The year that was meant to be but didn’t

This was the year Intelligent Design (ID) made its push to get into the science classroom and Iraq was supposed to be the shining new example of democracy in the Middle East. Alas, the latest attempt at cloaking creationism by another named gibberish has encountered its first knock back by the US legal system in Pennsylvania. The court's decision is available here (pdf) for the interested.

Judge John E. Jones III declared that the school district's claim that I.D. is a scientifically valid alternative to evolution is simply wrong. "Intelligent design is nothing less than the progeny of creationism," he writes.

Salon has an in depth article titled Survival of the unfittest looking at the challenge from ID and its rise in mainstream culture. Thankfully the situation here doesn’t appear to be as bad as in the US with both Bush and the Pope joining the chorus.

A lot of people seek answers to complex systems with closed solutions rather than spending the effort required to critique and/or debunk one’s beliefs and maintain an open and sceptical mind. ID isn’t the first and will not be the last challenge to the sceptics amongst us. I was always in favour of teaching the theory of the Flying Spaghetti Monster alongside ID. So what’s going to happen to FSM now?

As Nassim Taleb writes, there are many Opiates of the middle classes needing debunking. Another supposed success was to be the spread of secular democracy in Iraq. While some sense of political self-governance has taken hold it’s hardly the resounding success it was meant to be. The US appears to have done a deal with the Sunni leadership but Iran is sabre rattling, so what's up?. IMO, the biggest questions in 2006 will be if Iraq slips into a civil war and how the US-Iran relationship will evolve. Meanwhile Juan Cole has a an excellent article titled Top Ten Myths about Iraq in 2005

See you in the next year and all hail