Chicken with teeth - take that creationist

[Azazal]

The beauty of Intelligent Design, from the perspective of its proponents, is that the designer need not actually act in an intelligent fashion. That's why you can never disprove intelligent design: the most obvious way to disprove it would be to point out examples of unintelligent design, and IDers dismiss all such examples as our own inability to understand God's grand design.

In other words, they believe that if something seems intelligent, it proves that an intelligent God designed it. And if something seems stupid, it proves that an inscrutable God designed it.

Ahh the joy of the unfalsable argument.

Anyhoo, in other news, ID/creationism gets bitch slapped again

Utah slaps down creationist law for schools

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- House lawmakers scuttled a bill that would have required public school students to be told that evolution is not empirically proven -- the latest setback for critics of evolution.

The bill's sponsor, Republican state Sen. Chris Buttars, had said it was time to rein in teachers who were teaching that man descended from apes and rattling the faith of students. The Senate earlier passed the measure 16-12.

But the bill failed in the House on a 28-46 vote Monday. The bill would have required teachers to tell students that evolution is not a fact and the state doesn't endorse the theory.

Rep. Scott Wyatt, a Republican, said he feared passing the bill would force the state to then address hundreds of other scientific theories -- "from Quantum physics to Freud" -- in the same manner.

"I would leave you with two questions," Wyatt said. "If we decide to weigh in on this part, are we going to begin weighing in on all the others and are we the correct body to do that?"

Buttars said he didn't believe the defeat means that most House members think Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is correct.

"I don't believe that anybody in there really wants their kids to be taught that their great-grandfather was an ape," Buttars said.

The vote represents the latest loss for critics of evolution. In December, a federal judge barred the school system in Dover, Pa., from teaching intelligent design alongside evolution in high school biology classes.

Also last year, a federal judge ordered the school system in suburban Atlanta's Cobb County to remove from biology textbooks stickers that called evolution a theory, not a fact.

Earlier this year, a rural California school district canceled an elective philosophy course on intelligent design and agreed never to promote the topic in class again.

But critics of evolution got a boost in Kansas in November when the state Board of Education adopted new science teaching standards that treat evolution as a flawed theory, defying the view of science groups.

[The Original Nex]

For those requesting pics, the LiveScience.com article supplies a few

Dino-bird

They're not large teeth, quite small actually.

[LaCroix]

Yep, but it had not even hatched, so of course, they would be small.

I for one, welcome our new avian overlords.

[TheBlackCat]

The beauty of Intelligent Design, from the perspective of its proponents, is that the designer need not actually act in an intelligent fashion. That's why you can never disprove intelligent design: the most obvious way to disprove it would be to point out examples of unintelligent design, and IDers dismiss all such examples as our own inability to understand God's grand design.

In other words, they believe that if something seems intelligent, it proves that an intelligent God designed it. And if something seems stupid, it proves that an inscrutable God designed it.

The question, of course, is how you could tell apart a universe that is designed and one that isn't. In my experience this question has either resulted in cognitive lockup or a statement of opinion (which is inherently unfalsifiable).

[Wyrm]

The question, of course, is how you could tell apart a universe that is designed and one that isn't. In my experience this question has either resulted in cognitive lockup or a statement of opinion (which is inherently unfalsifiable).

Athough what you say is true, that there's no purely deductive argument that can discriminate between a designed universe and a naturalistic (undesigned) one, there is a probabilistic argument that states that, given the prior information that life exists (obviously true in our universe), the more fine-tuned the universe is for life, the more likely it is to be not designed (thus turning the usual cosmological argument for design on its head).

This argument is called the Ikeda-Jefferys fine-tuning theorem, and is a neat little Bayesian argument that comes to the conclusion that the probability that the universe is naturalistic given that the universe is fine-tuned and has life is no less than the probability that the universe is naturalistic given that it has life; the observation that the univere is fine-tuned given the prior information that it has life can never undermine the hypothesis of a naturalistic universe, and may support it.