There could be some new developments. They are reviewing the Intelligent Design creationism nonsense that was inoculated into their curricula a few years ago, and all signs indicate that they are planning to cut the infection out.

A majority of members on the Board of Education of Ohio, the first state to single out evolution for “critical analysis” in science classes more than three years ago, are expected on Tuesday to challenge a model biology lesson plan they consider an excuse to teach the tenets of the disputed theory of intelligent design.

A reversal in Ohio would be the most significant in a series of developments signaling a sea change across the country against intelligent design — which posits that life is too complex to be explained by evolution alone — since a federal judge’s ruling in December that teaching the theory in the public schools of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional.

The article mentions the usual polls that say the uninformed public favor teaching creationism, but is also notable for including the scathing opinions of scientists and educators.

Besides the Dover decision, the disclosure in December of documents detailing internal discussions of the lesson plan helped revive debate here. Obtained by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, a group considering a suit on the plan, the documents show that department scientists and outside experts condemned the lesson as “a lie,” “crackpot,” “religious,” “creationism” and “an insult to science.”

Asked whether the lesson connects skills to the real world, an external reviewer wrote: “Not the real scientific world. The real religious world, yes, the real world based on faith, yes, the real world of fringe thinking, yes!”

Patricia Princehouse, an evolutionary biologist and historian of science who has led the charge against the lesson plan, said, “Basically critical analysis is intelligent design relabeled, just as intelligent design was creationism relabeled.”

Let’s look forward to seeing this new label tossed in the trash bin.

Eaton was the Minnetonka school board member and advocate of Intelligent Design creationism who abruptly resigned, shortly after his attempts to weaken his school district’s science standards were quashed. You wouldn’t know anything about that bit of backstory from this puff piece on Eaton, which has little but praise for the man and explains his departure by quoting him as saying he is “not leaving for any health, family or career reasons.”

C’mon, Strib. Come clean and say it. We know why he left: it’s because his brand of creationism was decisively crushed in Minnetonka, and he knew he was marginalized and isolated.

There’s always Austin.

Check out the nice and lucid op-ed against Intelligent Design creationism published down there: it points out that ID is on a fool’s errand that will always allow it to be defeated in a scientific argument.

ID will be trapped in a morass of implausible and unscientific rationalizations, trying to explain why a designer did this or that, whereas evolution does not ascribe purpose to the process called “natural selection.” As Gould emphasized in his final public appearance here (in February 2002), it is unscientific and self-centered to think that our species—perhaps 160,000 years old, after 3.8 billion years of mostly microscopic unicellular life—represents the goal of evolution.

Orson Scott Card has written a long essay defending Intelligent Design.

Oy, but it is depressing.

It’s a graceless hash, a cluttered and confusing mish-mash of poorly organized complaints about those darned wicked “Darwinists”. He lists 7 arguments. Then he repeats his list, expanding on them. Then he goes on and on, hectoring scientists about how they should behave. For a professional writer, it’s just plain bad writing—I’m struggling with how to address his arguments, but he’s written such a gluey mass of tangled ranty irrationality that it’s hard to get a handle on it. Ugly, ugly, ugly…and why do these guys all seem to think the way to defend the ideas of ID is to whine about the perfidy of all those scientists? Not once does he bring up any evidence for ID.

Card can’t discuss the evidence, because he doesn’t know or understand the evidence. That’s apparent when he begins by praising Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box, and regurgitates the argument from irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity is not a problem for evolution, and Behe is a tired old fraud who hasn’t had a new idea in 15 years. That Card would be impressed with DBB says only that he doesn’t know much biology and that the depth of his thinking is remarkably shallow.

Oh, well. I’ll try the brute force approach and discuss each of Card’s arguments in turn. This will get long.

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