My Two Bits - A response to Bill O'Reilly

In Bill O'Reilly's "Talking Points Memo" he complains that "the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science both reject intelligent design and don't want it mentioned in science classes." And compares this attitude to fascism. I respectfully disagree.

Evolution (more properly "The theory of common descent with modification" ) is a coherent scientific theory which explains a great deal of natural phenomena, is internally consistant, and makes numerous and varied predictions which are borne out on a daily basis through research findings in many scientific disciplines.

Intelligent Design is nothing more than a collection of erroneous criticisms of evolution and "God did it" cop outs. It has no coherent theory, explains nothing, makes no predictions and therefore provides no direction for research. In fact no research is being done in this area (aside from mining scientific papers for quotes to manipulate and take out of context) because there are no predictions that can be tested. It is not science.

Including Intelligent Design in a science class is no more appropriate than doing sections on lysenkoism or EVP. Just as the purpose of math class is to teach math and not to explore the students feelings about the Pythagorean Theorem the purpose of science class is to teach science - not to give students the warm fuzzies about their parents religious convictions whatever they may be.

Just for the record - no I am not a scientist. I am not a farmer either.

But I know what bullshit smells like.