it's hard to understand how it continues to be a topic of contention in the public sphere. Seriously. And, Jon, all due respect, but ID is so transparently based on the idea of the Christian God as the designer that it's just not funny. In fact, that's exactly what Judge Jones said in the recent Kitzmiller case (the Dover, PA one; this is on page 25 of the PDF):

The only apparent difference between the argument made by [William] Paley and the argument for ID, as expressed by defense expert witnesses Behe and Minnich, is that ID’s “official position” does not acknowledge that the designer is God. However, as Dr. Haught testified, anyone familiar with Western religious thought would immediately make the association that the tactically unnamed designer is God, as the description of the designer in Of Pandas and People (hereinafter “Pandas”) is a “master intellect,” strongly suggesting a supernatural deity as opposed to any intelligent actor known to exist in the natural world. (P-11 at 85). Moreover, it is notable that both Professors Behe and Minnich admitted their personal view is that the designer is God and Professor Minnich testified that he understands many leading advocates of ID to believe the designer to be God.(21:90 (Behe); 38:36-38 (Minnich)).

Well, that pretty much nails that.

As for other stupid shit today, there's this, from the Charleston, West Virginia Gazette:

The last time 1st Lt. William “Eddie” Rebrook IV saw his body armor, he was lying on a stretcher in Iraq, his arm shattered and covered in blood.

A field medic tied a tourniquet around Rebrook’s right arm to stanch the bleeding from shrapnel wounds. Soldiers yanked off his blood-soaked body armor. He never saw it again.

But last week, Rebrook was forced to pay $700 for that body armor, blown up by a roadside bomb more than a year ago.

He was leaving the Army for good because of his injuries. He turned in his gear at his base in Fort Hood, Texas. He was informed there was no record that the body armor had been stripped from him in battle.

He was told to pay nearly $700 or face not being discharged for weeks, perhaps months.

Rebrook, 25, scrounged up the cash from his Army buddies and returned home to Charleston last Friday.

“I last saw the [body armor] when it was pulled off my bleeding body while I was being evacuated in a helicopter,” Rebrook said. “They took it off me and burned it.”

But no one documented that he lost his Kevlar body armor during battle, he said. No one wrote down that armor had apparently been incinerated as a biohazard.

Can you believe that stupid shit? Way to shit on the vets. And this was a Pointer. An Academy guy, who did really well--even volunteered for infantry instead of some candy-ass REMF job. And still he gets the shaft. That's some stupid shit.

But, topping all of the other stupid shit, we have something special. Shit so monumentally stupid, it's hard to believe that a conscious human being could utter these words without being immediately seized by demons and dragged straight to hell for being so stupid and such a liar. I speak, of course, of the testimony yesterday of Bush lickspittle Alberto Gonzales. While speaking before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales, in between rounds of torture-photo-inspired masturbations, actually said the following stupid shit:

GONZALES: I gave in my opening statement, Senator, examples where President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance of the enemy on a far broader scale -- far broader -- without any kind of probable cause standard, all communications in and out of the country.

God damn, that's some amazingly stupid shit. Aside from the obvious hilarity of the idea of President George Washington engaging in electronic surveillance, President Washington didn't fight a war. General Washington, on the other hand, did. Before there was a Constitution, you see, during that whole "revolution" thing you may have heard about. Also, it's kind of hard to hold Washington, Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt to the standard of a law that was passed in fucking 1978. And this guy is the Attorney General? That, also, is some stupid, stupid shit.

John McCain: Douchebag

That's right. Douchebag. The Senator from Arizona and media darling recently appeared on MTV for an "interview," courtesy of the same dipshits who brought you "The Real World" and "MTV Cribs."

In the course of the resulting douchebaggery, McCain showed that he is either a complete dolt or a shameless panderer to the Christian "right" (Motto: Returning the Educational System to the Good Old Days of the '50s--the 1150's).

When asked about "Intelligent" Design, McCain offered this stunning insight:

"Every young American should be exposed to every point of view," he posited.
"I'm not saying [intelligent design] should be taught in science classes. But
I'm saying young people should be exposed to it. I also believe that God had a
hand in creation. I certainly don't believe the Earth was created in seven days.
But when I stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon and look at that grandeur, I
detect the hand of God there in the time before time. I see no reason why
students should not be exposed to all theories, recognizing that Darwin's
theory's certainly one that is generally accepted in most of the scientific
community. I think it's not inappropriate to say there are also people who
believe this. Let the student decide."

Emphasis mine.

Can you believe that shit? "Let the student decide"? What the fuck does that mean?

I've done a little teaching in my life, and that concept just doesn't work. Consider this:

"Okay, kids, today we're going to learn about Pearson's correlation coefficient, which we denote with the symbol r."

"Uh, teach? We've decided that we don't want to learn about that, and, quite frankly, we believe that Pearson's correlation coefficient is simply a tool that godless atheists use to undermine our faith. We don't believe in it, and there are competing theories about Simple Heuristic Intelligent Tie-ins that jive with our faith."

"Simple Heuristic Intelligent Tie-ins?"

"Yes. Simple Heuristic Intelligent Tie-ins, or SHIT, is a way that a Supremely Intelligent Being (who is not, under any circumstances, to be confused with God) reveals to us how things are interrelated. In fact, leading theorists in the field of SHIT tell us that there are serious doubts about the entire mathematical enterprise. The generally accepted consensus is simply another religous dogma that the liberal-dominated state school system forces down our throats."

"Uh huh. And you feel that you can live your entire life wallowing in the field of SHIT?"

"Yes."

And so forth.

Also, I love it when dumb-ass people talk about Darwinian selection as being the "generally accepted consensus" in biology. That's a lot like saying that the dollar is the "generally accepted currency" in the US. Dipshits.

For all your Intelligent Design smackdown needs, be sure to visit our good friends at the Panda's Thumb. It's good stuff.

More later on Incompetent Design, as well as the truly fuckin' weird stuff that is quantum physics.