...it ultimately leads the Mad Biologist to a very irreverent, but accurate, description of the scientific method. Someone I know recently had said someone's car rear-ended. For reasons not worth going into*, said someone used The Google, and discovered that the person who ran into said someone is an intelligent design creationist (Intelligent Driving?).
This information comes by way of a post responding to a letter that the creationist wrote to the Boston Globe. The post contains this superb description of the scientific method as applied to intelligent design creationism (italics mine):
How about we take a look at Intelligent Design, using the Scientific Method, and check out how things go?
STEP 1: Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.
Okay, a bunch of animals are different and more diverse than they were a million years ago.STEP 2: Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena.
Jesus' dad made them, and helped them to change.STEP 3: Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.
Okay, I predict that Jesus' dad made lots of other changes, too.STEP 4: Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.
DING DING DING! Here we go. THERE IS NO WAY TO TEST YOUR STUPID "JESUS' DAD DID THIS" HYPOTHESIS. None. That's what separates your steaming pile of crap from SCIENCE, you stupid ninny.But I CAN test something like, say, "If I slam an icepick into a monkey's skull, fire will shoot out its ass." I can go out and buy 100 monkeys and 100 icepicks (gotta have a sterile one for each test - safety, you know). I can then take a ball-peen hammer and bash the ice-pick until it cracks and pierces each monkey's skull (properly restrained monkeys are preferred), at which point I can observe its ass visually, take temperature readings in and outside of its anus, and perform a microscopic analysis of any material that exits its backside in the immediate post-ice-picking period. Then, after I publish my analysis (likely under the heading "Nope, No Fire Comes Out Of Monkey Asses Following Cranial Ice-Pick Piercing"), my colleagues can extend these findings (replicating my experiment with multiple monkey species, choosing different ice-pick entry points, getting in closer for a better view, etc.).
All of which goes to show that we should teach kids about the relationship between fire and monkeys' asses before we teach them about Intelligent Design.
Indeed.
The rest of the post is worth a read too.
*They were quite legitimate.
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The post is entertaining, but please don't encourage publicly humiliating creationists on such a personal level. They might be armed.
Ha! That MELISSA LAUBE, from Arlington MA sure is stupid! I wonder how often her friends remind her of her ill-written and ill-conceived idea to write that letter?
Way TO go MELISSA LAUBE, FROM ARLINGTON, Ma
It's ironic that these writers fail to perceive their own worshipful and doctrinaire attitudes to the narrow belief system they call science.
Yeah pretty ironic. Those writers should stick to the essence of science and stop being ironic!
I think somebody has a chip on her shoulder. Stupid evolutionists and their worshipful and doctrinaire attitudes! Yah.
If nothing else, these letters persuade me that it might be a good idea for students to consider the implications of intelligent design side by side with orthodox Darwinism, as advocated by the writers, as a lesson in humility.
Yeah I'm sure the letters were what persuaded her that it might be a good idea for students to consider all that stuff. Yeah.
All of which goes to show that we should teach kids about the relationship between fire and monkeys' asses before we teach them about Intelligent Design.
Best summation EVER!