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How old is the universe? Scientists agree that the answer is somewhere around 14 billion years (give or take a few million)... unless you happen to be a student in the state of Texas. More »
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A new crop of science fiction novels focus on what it would mean if Intelligent Design turned out to be the truth. Jay Lake's Escapement is a perfect example, as is Walter Jon Williams' Implied Spaces — both are novels about people in clockwork worlds designed by some kind of higher power associated with spiritual realms. Other recent tales, such as Charles Stross' Saturn's Children and Iain M. Banks' Matter, flirt with the idea of an Intelligent Designer by suggesting that under some circumstances it is the most logical explanation for reality: For instance, if you are a creature who lives in a synthetic world (or body) designed by sophisticated engineers, your existence has been literally created for you rather than randomly evolved. Are these scifi authors carving out a pro-science version of Intelligent Design theory? More »
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Since we were just talking the other day about how intelligent design theory has been creeping into popular culture via movies like The Happening, it's only fitting that we supply you with an antidote to such culture. Amorphia Apparel, known throughout the galaxy for their absurdist tees devoted to mad science and runaway pterodactyls (see below for a gallery), has just created a special line of tees for the ID cause. In the pro-ID movie Expelled, Ben Stein urged people to "teach the controversy" which is ID. These shirts urge you to teach all kinds of controversies, such as UFOs building the pyramids (my fave) and Atlantis existing under the ocean. Check out more goodness from Amorphia below. More »
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M. Night Shyamalan's critically-panned flick The Happening is Hollywood's first blockbuster to promote the anti-evolutionary theory of intelligent design. Maybe you thought Ben Stein's ill-fated documentary Expelled was the only movie to argue in favor of the neo-Christian idea that an "intelligent designer" created the universe. Think again. With its references to "unexplained acts of nature" and a science teacher main character who calls evolution "just a theory," The Happening is basically a giant propaganda machine for intelligent design. Maybe science journalists are jizzing all over its allegedly realistic plants-attack-humans plot, but we talked to Shyamalan and we know the truth. More »
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Much has been written in advance of the April 18th release of Expelled. Some might say too much. Even Fox News panned the film, which claims that an Athiest/Darwinist conspiracy has hijacked academia and is kicking out anyone that finds scientific evidence supporting Intelligent Design. The commentary's been highly predictable, though — a little too predictable. Is there another conspiracy at work here, one that no one saw coming? More »
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Richard Dawkins: atheist, author, documentarian, evolutionary biologist... and now rapper. This video appeared on YouTube about a week ago, and since then speculation has circulated that it's a viral marketing campaign for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the new movie featuring Ben Stein that aims to prove modern science quashes free speech and independent thinking in favor of Darwinian dogma. We get to the bottom of this Expelled rumor, and feature Dick-to-the-Dawk's review of the movie and the story of his friend getting "expelled" from a screening, below. More »
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