I am suprised that no one responded to this posting with reference to the Darwin Awards (http://www.darwinawards.com/) which "... salute[s] the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who remove themselves from it. Of necessity, this honor is generally bestowed posthumously." Of particular relevance is a paper to which they link on the home page which provides convincing evidence for intelligent design - the abstract is as follows: "Penne Rigate will spontaneously insert itself into Rigatoni (order pasta) under liquid to gas transition conditions of H2O to create the previously unobserved species Noodleous doubleous. The estimated probability of this spontaneous generation event is too low to be explained by thermodynamics and therefore apparently represents intelligent design." Also relevant is Project Steve (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Steve) - 'Named in honor of the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, Project Steve is a parody by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) of creationist lists of scientists who "doubt evolution".'. Unfortunately despite the publicity that these efforts have received (the Darwin Awards are well publicised and appear in many newspapers), they have little impact on those who consider humour a sin and shy away from communist propaganda sheets like the New York Times.
However, speaking as an expatriate who has not lived in the US for over 30 years, perhaps the decline of science education in the US is neither surprising nor disastrous. The religious fanatics who are responsible for the scientific illiteracy that is spreading across the country also have a voice in government, and there is a widespread feeling in the world that the US wields too much power and wields it unwisely. That is why the EU has started the Galileo project, for example. The drift of scientific expertise from the US to other countries, driven both by religious hostility to science (as in the case of stem cell research) and by the imposition of difficult visa restrictions on foreign scientists, may seem undesirable from the viewpoint of those of you living in the US (and costly too, as even American scientific organisations are holding more of their meetings in other countries), but from a global point of view it may be a good thing. Countries that are driven by ideology are naturally hostile to science, which is the opposite of ideology. I suspect that as long as the US remains on the verge of theocracy, patchwork solutions such as the Darwin Day concept will have little impact. Bill Silvert Portugal ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Inouye" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2006 3:42 PM Subject: DarwinDay.org > At a recent meeting of the Geological Society of America, Donald U. > Wise, an emeritus professor of geology at the University of > Massachusetts ... > suggested that one way to do this "is with humor." Dr. Wise's first > foray is a parody song about intelligent design called "Marching Song > of the Incompetents," which had its premiere in October when hundreds > of geologists sang it enthusiastically at the otherwise conventional > meeting of the Geological Society of America.
