Deep, baying howls of derision.

Today the New York Times brings us Richard Dawkins at his finest. Dawkins reviews intelligent design advocate Michael Behe's new book The Edge of Evolution. He precisely incises both Behe's psyche and his thesis (which appears to be evaporating).

Here's a snippet: "Single-handedly, Behe is taking on Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Richard Lewontin, John Maynard Smith and hundreds of their talented co-workers and intellectual descendants. Notwithstanding the inconvenient existence of dogs, cabbages and pouter pigeons, the entire corpus of mathematical genetics, from 1930 to today, is flat wrong. Michael Behe, the disowned biochemist of Lehigh University, is the only one who has done his sums right. You think?"

Now, get over there and read it.

Update: Just in, here is a video of Richard Dawkins reflecting on Darwin, the Beagle and the flora and fauna of the Galapagos Islands.

Intelligent design: it's not even wrong.

First, a confession. I lifted this zinger of a title from a refreshingly mindful statement by a US Representative (that'd be Rush Holt of the 12th Congressional district of New Jersey), and also from Peter Woit's excellent physics blog Not Even Wrong.

Plagiaristic tendencies aside, the title does get right to the point. For while it may be true that intelligent design isn't right, more catastrophically for its pretensions as a scientific alternative to evolution, intelligent design is not even wrong. After all, science is about 1) standing on the shoulders of giants and using their foundational theories to make predictions about the outcomes of future experiments, then 2) doing the experiments, and then 3) forcing the scientific community to eat a big fat slice of humble pie if your results suggest the theories were wrong. What happens next usually involves the front cover of Science or Nature.

In short, valid scientific theories are falsifiable (spectacularly so) and intelligent design is not.

So why all this flurry about intelligent design on the Beagle Project blog? Well, it turns out that Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus might be coming to a big screen near you, all proceeds to the Beagle Project. And how appropriate, too, since the Beagle will be a vehicle for science outreach, the improvement of which is what this film is all about. All we need is a venue. Any suggestions? Better yet, any offers?

Kansas gives creationism the bum's rush.

Kansas (Reuters) - The Kansas Board of Education on Tuesday threw out science standards deemed hostile to evolution, undoing the work of Christian conservatives in the ongoing battle over what to teach U.S. public school students about the origins of life.

The board in the central U.S. state voted 6-4 to replace them with teaching standards that mirror the mainstream in science education and eliminate criticisms of evolutionary theory.

"I'm glad we've taken this step. If we are going to have a well-educated populace, this is important," said board member Sue Gamble.

Full article here. One day late, but a nice birthday present for Charles Darwin. H/t Beagle Girl.