Politics: Pennsylvania school adds "intelligent design" to 9th grade biology curriculum

Theory: A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.


Georgia and Kansas, we expect as much asshattery out of you. But Pennsylvania?

With a vote last month, the school board in rural south-central Pennsylvania community is believed to have become the first in the nation to mandate the teaching of “intelligent design,” which holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by an unspecified higher power.

I've always found the phrase "intelligent design" to be pretty humorous, since belief in the "theory" requires absolute ignorance of the current practice of science.

In medicine, sometimes we don't know how a drug works. Yet nobody proposes that it works by "poof!" We assume there are mechanisms, even if our research methods don't allow us to elucidate them. We don't think the drug somehow convinces God that its time to intelligently cure our patients. So what's the difference? The "poof" theory doesn't work in medicine, why do people expect it to work in paleogeology?