The Texas Board of Education voted on Friday to remove the universe's age from the state's educational standards, used as source material for the state's school textbooks. According to Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, this decision is a backdoor entrance for creationists and fans of intelligent design:

The goal here was to make science more tentative and vague so that teachers have room to tell students, 'This is only one explanation and the scientists are not even sure about it themselves' – which is, of course, utter nonsense.

The decision was only one of many made on Friday, and sadly, only one of many that suggested an anti-science agenda (Other decisions included specific language requiring scientific explanations on evolution to be "evaluated" by students and teachers, ominously enough). Chair of the Board Don McLeroy testified to the reason why that may be the case at the meeting:

I disagree with these experts. Someone has got to stand up to experts.

That's right! Standing up to experts and facts is exactly what the chair of an educational board's job is supposed to be! Well, at least there's always the internet to fill in gaps in these kids' education...

Texas vote leaves loopholes for teaching creationism [New Scientist]

In some ways, no. Consider Jay Lake's novels Mainspring and Escapement, which are about a kind of alternate Earth where it's obvious somebody (whom they call "God") has created their universe. After all, the sky is filled with gears and their world is run literally by a massive clockwork mechanism. When I talked to Lake about his novels recently, he said that they were explicitly a response to Intelligent Design. He thinks of them as a critique of the belief that our world was built rather than evolved. "By making ID into something that was clearly fiction, I wanted to show that the idea itself was fictional," Lake said.

When you try to create a world that is believably the product of ID, Lake seems to be saying, you get something that looks nothing like our Earth. That it's designed is completely obvious, and is not difficult to prove. So this is a thought experiment in ID that in some sense proves that our Earth was not created by a Designer.

Interestingly, however, Lake's critique of ID has not freaked out religious people nearly as much as Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. (Sure, it's true that more people have probably been exposed to Pullman's work, but let's assume that isn't the only reason why it's gotten more negative attention from religious groups.) In Pullman's universe, which is also a parallel Earth, there is a God and there are angels. But it turns out that God is just a senile old white dude, and his angels are fighting to seize his throne and control the Kingdom of Heaven.

Pullman's critique, like Lake's, works by saying, "OK let's assume that Christianity is real — what would that mean, logically?" For Pullman, that means God and His henchmen are a bunch of power-hungry politicians. And for Lake, that means that the universe is a giant clock. Both series, in a way, argue with Christianity on its own terms. They don't attempt to say, "Well hey, look at the world from the perspective of science — see how that's better?" Instead they say, "When you really think about what Christianity implies, this is what you get." And that's a powerful critique, though Pullman's is ultimately much darker. I believe Pullman has irked Christians for saying that their beliefs are in some ways downright evil, whereas Lake simply calls them the fantasy backdrops for rollicking adventure tales. This alone may account for the novels' different receptions among Christians.

As I said earlier, however, there is another way that this ID scenario is being tweaked by scifi authors. In Stross' Saturn's Children, there's a great subplot about robot religions. The robots, who have taken over our solar system after the extinction of humans, have to believe in a Designer — they were, after all, literally designed by humans. So a belief in ID, for robots, is the equivalent of believing in evolution for humans: It is the scientific truth. And yet there are certain religious zealots among the robots who insist on believing that they have evolved, and go through bizarre rhetorical gymnastics to prove it.

What Stross is saying is that as our planetary and bodily infrastructures become more synthetic, more "designed," we approach a state where ID begins to verge on scientific truth. This idea is echoed in novels like Iain M. Banks' Matter and Karl Schroeder's Pirate Sun, where our characters live inside massive synthetic worlds — a huge nested sphere in the former, and a giant blob of atmosphere floating in space in the latter.

What these authors are doing is even more tricky, if you look at their work as a sneaky critique of ID theory. Essentially they're saying, "Let's invent a universe where ID is truth. Oh, that would be the universe that science will build for us." And ultimately, in these novels, the Designer is not a God or even gods, but instead a whole bunch of sentient creatures harnessing the power of science and technology to design worlds and bodies intelligently.

This is the truly proscience version of ID theory: The notion that humans will eventually live in an ID universe, where our bodies and everything around us is designed. Only it will have been designed by us, in the service (hopefully) of bettering humanity. We won't be the playthings of some third party entity whose motivations are unclear. In the end, we will become our own intelligent designers.

Top image by Jasper Morello.

Holy crap do I ever love that one with the scientist hugging the nuke plant. But what do I love more? Two of the tees below. First, I adore the one that says "fucking pterodactyls," a sentiment I experience practically every time Rodan steals my Prius. And the ear mouse one. Just because I've always wanted to grow an extra ear on my cat. I don't think she'd mind.

There are a lot more where these came from, including a bunch more "teach the controversy" ones (including unicorns!). And they're priced pretty reasonably, too.

Amorphia Apparel [official site]

Avowed Christian Shyamalan told us that The Happening is really about religious faith, and explained that he chose Mark Wahlberg to play science teacher Elliot Moore because of the actor's intense belief in Jesus. Maybe he also chose vacant-eyed Zooey Deschanel to play his wife Alma because she looks like a little girl who needs a big strong monotheist in her life? No comment on that one from Shyamalan.

We get tipped off to the fact that this allegedly science fictional movie is really an ID tent revival in the opening scenes where Elliot teaches his science students about evolution. He explains to them that honeybees are disappearing all over the country, and asks what some possible explanations might be. Students who say things like "climate change" and "evolution" are dismissed as being "partly right." But then when a generally quiet student finally says, "It's an act of nature that we can't understand," Elliot lights up and says that's the best answer. That phrase "act of nature," which sounds suspiciously like "act of God," crops up in the movie again and again to explain why plants have suddenly decided to kill humans.

Remember, ID substitutes God for nature in its theory of evolution — ID believers think evolution happened, but that it was guided by (a Judeo-Christian) God. So an "unexplained act of nature" is pretty much the same thing as saying an "act of God" in ID-speak.

Once people in New York City start killing themselves in random, gory ways, Elliot flees with his wife Alma and his math teacher pal Julian, as well as Julian's daughter Jess. In the film's other major Christian-influenced subplot, we discover that Alma and Elliot have "been fighting" — not only does Alma have the gal to insist that they "wait to have children," but she also went out to dessert with a male colleague without telling Elliot. What? Dessert and lack of babies makes her evil? Apparently so. Julian hisses to Elliot that Alma basically isn't good wife material and that he doesn't trust her. One of the major plot points in the film is whether Alma can somehow be redeemed through her tribulations. And by redeemed, of course, I mean: Will she learn her proper place in her relationship with Elliot?

As our little band of characters flee into the Pennsylvania countryside, they gradually begin to realize that the waves of suicides might be caused by plants. We see news commentators talking about how the "attacks" probably aren't coming from terrorists. And Elliot uses the "scientific method" to deduce that plants can "spontaneously evolve" in response to a threat. Maybe plants think humans are threats, and "spontaneously evolved" in an "act of nature" to manufacture a toxin that switches off humans' self-preservation instincts? Why, we'd all just instantly commit suicide! You know, because God — erm, I mean nature — is mad at us! For doing things like not polluting and not having babies with our husbands.

Trying to look wise but merely looking blank and addled, Elliot ponders and looks into the middle distance, intoning, "Science will come up with a reason to put in the books but int eh end it's just a theory. We fail to acknowledge forces at work beyond our understanding." Well put, Mr. Science Teacher. All those atheists with that whole "evolutionary theory" thing don't realize it's just a theory! Probably everything in nature is just beyond our understanding. Let's pray.

But back to "science." Once Elliot has discovered that plants are causing the suicides, he surmises that plants only attack humans in groups. So he and Alma head off into the deepest, unpopulated countryside with three kids from a group of refugees (Julian has gone with another group to Princeton to find his wife, leaving daughter Jess with Elliot). God makes another intervention at this point.

When the group comes up on a boarded up house, they beg its occupants to let them in. Elliot, Alma, and Jess are polite, but the two boys with them aren't. They kick the doors, calling the people inside "pussies" and "bitches." So the guys inside shoot them, in randomly gory detail. Let this be a lesson to you kids: Don't curse, or you'll be killed by rednecks with guns if the plants don't get you first.

Despite all this absurdity, you've got to admire Shyamalan's amazing ability to whip out a perfectly-constructed horror/scifi plot without actually ever having any kind of monster or coherent threat. We get all the classic "scary monster" moments in this movie — people staring at stuff with horrified looks on their faces, distant screams, long tension-mounting shots in creepy houses — and yet at the moment when we expect to look into the face of The Big Bad there's literally nothing. No Cloverfield with its throbbing, toothy face, no disfigured bad guy with a bag of poison. Just beautiful fields of trees and grasses moving gently in the breeze.

There's a kind of true brilliance to The Happening at these moments. It's as if Shyamalan, a smart guy if nothing else, is trying to show us that at the heart of every monster movie there really lurks nothing at all. Just an empty field that you can fill with whatever terrifies you most.

And yet a meditation on cinematic form and the construction of horror movies isn't exactly what The Happening wants to leave us with. Instead, we are forced to watch in where's-our-twist-ending boredom as the "happening" ends abruptly — at the exact moment when Alma realizes she really does want to be a proper wife to Elliot, and to be a mother to the now-orphaned Jess. As some TV talking heads explain later, "events like this can just end suddenly." And we're left with an image of Elliot, Alma and Jess embracing in a de-monstered field of plants, in the middle of an Eastern seaboard which has almost completely suicided itself.

I guess that's why three months later, in an even more nauseating coda, Jess is happily skipping off to school. Private schools in NYC are easy to get into at last, since all the kids are dead. Luckily, however, Alma is ready to help repopulate: She dances out the door to meet Elliot coming home from work, bubbling over with the good news that she's pregnant. Praise Jesus! At last, Alma is doing what "nature" and "evolution" want her to do.

Think about it. In their reviews, athiests, scientists, and the scientifically inclined universally hate the movie. They've lashed out early and often. But they're just adding fuel to the fire. If the producers want anything it's publicity, and they've gotten it. Everyone's paying attention to the movie, but between the PZ Myers gaffe and now a lawsuit, the film seems destined to fail. And that failure seems just a little too easy, a little too convenient.

Who really made this film, and what is its true agenda?

Tonight we're going to see the film and get to the bottom of this. Watch this space tomorrow for the tell-all review.

I contacted Lesley Burbridge-Bates, who is doing PR for the movie, and she told me that no one from the movie had anything to do with "Richard Dawkins - Beware the Believers," or as I like to call it: "Dick to the Dawk to the Ph.D." Still, whoever created it has the movie on their minds — several characters show up with "Expelled" stamped on their foreheads.

We'll have our own review of Expelled on April 11, but Dawkins himself already went to see it on March 20, along with famed blogger and fellow atheist PZ Myers. As they were standing in line to see the movie, Myers was confronted by a security guard and told to leave the theater immediately, or be arrested. He left, but whoever sicked the guard on him didn't recognize Dawkins — who is interviewed extensively in the film — standing right beside him. Dawkins waltzed in, and here are some of exerpts from his review:

The whole tone of the film is whiny, paranoid — pathetic really. The narrator is somebody called Ben Stein. I had not heard of him, but apparently he is well known to Americans, for it is hard to see why else he would have been chosen to front the film. He certainly can't have been chosen for his knowledge of science, nor his powers of logical reasoning, nor his box office appeal (heavens, no), and his speaking voice is an irritating, nasal drawl, innocent of charm and of consonants. I suppose that makes it a good voice for conveying the whingeing paranoia that I referred to, so maybe that was qualification enough.

Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar — semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett).

Well, you will have guessed how Mathis/Stein handled this. I won't get the exact words right (we were forbidden to bring in recording devices on pain of a $250,000 fine, chillingly announced by some unnamed Gauleiter before the film began), but Stein said something like this. "What? Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN." "Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE."