The More Things Change...

I was looking at some cartoons on Gocomics when I saw this old Bloom County cartoon. It was originally published in the Washington Post and later released as part of a collection called "Loose Tails"—in 1983—twenty-five years ago. When you consider that the issue of Intelligent Design versus evolution is still being argued about in the courts, it's pretty amazing to see people still arguing. The whole series of Bloom County's "scientific penguinism" cartoons can be seen here.

The Evolution of the Eye

I can't remember where I first ran across this video. (Which is pretty pathetic since it just a couple of hours ago.) It deals with how eyes evolve in invertebrates and takes on a classic "intelligent design" argument that some organs, like the eye, are simply too complicated to have ever evolved without some sort of master "designer" interfering.

Here's an interesting review of the movie Expelled. It is documentary narrated by Ben Stein about the "Intelligent Design" movement. ID is essentially creationism repackaged to sound more "scientific." But for the most part, it consists of repeating the same claims and using the same tactics that creation uses to try to use doubts and create controversy to discredit the theory of evolution.

One of the things that I liked about the review is the calmness and objectivity of the reviewer. He doesn't call Stein and his friends "liars" or "idiots" and rightfully points out that this movie is essentially "preaching to the choir" of people whom are already predisposed to distrust evolutionary theory. He does note that it is a propaganda film but doesn't stoop to the level of the propagandists. Too often on the Internet, I see a lot of noise and very little signal as threads of comments frequently devolve into name-calling contests.