4.24.2005

Scopes trial in reverse

It's hard to imagine, but people actually aspire to assert that what they're working on "may turn into the Scopes Monkey trial in reverse. "

The Scopes Trial in reverse:

"Ann Arbor, MI – A simmering yearlong dispute over the Gull Lake Community School District superintendent’s order that seventh grade science teachers teach Davis and Kenyon's theory of Intelligent Design and his confiscation of thirty copies of Darwin's Evolution, which the teachers had been using for the past two years as a supplemental text supporting the theory of evolution, may soon end up in a federal court.
For the past two years, science teachers, Dawn Wendzel and Julie Olson, have been spending part of their classroom instruction teaching the theory of Evolution alongside the theory of intelligent design. However, this past Fall they were told that they could no longer teach evolution, they could not teach the controversy between the intelligent design and the theory of evolution and that they could only teach the scientific evidence for intelligent design."

--Adapted from the brief by the Thomas Moore Law Center

"If the world may be thought of as a certain definite quantity of force and as a certain definite number of centers of force--and every other representation remains indefinite and therefore useless--it follows that, in the great dice game of existence, it must pass through a calculable number of combinations. In infinite time, every possible combination would at some time or another be realized; more: it would be realized an infinite number of times. And since between every combination and its next recurrence all other possible combinations would have to take place, and each of these combinations conditions the entire sequence of combinations in the same series, a circular movement of absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated: the world as a circular movement that has already repeated itself infinitely often and plays its game in infinitum."
--Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 1066