Brendan Nelson: Intelligent Design?
It’s been a ridiculous and ongoing debate in the US for some time now. The alternative theory of Intelligent Design is being promoted in schools in more than 20 states across the US and by the US President[1]. Some school boards are requiring teachers to refer students to Intelligent Design as an alternative to evolution and inform students that evolution is only a theory and is not fact.[2] This week, 70,000 Australian scientists have (wisely) taken pre-emptive action and sent an open letter to schools asking them to not consider teaching the ‘theory’ as it fails to qualify on every count as a scientific theory.
Brendan Nelson has fucked up much of Australia’s education system, but I’ll leave Laura to rant and rave to you about that. Could this be an issue on which he is showing some kind of intelligence? He has said that parents should have the choice as to whether the ‘theory’ of Intelligent Design is taught in schools, though not to the exclusion of the established theory of evolution. If it were up to me I’d exclude it all together but (fortunately) we do live in a democracy. He has also suggested that it’s rightful place is not in the science class room, but rather in religion or philosophy classes. Wow, more intelligence from Brendan.
You can find out more about Intelligent Design from Wikipedia (although I don’t know why you’d want to).
You can find out more about the theory of evolution by natural selection at Wikipedia as well, and if you’re really into it (like me) you should consider reading Origin of Species (which you can get from Amazon
But by far my favourite for an alternative to the theory of evolution is the teachings of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
- Gah! OMGWTF! Could he be more stupid? [↩]
- School defends intelligent design - BBC [↩]
I have read some of your blogs. You seem to be quite a scientifically minded person, writing about the origin of species and space travel. Are you an atheist too?(Don’t worry, I am not some theistic nut trying to make an argument. I am very scientific too, as well as an atheist). Have you ever heard of the Miller experiment (or the various similar experiments)? here is a link http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/Exobiology/miller.html These experiments gave a very basic idea as to how the first organisms came about on our planet around 3 and a half billion years ago from nothing more than simple compunds. Although it isn’t very appealing to some that we are composed of nothing more than the same elementary particles as every rock, wrench and doorknob, it reveals the huge potentiality of life evolving somewhere else in the universe. The feild addressing this question is called Astrobiology. Many people scoff at first thoughts of life around other solar systems, but it only takes a quick lesson in numbers to awake the human curiosity inside us all. That is, there are a roughly estimated 100 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, and our galaxy is just one of an estimated 50 billion galaxies in our universe (Hubble took deep feild images of space around a decade ago which revealed just how much there is “out there” waiting to be explored). Carl Sagan once said that “there are more stars than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on this planet. Remember too that so far 169 confirmed planets have been discovered around other main sequence stars, and that is in our little neighbourhood only (and we haven’t even begun the search for small, rocky planets like our own). It is quite humbling to be aware of just how small we are in the cosmos, and just how much out there remains to be explored.
John Doe
6 Nov 05 at 9:47 pm
Hi “John”,
Thanks for the link it was worth a read.
Simon
10 Nov 05 at 11:05 pm
You still didn’t answer if you are an atheist. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, y’know. It would actually show how cemented in reality you are. The only reason some people don’t reveal their atheism is because religions have put a negative spin on it. They have told their children that Atheists are “Bad”, “Evil” or “Wicked”. The truth is, whether or not a person is any of those things is dependent on the individual, not the acknowledgement that gods and the supernatural do not exist. It is quite hypocritical when you think about it. I mean, a theistic person calling an atheist “bad”, when they like to brainwash their children into delusions about god/s. Praying is talking to something that isn’t there, which is a hallucination, the worst symptom of schizophrenia. If purposefully causing mental illness in a child isn’t “bad” or “wicked”, then what is? If you would like information about atheism to help you step out of the stigma placed by the world, visit http://www.atheistfoundation.org.au . Please have a thorough read of the large number of interesting articles they store on their website. Just this week Peter Costello labelled Australia as a secular democracy, but the unfortunate truth is that the current government consists of a majority of christians, many far-right christians, who have religiously biased views on topics such as abortion and embryonic stem cell research. This has left the country with a ban on the safe abortion drug known as mifepristone (safely used in many other countries, but unfortunately thanks to the far-right christian viewpoint of certain parliamentarians, including our catholic health minister Tony Abbott, there has been a ban on it since 1996), a total ban on Therapeutic Cloning (anything involving the destrucion of embryos is deemed immoral by a large number of christians), and the introduction of intelligent design by our christian-biased education minister. Peter Costello needs a wake up call, cos the last time I checked, this country was a christian-dominated democracy, and it stinks. If you become an rich entrepeneur one day, hopefully you will be like Richard Branson, an atheist (http://www.celebatheists.com/w/index.php?title=Richard_Branson).
John Doe
11 Nov 05 at 10:15 pm