The Books section of the weekend New York Times offers this article:
Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?

It begins…

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from "American Idol," appearing on the Fox game show "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: "Budapest is the capital of what European country?"

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. "I thought Europe was a country," she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. "Hungry?" she said, eyes widening in disbelief. "That's a country? I've heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I've never heard of it."

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As many know, I do not think ID qualifies as science and neither do I think it functions well as apologetics. I view it is a potential explanation that merits investigating. But an investigation should be open-ended and the investigator should be as unbiased as possible (I speak about this in the book). Otherwise, the investigation is just an attempt to prove or disprove what one already believes and is thus prone to confirmation or disconfirmation bias.

Yet I am also a theist. So how can a theist investigate something as big as ID in a truly open-ended, open-minded manner?

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Those who have read The Design Matrix might appreciate the significance of this research:

The phenotype piqued Kopan's interest: He saw the potential of looking at the role of PS independent of Notch. Khandelwal and Chandu took the phenotype, switched out a mammalian form of PS into the phenotype and rescued it. Similarly, inserting the moss gene in mammalian cells resulted in reversing some of the losses experienced by animal cells lacking PS function, testifying that the human and moss proteins had an evolutionary conserved function.

"In the moss, the proteins were very nearly interchangeable," Quatrano said.

and

"Importantly, the human protein acted in plant cells even if its enzymatic activity was removed by mutation. We stumbled upon an observation that PS proteins in mammals can perform other functions besides the enzymatic ones, that is, outside its role as gamma secretase. We're now looking closely to define these moonlighting functions and determine their contribution to disease."

Here

HT: Doug

Okay, so I'm a little slow. In 2001, Takashi Miyata and Hiroshi Suga [1] analyzed eight different animal-specific genes involved in cell-cell communication and developmental control. Each of these gene families has spawned a myriad of subfamilies through gene duplication and divergence. But when did all this inventive evolution occur? Here is their summary:

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Does the end justify the means? To what lengths will opponents go to discredit a yet to be released movie? This from another ID friendly blog:

You heard it in the UC, Irvine campus paper first folks, the producers of "Expelled" are bribing people to force others to see the movie. Of course, the author could have brought some evidence instead of just Kool-Aid, but who needs evidence when you are a Darwinist, right? So, I did some checking, and there is no evidence for this claim anywhere, and the author provides none. So, it's come to this. The Darwinists are now using students to write hatchet jobs in order to discredit a movie that they haven't even seen. How very scientific/objective of them.

Oh, and he repeats the fallacious claim that Dawkins, et. al. were tricked into doing the movie that I've already debunked. Ridiculous!

Sometimes plugs can be appreciated by more than plumbers. I found this to be the case with NEW PHYSICS AND THE MIND. There are attention grabbing comments like this one:

The mind has played a role in physics since the earliest days of quantum physics. The Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927 featured a debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein about whether the mind and consciousness are (Bohr) or are not (Einstein) part of physics. Einstein's position has dominated mainstream physics for decades, but the battle simmered on for the entire twentieth century.

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An article of The Times entitled Professors discuss intelligent design vs. evolution shows interviews of Michael Behe and William Dress, an assistant professor of science who teaches biology at Robert Morris University. Their viewpoints contrast with each other. Here's some snippets:

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