I don't see this blogged, so I'm jumping into the fray (with my usual liberal dose of righteous indignation at this sort of thing). I think this is an important developing story - the Dead Date is April 30.

Despite the Shiavo fiasco we all recall - when the President interrupted one of his frequent vacations to return to DC and call a special session of Congress to prevent the euthanasia of a Florida woman with brain damage - a hospital and insurance company drafted bill G.W. Bush signed into law as Texas governor in 1999 is once again being used to kill. This time it's a 54-year old woman who is not in a coma, is not terminally ill, and whose brain damage from hemorrhage suffered after heart surgery does not compromise her higher brain functions. It just compromises certain motor control, which requires her to breathe by mechanical assist (ventilator). The patient and her family have registered strong objection to this planned "mercy killing," but a single doctor has decided their wishes don't count.

Senior DI Fellow Wesley J. Smith is so far one of very few who have taken up the cause, arguing that the treatment isn't being removed because it doesn't work - it's being removed because it DOES work. He also lists a host of other objections, and lodges substantial criticisms of the Texas law.

Houston Hospital Votes to End Woman's Life with Bush Law
WorldNet Daily: Hospital to Kill Sick Woman

Read it and weep…

Over at Science & Theology News, Matt Donnelly says

There is a sense within the science-and-religion community that the debate over intelligent design has run out of gas. This isn't necessarily because of a lack of interesting topics that could be discussed, but because the usual suspects on all sides of the debate have begun to get noticeably repetitive.

For anyone who has hung around the ID/Darwinism debate for very long it certainly should be apparent that there is a lot of repetition in arguments. Since this type of repetition has been going on for years, I'm not sure it would be a fair inference that the debate is running out of steam. However, I do think that all this rehashing of ideas and arguments presents a rather unique phenomenon in culture. It would be hard to find a contentious concept or issue in scientific exploration that has had such broad exposure. Normally scientific controversies rattle around in academia and the scientific community without much notice by the wider populace. Perhaps this is for good reason because critical struggles over paradigms usually manifest themselves in a dialog among specialists. This is, however, not true for the intelligent design debate. For instance, if one monitors news items covering intelligent design in the media via a Google news search rarely does a day go by without some news media outlet offering a story or commentary on the debate. Whether it is the trial in Dover, a course offering at a university, essays on web sites, or interviews and debates on television there is a steady throng of exposure to the propositions/arguments/evidence etc. concerning ID and Darwinism. Then there are the discussion boards and blogs where both the old guard and a constant stream of new debaters do battle over the issues.

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I've argued before that Intelligent Design Creationism could be a legitimate term even though creationism is not equivalent to intelligent design. Here is an article that highlights some of the problems that creationists have with ID. The article focuses on young earth creationism but you can find old earth creationists who have problems with ID, too.

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John Timmer is to be congratulated for providing some excellent coverage of the "Teaching Evolution and the Nature of Science" conference. Very good reporting.

What I'd like to focus on in this blog is Pennock's pragmatic test for understanding evolution as science. Take note TelicThought readers. Pennock places a huge amount of value in *what evolution can do for us today* - in other words, how we can use evolution. Directed evolution, by engineers, for people.

The first session was on the nature of science and biology, presented in part by Robert T. Pennock of Michigan State, who testified at the Dover trial. He suggested that teachers should present evolution as part of a discussion of the nature of science, as the development of the theory is an example of science done right. He even suggested that science itself can be viewed as a selective process that discriminates among competing ideas. In contrast, he presented ID as a negative argument against evolution with no explanatory power. Ultimately, however, he suggested that the key feature of evolution is that it passes the pragamatic test: evolutionary processes work in both engineering and computer programming, producing efficient products that would not have been proposed by intentional design, including an antenna used by NASA. I asked him later about the prominent roles played by engineers and chemists (who have careers centered around goal oriented design) in providing creationist arguments with academic credentials, and he suggested that ultimately, the success of evolved designs will win over these fields.

[emphasis added]

John Timmer commenting on the proceedings of the "Teaching Evolution and the Nature of Science" conference had this to say:

Branch's final topic was how to handle a situation where a biology department winds up with a creationist as a graduate student. This was both of general interest, as creationists tend to use their degrees as rhetorical weapons, and of personal interest, as I was part of the Berkeley class that produced the noted Discovery Institute fellow Jon Wells. Unfortunately, his conclusion was that there are no easy answers. He did, however, note that graduate departments exist to serve the scientific community by providing qualified individuals to perform research and teaching services. There is no ethical requirement for graduate faculty to be complicit in the training of someone who is ultimately going to actively harm the field.

An interesting questions come to mind. Who gets to decide what makes a creationist? Is Branch's fellow presenter, Ken Miller, a creationist? Seems reasonable to say that he is. What about our friend Krauze, a good ol' European agnostic? He's telic-minded, but he ain't no theist. Is he on the wrong side of the fence or the right side? Who decides? Do his contributions to an intelligent design blog make him prone to Branch's creationist net?

Also, what do we make of Branch's call for graudate faculty to be soothsayers and predict which of their students will actively harm the field? How does one tell? What should a graduate faculty member be looking for, just to be safe…to protect the integrity of science?

Unable to find the two men who reportedly beat up religious studies professor Paul Mirecki, the police has closed the investigation.

The trail has gone cold in the investigation of a roadside beating reported late last year by a Kansas University professor.

Douglas County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Lt. Kari Wempe said Thursday that detectives had finished their paperwork related to religious studies professor Paul Mirecki's report that he was beaten by two unknown men on Dec. 5, 2005, on a roadside south of Lawrence.

The office has not identified any suspects and, unless any new leads come in, the investigation is finished.

At the time, Mirecki was under fire for comments he had posted online critical of organized religion.

No new information in reported beating

Dear PZ;

Thanks for your response to my concerns about your expressed intent to deny tenure to teachers at your university based on what has been legally established to be religious belief. I especially enjoyed your creative use of adjectives and the linked defense by Mark Nutter over at his semi-interesting Scientism blog that appears to be dedicated mostly to what we say here at Telic Thoughts. It's always nice to know our thoughts enjoy such wide distribution.

I would have responded to you on your own blog, but I have tried to post comments before and they have never made it out of the pre-screen holding bin. So there would be no point. Thus I'm responding here, figuring that you will either see it on one of your drive-bys or it will be forwarded to you by Nutter or someone else.

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In my previous blog, I showed how someone can take good news and turn it into bad news. Scientific literacy in America has doubled in the last generation and is higher than that of Canada, Europe, and Japan. Yet some people think that scientists still need to start acting as political partisans.

But there is even more good news:

To measure public acceptance of the concept of evolution, Miller has been asking adults if "human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals" since 1985. He and his colleagues purposefully avoid using the now politically charged word "evolution" in order to determine whether people accept the basics of evolutionary theory. Over the past 20 years, the proportion of Americans who reject this concept has declined (from 48% to 39%),

Okay, so scientific literacy in America has doubled in the last generation and is higher than that of Canada, Europe, and Japan. In addition, over the past 20 years, the proportion of Americans who reject human evolution has declined by almost 10%. Ah, but this time there is finally some bad news, as Miller also notes that the proportion who accept it has likewise declined from 45% to 40%. Nevertheless, the number of people who accept human evolution is more than twice the scientific literacy (17%) rate in America. So what is happening?

Confusion, on the other hand, has increased considerably, with those expressing uncertainty increasing from 7% in 1985 to 21% in 2005.

So what is the source of this confusion? You can't blame the creationists, as their numbers have dwindled also. It has to be something that would pull people away from belief and into the realm of not being sure. Gee. Might the chickens have come home to roost? The education system, which is the spawn of academia, has made moral, cultural, and epistemic relativism a cornerstone of education for the last few decades. I wonder why.