Score one for common sense.

My christmas present? Judge Jones hands down the ruling in Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District (the evolution v ID case).

Decision can be downloaded as a PDF here.

At 139 pages, I haven't finished reading it, but it has a few things in its favour.

One, obviously Jones reached the correct decision.
Two, he accuses the ID proponents on the school board of lying, to cover up their fundamentalist stance. (Ha!)
Three, Jones is a Dubya appointee. Thus whilst the ID brigade have dubbed him an activist and engaging in censorship, it might actually be possible he made a sensible decision on the basis of arguments presented - as a Dubya appointee he would be more likely to be on the side of the ID-ers, and yet he found their arguments to be absolute rubbish.

More can be found at The Panda's Thumb.

If people want to believe in ID, that's fine. There are still people who believe in a flat earth, who think that the moon landings were faked, and that Howard and Bush are good honest men of honour.

As Paul Simon so eloquently sang, 'A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.'

But there is no way anyone can rationally justify ID as a scientific theory. Karl Popper must be rolling around in his grave.

In any case, the arguments for ID are astoundingly flawed. They whiff of question begging. 'Life is too complex to occur from chance [not backed up by evidence, at all], therefore it must be designed, therefore there is an intelligent designer'. That's a pretty shoddy argument. Implicit in that first premise is an assumption of design right from the off. You can't use that to come to the conclusion of an intelligent designer.

Add to that the flagrant misunderstanding of evolution and the wealth of evidence to support it as far more than a mere theory, and the 'debate' is a farce. ID proponents do not want a debate. If they did, they would go off, of their own accord, and read Dawkins. It's not about teaching both sides of the story in schools. Science isn't an intellectual argument. That's philosophy, my friend (and I think first year philo students could easily rebut the ID arguments). If science was about teaching both sides of the story then, yes, we should teach flat earth theory and phlogiston.

(Well, I suppose phlogiston is covered in Chemistry lessons, but only as an example of a wrong account of reality.)

And just as my last little jab, I must express my irritation at fundamentalists who argue with me by saying 'Oh, but how can you believe in something as absurd and odd as random mutation and natural selection?'

To which I can only say, 'I've always thought that the idea of some anthropomorphic, supremely good deity I've seen no evidence for seems pretty odd'.

Now excuse me while I continue recovering from my (freshly mutated through copying errors in genetic material, hence I have no immunity to this strain) 'flu.