Thank you for posting that example of Forrest refusing to get caught in Thompson's lawyerly web of confusion. She clearly held her own and bested Thompson during the cross.
AUSTRALIA'S scientific community has fired its first broadside in a looming war over a controversial theory of evolution known as intelligent design....
In an open letter entitled Intelligent design is not science, the group calls on all schools not to teach the topic as science because it fails to qualify on every count as a scientific theory.
"As Australian scientists and science educators, we are gravely concerned that so-called intelligent design might be taught in any school as a valid scientific alternative to evolution," the letter says.
"While science is a work in progress, a vast and growing body of factual knowledge supports the hypothesis that biological complexity is the result of natural processes of evolution."
The coalition of scientists rejects the assertion that some living structures are so complex that they are explicable only by the agency of a superior force.
They say intelligent design's central plank of a theological or philosophical notion of supernatural intervention is a belief which cannot be observed, tested, validated or falsified.
"They are free to believe and profess whatever they like," the letter says.
"But not being able to imagine or explain how something happened other than by making a leap of faith to supernatural intervention is no basis for any science: that is a theological or philosophical notion."
To allow the theory to be taught as science would make a mockery of Australian science teaching and throw open the door of science classes to similarly unscientific world views such as astrology, spoon-bending, flat-earth cosmology or alien abductions, the letter said.
Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson said in August he believed parents should have the choice whether they wanted the theory taught in schools, but not to the exclusion of the established theory of evolution.
He has since said the theory might be more at home in philosophy of science or religious classes - but not in the science classroom.
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You need to learn how to read.
Forrest seemed to remember who said what better than the lawyers.