No, but I will admit that @Eddie has me on that one. I was not aware that there was any such thing as a “PhD in Psychiatry.” Many of my colleagues have PhD’s, but not one that is labelled “psychiatry.” So I admit my error there.
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Then you should be much more careful about what you say and how you say it, because that’s exactly how it came across. And at best, it’s an irrelevant digression.
I challenge things I disagree with not matter which “side” the writer is supposed to be on. Consider scrutinizing Meyer, etc. similarly. Have you read this?
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Everyone reads differently. Had you said exactly the same thing that I did, I would not have read it in the same way as you did. It’s not easy to anticipate every possible reaction of a reader. Anyway, I have clarified what I meant now.
No, I hadn’t seen that one before. Thanks for the reference. Next time I’m looking at the Meyer book, I will correlate your points with his statements.
I think your intended reading makes you unusual, perhaps unique. And if that’s what you meant, as I’ve said, it was an irrelevant digression.
You will note the prevalence of quote-mining and misunderstanding (as well as gross inconsistencies).
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I strongly recommend John Harshman’s review of Darwin’s Doubt, which is devastating.
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Thanks I am reading it now. It’s an absolute evisceration.
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One of the techniques for exposing this is to look for typoes in citations, then for earlier works which include the same typoes. A lot of creationist publications suffered from this kind of citation copying.
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I agree. That must have been tedious for John.
I would add one thing to it, which is that both Axe and Meyer misuse the term “fold” to obfuscate. They seem to view proteins as semirigid machines, or at least they want their readers to think that. Neither admits that a massive amount of biochemistry and biophysics consists of proteins going back and forth between two very different, metastable folds.
Every one of our heartbeats starts with one of these dramatic transitions in the structure of the troponin complex when it binds calcium, for example.
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There is no reason to debate scientific issues in the public schools. Science education should concentrate on teaching the scientific method, so that students can distinguish science from pseudoscience.
I support teaching students about ID as an example of pseudoscience that pathologically avoids the scientific method.
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One of life’s great ironies. It’s a mutation, and a transitional form, and can be used to infer the history of the ID movement.
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Let’s look at this case, then:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6225/1014.long
I don’t think Judge Jones would allow even that. Even mentioning that ID exists, without saying a word about its contents, was unconstitutional according to him. (The statement read to students that brought about the lawsuit said nothing about the contents of ID, so apparently the sin against the constitution was mentioning ID to students at all.) And in order to show that ID was pseudoscience, you would have to inform the students about its contents, present some of its arguments (in order to dismantle them), etc.
But sure, if Judge Jones would relent, I would enjoy the free publicity for ID that this teaching approach would provide. I support your motion. 
Your knee-jerk defense of anything even remotely connected to ID-Creationism is hilarious! Do continue to show us the depths of your scientific acumen. 
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Teaching of creationism is not allowed in public schools. And Federal Court (Judge Jones) ruled that ID is creationism. This is settled law.
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Aw, shucks! I really liked Mercer’s proposal!
This is wrong – or at least wildly tendentious. The sin was not mentioning ID, but mentioning ID for the purpose of advancing religion. If you detail the contents of ID for the purpose of advancing religion in public schools (and without a genuine secular purpose), it’s unconstitutional. If you merely mention ID with the same goal, it’s unconstitutional. If you act out ID via interpretive dance for the purpose of advancing religion, it’s still unconstitutional.
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Then you should be reassured, because there’s nothing unconstitutional about teaching about ID as an example of pseudoscience.
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I wonder what a class on ID would actually teach?
“An unknown intelligent entity who is NOT the Christian God with unknown powers at an unknown time and unknown place using unknown methods for unknown reasons created life.”
OK, that took a minute. What do you do for the other 49 minutes of the first class, and every other class for the rest of the semester? Play Sudoku? 
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It actually takes a bit longer than that:
Yes, the sin was improperly advancing religion, but since the Judge ruled that ID was inherently religious (I’m sure you’ve read the ruling), then mentioning it was necessarily for the purpose of advancing a religion. (Why else would you advocate putting a view you knew to be inherently religious into a science class, unless you wanted to spread that religious view?) It’s not as if the Judge ruled that ID could be taught if it was taught just as scientific theory and stayed away from drawing out religious implications. He ruled that there was no way of teaching ID without slyly slipping in some religious teaching, because ID “could not escape its creationist origins” (or words to that effect).
So even if a teacher put ID on his curriculum purely for the purpose of showing what lousy science it was, as Mercer suggests above, he would still be exposing the students to inherently religious ideas – and it’s dubious that this would be allowed by another court, for two reasons: (1) It would be giving those religious ideas a public platform (even if the teacher was trying to undermine them); and (2) If the science teacher attacked what were known to be not really scientific but inherently religious arguments, the science teacher would be violating the neutrality of the state toward religion, even if his motive was only to promote better science. So I suspect that most courts would not allow it.
But hey, if they do, that’s fine with me. The only bad publicity is no publicity.