Don't worry Ben, you are smarter than they are put together :-)

Oh please Ben, you kinda had me for most of your discussion - not that I agreed with you, but you had a rational basis for your platform. But you should know better than to have ID taught as a peer "theory" in schools. ID has NEVER been put to the null hypothesis test. As someone who lives in the neighborhood of the Discovery Institute, I can tell that these folks are NOT applying what is known as "scientific method".

Now the concept of inductive proof and the use of the null hypothesis and its disproof, is a concept that is hard to get accross even at the collegiate level much less at the High School, Junior High or elementary school level. So the ability of students to figure out which is and is not science is very critical.

Teaching something as a peer to a scientific theory when it is not is simply dishonest. And no matter how much the ignorant parents (and the broughaha is invariably amongst parents who do not have a clue about science) are upset about the "indoctrination" of their kids, it is not the role of schools to teach irrational and magical thinking.

These same parents I seriously doubt would accept the teachings of Scientology, or the beliefs of the Heaven's Gaters, yet each of these is as much a scientific "theory" as ID is.

You know better Ben.

traugott:

I found the hot document very interesting, even though the notion of peer review was somewhat flawed/incomplete as the author has admitted (and I should say: kindly admitted). I think it is unrealistic to demand a correction, I have seen corrections (in slate and elsewhere) only for the easiest, most simple factual mistakes .... usually, this kind of mistake stands unacknowledged and uncorrected. Anyway, the document is still hot, even though the text is in part flawed.

Well, when a journalist goes beyond factual reporting and directs the opinion of the reader, why should she not be held accountable when the logic behind her (mis)direction is flawed? Just call her statement what it is: part of a snarky introduction to an article alledging reviewer selection bias in a new journal, which was erroneous in a way that could have been avoided by exercising due diligence (e.g., a five minute Google search). Her comment about the editors "streamlining" the reviewer selection process went beyond factual reporting; indeed, it's this kind of reporting that often gives conservative partisans the opportunity to complain (legitimately, in this case) about liberal journalistic bias. And I can't agree with you that the author of this article "kindly admitted" anything. She didn't say anything about her original (wrong) statement; she just "clarified" the situation by trying to back up her point about biased peer reviewer selection by quoting from another section of an article. That's what children do -- they won't admit they were wrong about something, they just come up with another reason why they were right all along.

Well, I'd have to say that I'm deeply troubled by the need for 'scientific controversy' as it implies that there is group of people among whom controversy matters and a (larger) group of people among whom controversy doesn't matter - and in this case, it largely excludes the local parents and even elected school boards from the group of people who matter.

Heck, I'm enough of a scientist to know that scientists have often not had enough controversy. Many things have been established within the establishment that have later had to be revisited, sometimes prompted by an outsider.

I don't expect to see evolution as a whole go down in flames. It has been subjected to extensive scrutiny and has been demonstrated to be useful as an engineering principle. However, I don't like the principle of saying that communities of parents can't exclude or include aspects of culture, science, or whatever they would like, frankly, from their child's education. If there was a community that decided that the only thing important for their children to learn was windsurfing - well, they may learn the error of their ways in a generation, but they are trying to do what they believe is best for their children and that's good enough for me.

So, while I don't like the idea of bamboozling a judge with a shadow 'scientific controversy' I also don't like the idea that a judge would need one to make a ruling in parental favor.

*laugh* you flatter. As my Dad always said;

"I'd rather be lucky than smart any day"

*sigh*

You do have a fondness for null hypotheses. Well, I can make ID a theory with a null hypothesis very easily:

Theory: Life was designed and fabricated from non living material purposefully by an entity neither living nor non-living, for being immaterial.

Null hypothesis: Life is an emergent property of non-living material that has achieved, by self-assembly, a self-replicating state that incorporates increasing amounts of unliving material.

Fine. Does that make it testable? I'm not sure. I don't think I'm smart enough to devise the test, certainly not on the fly. Is anyone else smart enough to do it? Not sure.

But then, I don't think I would have figured out how to test the expanding universe hypotheses with background radiation surveys... just because I can't do it doesn't mean it can't be done, and just because it can't be done doesn't mean it conceptually couldn't be done.

But in the end, you and I come back to the 'role of the schools' which I feel is more our point of disagreement. Frankly, any science as halfbaked as ID doesn't really belong in what I would consider an intro biology class - but neither does any of that early evolution stuff that has been waved about like a banner for 40 or 50 years. So fair is fair.

Well, if you are publishing anonymously, as AIG offers, you are also not using your credentials... so... I don't know what to say about that.

As I've said before, they won't be able to test the accuracy of the bible given the assumption that it is accurate. However, they can test other things within the umbrella of their assumption of accuracy.

For example, imagine I _assume_ that I have the stone that David used to kill Goliath! I also _assume_ that where I found it is where it fell after hitting Goliath!

Then, using valid science, and presuming that the recorded height of Goliath is correct and that David's age is predictive of his height and that his sling was typical of those used in the iron age deposits from the region, I can make statements about the speed of the throw, the angle of impact, etc.

Are any of these statements likely to be correct in the larger picture? Heck no! But are they 'good science' given the assumptions? They can be, as long as the calculations and such are correct.

I have a bunch of examples of nobel prize winners going on to make a hash of something - Luria made some really bad assumptions about cell wall structure; Pauling made famous statements about Vit. C megadoses; and Watson has recently been blasted for some racial statements.

I have no doubt about their other science.

I think that you are really asking for something illegitimate - a club with which to banish opinions you find offensive from a community you wish to otherwise empower.

The point of public education is to provide all children with an OPPORTUNITY to learn those common elements of knowledge in our society and culture that facilitate productive participation in the society. Parents have the right to remove those parts of the education they don't want their children to have and even substitute other parts. But they do not have the right to impose theologically belief based content on the broader public in the guise of "science".

ID is not science. It has never been science. It is faith tarted up in the language and SOME of the processs of secular objectivism. And as such it is dishonest.

So if a parent doesn't want their child learning science - ok, pull the kid from science class. But science is the interlinking and interplay of observed facts, predictive experimentation and formal processes. You can't teach that physics is science, that protein chemistry is science, that anatomy is science, but wait - ignore the science - ID is science.

I also don't completely buy the "parents have 100% control of their children" arguement. That essentially makes children be chattel. And when human beings are reduced to chattel, bad things happen to them and the concept of rights and liberty are diminished for everyone.

I don't have a good balance point between parental rights over a child and their responsibilities to not poison the child's mind with falsehoods like ID, but it isn't at all clear cut that just because a parent wants it, it is necessarily good.

That's not a valid Null Hypothesis for ID.

ID's core is that it was "fabricated purposefully", so the null hypotheisis simply has to say

Life came about through mechanisms that do not include a purposeful fabrication..

And unless you can find any inconsistency between that statement and observable nature, ID cannot be proven. That's where the gotcha comes in.

And the "early evolution" stuff is far more consistent with scientific process (regardles of Mendelyev's cooked pea data [pun intended]) than anything ID has done.

AND Watson lost his job precisely because his "science" on racial genetics was dubious.

Skills matter. Integrity matters. In science particularly, consistency and process matter.

Violate those (and those who so far have submitted to the Answers Journal have) and you don't get to keep practicing funded science anymore than the HS dropout on the street corner who cannot recognize an deductive proof gets to.

Some people don't belong in science. Some people's beliefs interfere with the job paths they have chosen to date. A Christian Scientist should not be an Anesthesiologist - a Satanist should not be a Pastor, A fiscal conservative should not be the head of research at Mother Jones.

Essentially you are aruing for the worst kind of Affirmative Action. You are arguing that people who do not believe in the scientific process, should still be hired to do science simply so that we have a "diverse set of views" involved in doing science...

Except that science has some pretty measurable criteria that actually DO predict outcomes.

BenK:

...I don't like the principle of saying that communities of parents can't exclude or include aspects of culture, science, or whatever they would like, frankly, from their child's education....

I think it's fair to exclude an outright LIE: ID is science. Furthermore, ID IS exluded under your terms: so far, wherever it's become an issue in public school systems, the parents themselves have ultimately exluded it (in the cases where things got to court, the court decision was always seconded by public opinion, which threw the creationists out of the school board).

The general public has shown no substantial inclination to teach LIES in school--as long as the facts are made clear to them, which sometimes takes a legal circus to get across.