Setting up a dangerous, but non-binding precedent, a District Court in Central Pennsylvania today issued a ruling stating that “Intelligent Design” is not a scientific theory at all, but teaching it is tantamount to teaching religion in schools.

Read the AP story on Yahoo

While this ruling is merely a confirmation of what any thinking person who has been exposed to even the most perfunctory overview of the theory already knows, it is not binding on any other court where the issue is being raised.

However, this does not stop those forces who are deadset in forcing their VERY SPECIFIC brand of christianity down the throats of citizens of a secular nation from whining: “But it IS a scientific theory… Please believe us… it really has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with religion or God or the bible. It’s scientific and was scientifically observed in a scientific lab run by scientists…” We’ll let alone that the only people who seem to want to promote this idea also want to promote christianity in publicly-funded schools. But I just want to mention that the idea rests on the notion that scientists observed specialized processes occuring in bacteria and flaegella, and figured, concluded, without any real evidence for the conclusion whatsoever that something rational and intelligent MUST have designed them like this, because it couldn’t have happened randomly.

To finish up the celebration here, the understanding that this is based on is that the counter argument is that it all happened randomly. It is a counter proposal to “random selection”. But it is also a refutation of “survival of the fittest”. If we employ this theory, we can see that non-rational systems, or systems that actually do damage to the organism, will indeed do damage to that organism. The offspring that do damage will die as well, and eventually, the organism with the non-rational system in it that does nothing for it, will disappear. At the same time, organisms are constantly adapting to their environment and eventually, their DNA will mutate. Sure the process is random. But the mutants will be more fit to live in the environment, and will pass their adaptation down to their progeny. Those who fail to adapt will die off.

That’s evolution in a nutshell. Politically it doesn’t work, and biologically, it is still just an unprovable theory, but it sure makes a hell of a lot more sense than if some intelligent being, entirely outside of what we call nature, or the world, or the universe for that matter, came down and designed things to work the way they did. I mean, if the proponents of intelligent design seek to downplay evolution as just a theory, well, their idea is so much more a theory that their argument works against them.

Unfortunately, for proponents of that scheme to introduce religion back into the schools, essentially seeking to undo all of the work our secular nation has done to get it out, has now been labled as such, and hopefully will remain labled as such, and thus be denied a place in the socialization of good little consumers and minimum wage workers in our institutions of public education.

And after all, why don’t they just teach their theory in parochial schools. That way, only the people who want to trick their kids about where life came from will get to, and the rest of us don’t have to worry that secular institutions will be used to promote fundamentalism.

Merry Seasons everyone…
Doc

PS: I got rid of the Google AdSense program from my website. It’s bad enough that Blogger is owned by Google. But I decided that I wasn’t making enough money to justify me being a Google whore and sell their ads to people who came on to this site to read my status-quo bashing articles. If you really REALLY looked forward to clicking on my ads, I am deeply sorry, but judging by the tab I was running up with AdSense, that is not many of you, so the desires of the minority sometimes have to be sacrificed to the common good.