Daleks and Reavers and Bears

Feeling virtuous. Abstracts written, essays marked, meetings organized. Read a nice little piece in the Saturday Guardian about Jonathan Coe’s obsession with The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes with a (possibly) happy ending.

(  Spoilers for ‘Dalek’ )

Nature has an article on the rise of ‘intelligent-design’ on US college campuses:

The arguments are familiar: some biological systems are too complex, periodic explosions in the fossil record too large and differences between species too great to be explained by natural selection alone.

After reading it I’m still not at all clear how this is a subject that can be taught separately. If we’re not teaching students to think critically about scientific results and their current explanations as a matter of course, we really are failing them. And the implication that intelligent-design means accepting that some phenomena cannot be explained and that therefore we should stop asking questions about them is anti-science at a far more fundamental level than any creationist claims that the Earth is only a few thousand years old.

I get the feeling I’m missing something. Evolution does seem to be important to scientists beyond those active in field – in an Guardian article a few weeks back the usual suspects were interviewed about what scientific ideas they thought it was most important to get across in schools. Natural selection was the single most popular choice. Darwinism is philosophically disorientating. I still remember the moment of understanding it for the first time and simultaneously losing my religion. Almost on aesthetic grounds. I’m going to hell for the pretty.

(  More on ‘Dalek’ and ‘Serenity’ speculation )