What is it with these fucking idiots?
Required?
REQUIRED?
What part of “UNCONSTITUTIONAL” do they not understand. What part of NOT FUCKING SCIENCE do they not understand?
Is the Mississippi legislature really this stupid or are they just that cynical about pandering to the inbred vote?
Jesus, I’m getting tired of reading stories like this.
I hate making broad negative generalizations about an entire state , but sometimes I don’t feel so bad about it. This is one of those times.
But…but…but intelligent design has nothing to do with creationism, right? They’re two totally separate things!!! 
Actually, the last major theory that established science (according to a piece by Andre Kerdescu of NPR) attempted to debunk by saying it was the same as creationism was…
(wait for it)…
(hold on)…
(ready?)…
The Big Bang theory. Even Einstein attempted to refute the Big Bang as “impossible” by introducing the universal time constant to his theories. He failed. Simply put, Intelligent Design and Evolution are not, in and of themselves, incompatable. However, with that said, Intelligent Design should be taught as a philosophy, not in a science class. Perhaps a BAIS type class?
This has always puzzled me you know.
How can a country as great as the US (which, deserved or not, has been the pinnacle of ‘civilisation’ to which other lesser countries hope to aspire) countenance such fucking crap legislature as this?
Yes, I know that it is one state that is trying it on, but from us on the other side of the world, we do but wonder how the US itself can be so retarded in their thinking?
Can’t you force those states to secede from the union or something? 
Before people start complaining about Mississippi going to the dogs (or gods, I’m not sure which.) it should be recognized that having a bill sent to committee does not mean it’s ever going to see the light of day again, let alone that it’s even close to being enacted as a law.
AIUI (someone from Mississippi might be able to better correct me, if I’m wrong.) what’s going on here is that the bill was proposed on the floor of the legislature, and then was sent to the Committee on Education. There the committee will attempt to work out a bill that meets the constitutional requirements and sent it back to the legislature for voting to pass. If Mississippi has a bicameral legislature (Sorry, at 4 AM I’m not feeling the need to actually do real research.) then, before the Governor gets the bill to sign into law, the higher house will also have to vote on a similar bill. Then the two bills are reconciled with each other. And I believe voted upon again by each house. Then the bill is sent to the governor. Who may or may not sign it.
Until it’s out of committee it’s nothing more than some clique of representative’s pipe dream. And is likely to die in committee again, after having wasted time of everyone involved. When it comes out of committee would be a better time to start complaining about the idiocy of the bill or the state. As it is, there’s no reason to tar a whole state with anything here.
(I do not defend the bozo who submitted this joke to the legislature. Just the rest of the state.)
You know if this bill would pass that’d mean school children in Mississippi would get the best education concerning evolution from the local Catholic High Schools.
Martin Hyde, you mean that’s not already the case? 
It’s hard to say as I haven’t any experience with Mississippi (driven through a few times), but in a lot of “Mississippi-like” states I know parents (even huge numbers of non-Catholics or even atheists) will send their kids to Catholic schools as they aren’t big fans of the local school system’s quality of education.
This is an utter misrepresentation, whomever it’s ‘according to’. Yes, Hubble’s 1929 observation of receding galaxies was a surprise, no doubt. Yes, Gamow’s later suggestion that the universe was highly compressed at one end was initially treated as just a suggestion, but the naysayers including Fred Hoyle who preferred a Steady State to Big Bang could never be called “established science”. Penzias and Wilson then conclusively settled the matter by observing the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. All of this was entirely reasonable difference in interpretation of evidence - nobody “attempted to debunk it because it was the same as creationism”.
The cosmological constant is what you’re looking for, and it is no longer considered a failure, having been reborn in different guises in eg. Higgs field theory. Einstein didn’t think a compressed universe was impossible, he just didn’t like the idea. Again, anitpathy towards creationism played no part here.
Evolution says that the simple mechanism of copy-vary-select can result in all the complex organs and organisms observed to date, ID says it can’t. These positions are mutually exclusive.
I would suggest Media Studies or the like, just after analysis of the Monty Python sketch in which a man looks for an argument but finds only mindless, automatic denial without any supporting rationale.
I think a lot of people living in foreign nations have a fundamental misunderstanding of how our federal government works. Individual states have a certain amount of autonomy and are largely free to pass whatever legislation they wish. The state laws of Mississipi or Texas are not U.S. laws they are the laws of Mississippi and Texas.
Odd considering the attitudes of people living in the United States can vary widely from state to state. What goes on in Mississippi might not happen in Alaska, Hawaii, California, or Arizona. Of course I don’t posess a whole lot of knowledge about how the Australian government works so I can hardly be surprised when people don’t understand how ours works.
Marc
I steeled myself and clicked on the “Intelligent Design Proven!” ad at the bottom of the thread. And found out nothing, because apparently Mr. Perry Marshall wants to email me a 5 day course instead of putting his content on his website. Mr. Perry Marshall isn’t getting my email address.
I have no objection to the teaching of creationism in schools, as long as it is presented in a World Mythology class and not science class, and as long as they include a wide range of creation stories like, say, Greek, Norse, African, Hindu, Mayan, Maori, Christian, Egyptian…
Somehow, though, I don’t think that’s what the IDers have in mind.
Perhaps. Kambuckta would not be one of those people. As a general rule, the US does a good job of exporting knowledge of its culture and nation. As a consequence, you might find that it is as a general rule safer to tend towards the assumption that you know less about “foreign nations” than foreigners now about your nation.
Indeed. If you did, you’d know that we have a very similar system here and Kambuckta is familiar with the idea.
Kambuckta is blowing off steam and giving you shit. Note the smilie. Note the comment that she knows that this is just one state trying it on.
I stand corrected.
Again, I stand corrected.
Let me raise the question of selective breeding, such as the white mice which are used in labs. These creatures are a creation of modern science, and as such could not compete in any biosphere on this planet. Did they ‘evolve’ or were they ‘designed?’ In this case both. Because of external factors and not being subjected to the full rigors of a truly competative environment, lab mice have traits which would virtually guarentee their destruction if faced with competition and natural selection. Doesn’t change the fact that their design isn’t exactly what medical science wanted.
The only arguement which prevents ID and evolution from working in conjunction would be creationism. As noted in an earlier cite, ID and creationism are at odds with eachother, seeing as the latter is a literal interpretation of the Bible and the former is an odd answer to evolution. Perhaps Dr. James Lovelock’s Gaea Hypothesis is a better answer. Organisms are ‘designed’ by this overall ‘intelligence’ (the Earth as a whole) to sustain life. Creatures which do not contribute to the overall well being of the whole go extinct while others ‘evolve’ (or are ‘designed’) to fill certain niches?
That also raises another question. With the ID side of the debate, more often than not it is assumed that a sentient being is the ‘designer.’ Intelligent does not equate to sentient. Ants as individuals are not sentient (don’t ask me to prove it, but for some reason I doubt that they have an image of ‘self’) but as a colony have a highly organized society. The colony is ‘intelligent,’ in that it seeks to guarentee its suvival despite the fact that the individual is not sentient.
~Mang
Er…on preview, I see that I’m not making a helluva lot of sense. I’ll be back tomorrow, armed with sleep, and perhaps I can explain myself.
Really? Because I’ve found that a lot of what passes for knowledge about the United States isn’t quite the truth. Yes, we most certainly do export out culture but it isn’t as if our movies or television are an accurate representation of life or attitudes in the United States. Even the news media, particularly television, tend to exaggerate things by making some stories seem a whole lot more important then they actually are.
I’m aware of the similiarities between our federal systems but I will readily admit I don’t know all the ins-and-outs of Australian legislative processes and politics.
Did I get upset? Did I call Kambucta names?
Marc
But I think you’re misunderstanding the ID argument, which relies on irreducible complexity. In other words, there is no way that breeding can be responsible for certain traits. The fact that these mice were “evolved” or “designed” in a lab is exactly what makes it not an argument for ID.
The source referred to here is Andrei Codrescu, an entertaining poet.
They evolved in a very specific, isolated environment. Yes, that environment was effectively controlled by another organism (us), but the same is true of other (arguably any other) instances of evolution or speciation: We chose only some mice to breed just as predators, pathogens and food source plants choose which mice are still breeding after N generations.
But here you are selecting environments arbitrarily. Yes, white mice wouldn’t thrive in the environment of a fieldmouse, but then neither would a water vole. I would argue that the fieldmouse lost out in the white mouse environment too - we were the ‘predators’, and we eradicated it.
Well, want doesn’t necessarily get, but the point here is that what you call ‘design’ was really just humans using the natural variation to bring about a specific outcome - just because an environment of grasses or whatever would produce a different outcome doesn’t make that variation any less natural. I would even argue that this applied to the Harvard Oncomouse in which the myc oncogene was modified to cause tumours reliably. Again, ‘design’ is just focussing on a particular feature thrown up by natural variation.
No, ID sates that some features cannot be the result of natural variation. This is diametrically opposed to evolutionary biology at a fundamental level.
Unless you or he can propose a test which distinguishes Gaia from established evolutionary biology, the hypothesis is not even scientific.
You forgot to actually state the question.
So? The whole point of evolutionary biology is that highly complex or organised systems can result from simple copy-vary-select mechanisms in particular environments. ID says that certain features can’t.
Before you get too comfortable up there on the high horse, kambuckta, you may like to remember that Australia’s Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson has made a number of statements supporting intelligent design and its implementation into school science curricula, were it politically feasible. If Brendan Nelson was given his own Down Under Mississippi (which I am sure would be referred to by the apt acronym D.U.M.), he would be perfectly happy to enact exactly the bill you are decrying, and Australia, lacking the First Amendment protection of freedom of religion that the United States’ enjoys, would be powerless to prevent his conflation of church and state.
One of the biggest reasons Australia is free of the foolishness the OP speaks of is the accident of Geography which has seen its states’ populations dominated overwhelmingly by metropolitan (and as a result, less conservative) areas, and a low population density that has resulted in it being impossible for comparably backward regions of the country to be self-governing.
Live here for five years and you won’t feel bad about it at all…
-Joe