[muir_redwoods]

"Always, always I have thought that it was absurd for biologists to make assertions about the origins of the species and point to an accidental planet full of life..."

Biologosts speak of the origin of species not "the origin of the species". The distinction is that evolutionary biology quite capably describes the origin of the varieties (i.e. separate species)of life from an original life form but is silent on the topic of how life first arose.

Darwin did not teach on how life began, only on how it became differentiated.

[Mamzelle]

What Darwin may or may not have intended.... His theories grew a life of their own and assumptions run rampant. If biologists had taught evolution as a model (which it is, an essential one) they wouldn't be having these problems with ID. I was certainly taught, at least in high school, that it (evo) was dogma. I was taught this Cosmic Soup thing, which struck me then as an abusive, unwarranted, overarching supposition and remains so...

I have become convinced that this ID/evo dichotomy is almost all politics, anti-Christian resentment by libertarian-leaning conservatives, nurtured carefully by leftists in the interest of the DNC, being used to pry votes away from the GOP.

This keening and bleating by the erstwhile "scientists"? Well, I do think they protest a little too much. This problem of ID, if it really is one to science, could be negotiated away.

[Mamzelle]

btw--have you ever seen the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest? If you haven't, it's a small park, but still worth the drive.