The monkeys shall ultimately rue the day they started to believe they weren't monkeys... in the meantime we all have to put up with much monkey business.  Today's monkey business is the requirement put forth by the (mostly Republican--big surprise there ) Kansas Board of Education that all teachers of biology must familiarize their students with the Intelligent Design-inspired criticisms of Evolutionary Theory.  The fact that Intelligent Design is not science doesn't seem to have registered with these fucktards...

From the article Kansas schools take step against evolution (AP via UK Times Online):

...Until yesterday, Kansas had allowed teachers to take issue with the theory of evolution. Now they will be forced to do so, using an official list of perceived weaknesses in Darwin's theory...

...Critics of the new science standards say that that all the objections listed in them derive from "intelligent design" (known as "ID"), a theory that maintains that the life is irreducibly complex and must have been created by a higher power.

"All the arguments inserted in the standards are only found in the literature of intelligent design," said Jack Krebs, a high school maths teacher and vice president of Kansas Citizens for Science, which opposes the change. "Teaching the criticisms is teaching ID."

Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, said that the tactic used by the creationist lobby in Kansas - to portray criticism of evolution as part of encouraging diversity of thought - is likely to imitated in other parts of America. In August, President Bush endorsed teaching intelligent design alongside evolution.

"This action is likely to be the playbook for creationism for the next several years," said Mr Scott. "We can predict this fight happening elsewhere."...

Makes me wanna cry.

Yes its good to encourage diversity in thought, but then, when we teach about plant life cycles we don't teach the kids about aboriginal beliefs that plants have spirits and that the corn-god makes them grow, nor do we point out the "problems" with our theories of plant life cycles from the perspective of aboriginal beliefs.

Why?

Because the aboriginal beliefs are not SCIENCE, and we teach about plant life cycles in a SCIENCE class.  You don't argue against the theory that the Earth is round by dragging flat-earther arguments into the science class in the name of "diversity of thought".

America loves freedom and diversity.  Couched as diversity of expression and ideas, teaching I.D. has more appeal.  Except that in health class, we don't let people talk about the health benefits of cigarettes in the name of diversity.  In gym class, we don't let people discuss the postives of using steroids in the name of diversity.

Being fair and balanced doesn't mean giving equal time to the liar.  The liar is still a liar.  We don't present our kids with the science and the lies as if they are both equally valid.  All this does is give legitimacy to the lies.

Evolutionary Theory has issues it's true, but those issues are known to science, and they are being explored.  The preponderance of evidence supports evolution and it has been subjected to the rigors of scientific inquiry for a long time.

For the record, there are two central fallacies inherent in I.D.  The first is "arguing from incredulity".   The second is the fallacy of the "excluded middle".

The preponderance of the evidence makes clear that more complex life forms evolve from simpler ones.  A typical argument of incredulity would be "The human eye is so irreducibly complex that it is simply not possible for it to have slowly evolved from progressively simpler and simpler organs."  Basically the argument boils down to "gee I can't imagine how you could get from pseudopods to eyeballs, therefore, you can't... without God."  Any computer scientist knows that remarkably complex behaviors can arise from the simplest mechanics, whether or not you can visualize how the behavior arose is irrelevant, that doesn't make it false, and it certainly isn't a scientific argument.

The excluded middle is a fallacy that basically reduces a wide variety of possibilities to two.  The one the challenger believes, and the one he doesn't believe.  It boils down to "evolution has all these problems... therefore intelligent design must be true".  This is also not scientific argument.  My friend is missing this morning, I have a note from him that says he's gone fishing, but the handwriting doesn't look right, therefore he MUST have been taken by aliens.  If a serious scientific challenge to evolution ever comes up, evolution will likely be supplanted by a new theory.  It is certainly not a given (and IMNSHO nigh-impossible) that the replacement will have any resemblance to I.D.

*sigh* How I wish these morons would just stick the I.D. in mythology class where it belongs and stop trying to cripple young minds that need critical thinking skills.

"The evolutionists forgot one thing--monsters.  Monsters from the I.D."