sw'as

Brendan Nelson: Intelligent Design?

Touched by his noodly appendage 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 President1. 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 - go on, give me a click).

But by far my favourite for an alternative to the theory of evolution is the teachings of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

  1. Gah! OMGWTF! Could he be more stupid? [↩]
  2. School defends intelligent design - BBC [↩]