No previous experience in audits, but hey! he was an ethics lawyer for the White House General Counsel during this admin!

Which is awful and cronytastic and forehead-smacky in lots of ways, but not plain fucking stupid in the same way as putting a bald-faced lie on your resumé about graduating from a place you didn't graduate from. It was an ER plot twist from, like, fifty years ago or something!

I'm all sad about the total and utter tainting of the term "Intelligent Design;" when I first heard it several long years ago, it sounded like a perfectly decent descriptor of people who both believe in God and are down with the Big Bang and evolution and all that smart thinky-people stuff, and now it's just another weapon of craxy. It'd be nice to have a new, non-loaded term, but I'm askeered the ID folks would just glom onto that one instead and ruin it too. Apparently the wisest rule for people who are theo-evolutiono-thinkist is the Fight Club rule.

Project Runway fans: An interview with Andrae Gonzalo.

In the long run, I think it will have a positive benefit on science, even if it is proven wrong.

Huh, can you explain further where you think the benefit is? (The proven wrong bit - well, Gud's made that point.)

That's odd. I personally know more than a dozen physicians who, in fact, believe just that. I'd be careful tossing the generalities around.

How do they explain the structure of the human back or knee? Do they consider these to be the designs of an all knowing creator?

I think it's perfectly possible for ID to have roots in creationism yet have an existence outside it. I want to use the word evolution, but it makes me laugh. All it takes is one person surfing the web and liking its smell.

But that's separating the idea from the movement. Which I do.

I'm all sad about the total and utter tainting of the term "Intelligent Design;" when I first heard it several long years ago, it sounded like a perfectly decent descriptor of people who both believe in God and are down with the Big Bang and evolution and all that smart thinky-people stuff, and now it's just another weapon of craxy.

Yeah, it's too bad, because there's nothing unreasonable about believing that God is working within the framework of natural laws to shape the Universe to some plan. Not something I believe, but that doesn't make it crazy.

Huh, can you explain further where you think the benefit is?

One of the primary claims of ID is that the eye is too complex to have evolved that way. If you take away one of its parts, then the whole system failed.

That encouraged scientists to go and develop a computer model of exactly how the eye evolved, (which it seems to have done about 40 times independently around the animal kingdom). By proving ID wrong, it has increased our understanding of evolution and biology.

But that's separating the idea from the movement. Which I do.

I think this is an important thing to do, because "Intelligent Design" is such a well-designed marketing term that it does describe the beliefs of many sensible people outside of the core promoters.

(I try to capitalize it when talking about the political movement, and use other terms when I'm not. Before ID became common parlance, there were plenty of people in the "however it is, that's how God made it" camp who didn't have an umbrella term to use. It's unfortunate that the tidiest and most accurate-sounding phrase available was designed by a bunch of crazy people.)

Yeah, it's too bad, because there's nothing unreasonable about believing that God is working within the framework of natural laws to shape the Universe to some plan.

I agree that this is very reasonable. But this position adapts the concept of God's agency to fit the realities of the world as we know it. What creationism and its ID sockpuppet do is to adapt the realities of the world as we know it to their preexisting concept of God's agency.

And in cosmology news, Bad Milky Way! No biscuit!

Nearly a million stars seem to have gone missing from the nearby globular cluster Messier 12, located within the constellation Ophiuchus. Our own Milky Way, scientists say, may be to blame.