Teach the Controversy: Intelligently Designed T-Shirts

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• I need these! But I need less T-shirts. It's a dilemma! I also can't decide between the turtle-world and the periodic table.

• Ten minutes later I discovered the shirt designer and purchased a turtle-world top...

• Yawn. The fact with ID is that it's basically harmless stupidity -- it really has little bearing on anything anyone does day to day and anyone who's a candidate for doing something worthwhile in biology wouldn't fall for it anyway.

  On the other hand, it seems to me that a lot of people who are outraged and or are smirking about the stupid religious hicks couldn't tell you what an allele is or what a chromosome does (even though they can probably assure you that ID proponents are missing one). Meanwhile, MMR vaccinations are down because of pseudo-scientific prattle from the likes of Robert Kennedy Jr, every newspaper still has a daily horoscope that doesn't lack for readers, and people are congratulating themselves that they've finally got harmless lawn chemicals banned from use by the bourgeoisie. Sigh.

• @David Janes: I'm not sure that ID is as harmless as you paint it. I think it promotes pseudoscience (which runs rampant across the political spectrum), distrust of science as "just another religion" and downplays critical thinking (another thing that afflicts both sides of the political spectrum).

  It's likely that the target market for these t-shirts are the sort of people who'd know their chromosomes from their alleles from their genes. Besides, that level of nitpicking is like saying someone's not qualified to talk about religion because they don't know the mortal sins from the deadly sines from the venial sins (or that "mortal" has been supplanted by "serious").

• I would say that the "ideology of science" is the main promoters of pseudoscience -- that is, that there's topics that are now out of bounds for discussion. Firstly, because this inherently politicizes science as certain topics could be usefully put of bounds by saying "oh, it's science, we don't have to discuss this anymore"; secondly, because many scientific advances come from overthrowing old ideas, the new ideas being labelled as 'unscientific', 'stupid', etc.; and thirdly because science should constantly have to defend itself because science is basically a compendium of useful knowledge that hasn't been disproved.

  BTW, I'm not saying ID has a place in the classroom (outside perhaps comparative religions), just that (to reiterate my early comments) it's not going to damage anyone who isn't already damaged and there's lots of pseudoscientific prattle going about that's far more damaging.

• Board use of psychic blasted*: The mother of an autistic girl says the public school board was "completely unprofessional" to formulate a theory that her daughter was being sexually abused based on a psychic's perception... [the mother] said they advised her that Victoria's educational assistant (EA) had visited a psychic, who said a youngster whose name started with "V" was being sexually abused by a man between 23 and 26 years old. Leduc was also handed a list of recent behaviours exhibited by her daughter.

  * I'm assuming not a Psionic Blast

• @David Janes: You be quiet! Psychics are real! John Edwards contacted my grandma!

• That last graphic is very "heh"/