intelligent design

The planet, Jupiter!

To those tired of my political tirades, this dusty!

In my on going effort to keep up to date on the world in general, and obscure philosophies in specific, I have used the current and most nouveau phrase, "intelligent design". Between ourselves, dear reader, I prefer "creationism". This idea of the Supreme Creator and Judge, sitting there, being "intelligent" gives me the quivers.

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Evolution or Intelligent design.

In my on going effort to keep up to date on the world in general, and obscure philosophies in specific, I have used the current and most nouveau
phrase, "intelligent design". Between ourselves, dear reader, I prefer "creationism". This idea of the Supreme Creator and Judge, sitting there, being "intelligent" gives me the quivers.

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There’s a new kid on the BloggerParty block, BigBadJohnny. Well, maybe he’s not a kid; if his avatar tells no lies then I’m a spring chicken by comparison. We can swap stories about when elephants had fur. Anyway, it appears that Johnny is a wondering sort, and one of the things he’s wondering about, he says, is where eyes came from. So here I am, sitting in front of the washing machine wondering how I’m ever going to work what I actually do for a living into the incoherent mishmash that is Felloffatruck Publications, and here comes an opportunity, wonderfully gift-wrapped. Thanks, John, the check’s in the mail. :)

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Ever wonder why it is that arguments over things like “intelligent design" or the “truth" of the Christian Bible always look like a quote from Shakespeare? “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". And that scientists, if they manage to get a word in edgewise, don’t seem to keep it there for long? I suggest part of it is the way we argue.

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Once upon a time, in the time of Joseph Stalin and his Soviet Union, in fact, there was a man named Lysenko. Trofim Denisovitch Lysenko, of the Ukraine, to be precise. His is a cautionary tale for all those who think science is just another ism, and that primary education should be about indoctrination in comfortable ideas, rather than in learning to deal with uncomfortable truths.

Lysenko considered himself a plant breeder and geneticist. He was charismatic, and was very good at indoctrination. He could get the peasant farmers of the Soviet Union to do his bidding - no mean feat, as the peasants had lost their farms to collectivization in the previous decade and were generally ticked off at anybody with orders from Moscow. He could sell sand in a desert - which is a good thing, because a lot of his ideas turned fertile fields into sand. Stalin made him head of the Soviet Union's Institute of Genetics. A position he held for thirty years, during which he silenced, exiled, or killed outright any scientist who disagreed with him. He was the politically correct "barefoot genius", the perfect Soviet Comrade, far superior to those effete, reactionary, brainwashed whitecoats.

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