Ya gotta love August

I got my 1.5 minutes of fame on the Fox News Tony Snow

Yeah, well, it is Fox.

The new, presumably Constitution-proof way of providing coverage for communities that wish to teach ideas like intelligent design is to employ such earnest language as "critical inquiry" (in New Mexico), "strengths and weaknesses" of theories (Texas), and "critical analysis" (Ohio). It's difficult to argue against such benign language, but hard-core defenders of Darwin are wary. "The intelligent-design people are trying to mislead people into thinking that the reference to science as an ongoing critical inquiry permits them to teach I.D. crap in the schools," says David Thomas, president of New Mexicans for Science and Reason. On the other hand, tinkering in that way with the standards won't necessarily weaken instruction on evolution. "Where you have strong science programs now, they'll ignore the [state] standards," says Bill Wagnon, a professor of history at Washburn University who represents Topeka on the Kansas school board.

That a really neat picture from www.time.com

I already dislike some of it: this stuff on the eye, for instance, has the evolutionist position full of "imagines" and mentions only the lack of fossil evidence. The strong evidence lies in the diversity of extant forms and the deep molecular homologies in both the biochemistry of photoreception and the developmental regulators of form. That is positive evidence, not the products of imagination.

Ugh. Or this bit, dueling quotes from Miller and Levine's textbook vs. Of Pandas and People. They just throw them up without comment as if they were both legitimate examples, but the Pandas quote misrepresents the science!

It's he-said/she-said baloney. Grow a spine, Time.

 Grow a spine, Time.

The problem is a step beyond anatomical -- it's metaphorical.

PZ Myers: just thinking, if Time had tried this sort of he-said/she-said thing with non-Religious-Right philosophies like racial equality, they'd have been accused of "political correctness". The spin spins both ways...

-- bi (http://fzort.org/bi/)

That particular side-by-side doesn't bug me, since those are the two books at issue in Dover, Pennsylvania. And they listed the "More that 2 million copies sold" vs. the "More than 20,000 copies sold," which is nice.

And, those two quotes accurately sum up the view each book takes. That Pandas quote from pp. 99-100 is probably the single most-quoted bit of the book, and it shows that "intelligent design" really is the same thing as progressive creationism, or Wendell Bird's "abrupt appearance" that was employed by the creationists in the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard case. None of this "something, somewhere was intelligently influenced", which is the current ultravague definition the IDers are obfuscating with.

The eye thing is pretty bad, even though it's a "web exclusive" presumably not in the print edition. I don't think Behe's position on the eye is accurately described (he more or less admits that the evolutionists are right about the morphological evolution), and neither is the mainstream position. The collection of eyes on the website is all tetrapods, which rather misses the point.

Perhaps some poor intern was told, "hey, get some eye pictures and make a web exclusive for us!"

The collection of eyes on the website is all tetrapods, which rather misses the point.

More August coverage:

Creation history museum in Ozarks

I can see how the quotes could be used to argue against ID, but the point is they didn't (unless there is something in the text). The flaws you mention need to be explicitly laid out by the journalist, or they'll just zip right over the head of your average reader.

"I'm still not against Darwinian evolution on theological grounds. I'm against it on scientific grounds. I think God could have made life using apparently random mutation and natural selection. But my reading of the scientific evidence is that he did not do it that way, that there was a more active guiding."

Did anyone see The History Channel's "Ape to Man" last night? And was it any good?

I watched "Ape to Man." It wasn't too bad. As usual, clarity was sacrificed to rhetoric, but I don't remember any glaring errors.

He begins by saying he's against evo on scientific grounds and then proceeds to guess at how God did it... Those clearly aren't scientific grounds. I haven't read all of the science on the mechanisms of evolution, but I'm positive that none of it mentions God. Behe just inserted Him as a fait accompli wherever he saw fit.

— HPLC_Sean

The same guy who said

"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated.

He begins by saying he's against evo on scientific grounds and then proceeds to guess at how God did it... Those clearly aren't scientific grounds.

— HPLC_Sean

I read the print version, and was deeply disappointed. They let ID get away with murder. Suggesting that the eye or clotting cascade are IC, for example, without presenting any contrary evidence, for example. Shameful disregard for science, and it smelled like pandering. Of course most people will be comforted in their dismissal of real science as long as facts are edited to prevent their discomfiture. The only mainstream publication with the balls to even attempt a real scientific affirmation of evolution science recently has been National Geographic, and at the risk of sounding ungrateful, that was a pretty flawed piece. I'd like to see P.Z. Meyers and Carl Zimmer pair up on an article that would really anticipate and cut off some of the absurd content most mainstream journalists seem to get away with.

No, as per the quote you gave, Behe begins by saying he's "not against Darwinian evolution on theological grounds". That is, he doesn't find evolution inconsistent with his religious beliefs.

...I'm against it on scientific grounds.

What scientific grounds?