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12. mai 2005
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I normally find the explainer column in Slate to be quite useful, but given how Daniel Engber deals with the creationism vs intelligent design issue, I have to wonder how explanatory it really is.
Is Intelligent Design the same thing as Creationism?
No. Intelligent Design adherents believe only that the complexity of the natural world could not have occurred by chance. Some intelligent entity must have created the complexity, they reason, but that "designer" could in theory be anything or anyone.
Very misleading. Intelligent Design may not be exactly the same as Creationism, but there is a significant overlap. ID is a form of creationism, and the concept of intelligent design is of course at the core of creationism. ID is politically repackaged creationism, forming a "big tent" including hard-core young-earth creationists as well as evolutionists who believe God (oops, that is, some "designer") had to step in once every few million years to play around with the DNA.
The column stupidly buys into creationist propaganda that the complexity of the natural world occurred "by chance." No evolutionist will believe complex life originated by chance. The whole idea of the theory of natural selection is that it is not chance at all.
Creationism comes in many varieties, from the strictest biblical literalism (according to which the Earth is only a few thousand years old, and flat) to the theistic evolutionism of the Catholic Church (which accepts evidence that the Earth is millions of years old, and that evolution can explain much of its history—but not the creation of the human soul). Between those extremes, there are "Young-Earth" and "Old-Earth" creationists, who differ over the age of the planet and the details of how God created life.
This is also wrong. The Roman Catholic teaching that God created the soul has nothing to do with creationism. The soul is not part of the natural world, is not subject to scientific study, and it's thus scientifically irrelevant. Such an idea certainly has no quarrel with a naturalistic theory of evolution, and cannot be labeled ID. The author also seems to think "young earth" is distinct from those who think the Earth is only a few thousand years old; in fact they are one and the same. Young Earth creationism is the extreme, apart maybe from those who add geocentricism and flat-earthism.
PS: Of course, this column was still better than a mind-boggingly ignorant rant by Brian McNicoll. The poor guy thinks he has found a way to refute evolution:
You want to see slimy evasion? Put this to a dedicated Darwinist: How did two apes, two animals driven by nothing but instinct to survive, mate and produce a thinking, discerning, right-from-wrong-knowing human being? Two of them, actually – one boy and one girl, in more or less the same neighborhood, travel not being as convenient then as it is now.
It's not evasion, McNicoll. It's laughter.
12:23:19 PM 
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A US Senate committee has released a report outlining strong evidence that maverick British MP George Galloway received an allocation of 20 million barrels of oil from Saddam Hussein's government.
A US Senate committee published evidence from Iraqi documents and interviews with Iraqi officials that the former Labour MP, re-elected to Parliament for his Respect party, received allocations for millions of barrels of oil.
Taha Yassin Ramadan, the ousted Vice-President of Iraq, told Senate investigators last month that Mr Galloway had been granted the oil allocations because of his opinions about Iraq and because he wanted to lift the embargo against the country. Another Saddam-era official told US Treasury Department officials in 2003 that a British MP, identified as Mr Galloway, “benefited tremendously from the illegal trade of oil by Iraq”.
“Despite Galloway’s denials, the evidence obtained by the sub-committee, including Hussein-era documents from the Ministry of Oil and testimony from senior Hussein officials, shows that Iraq granted George Galloway allocations for millions of barrels of oil under the Oil-for-Food programme,” the report said. “Moreover, some evidence indicates that Galloway appeared to use a charity for children’s leukaemia to conceal payments associated with at least one such allocation.”
The current evidence showing Galloway's shady deals have nothing to do with earlier allegations from the Daily Telegraph, which lost the first round of a libel case initiated by Galloway.
Galloway unsurprisingly denies everything.
The same report also outlines evidence against former French minister Charles Pasqua, who is to have received allocations of 11 million barrels of oil. You can find the full report on the BBC site.
11:55:35 AM
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Pablo Paredes has been convicted of refusing to board his ship the USS Bonhomme Richard when it was sailing for Iraq. Here is how he describes his conversion from navy sailor to peacenik:
Paredes says he was a different person when he joined the Navy in 2000, looking for a job and a way to get a college education. The Navy sent him to Yokosuka, Japan and once there, he says he had something of an awakening.
He began devouring works by writers like Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguistics professor and political activist. He joined political discussions with like-minded friends who criticized the Bush administration. Japan's strong moral code impressed him as well, and when he left the country last year, Paredes says he had a huge internal conflict.
"I was ashamed to wear the uniform," he said in a recent interview.
Well, a lot of people are impressed by Noam Chomsky when they are kids.
4:02:17 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.06.2005; 06:44:37.
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