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384 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2006
"Scientists cannot claim to be on the research frontier unless one thing or another baffles them. Bafflement drives discovery."
"I am glad that, in the end, the humans win. We conquer the 'Independence Day' aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus to the mothership. [] The entire defense system for the alien mothership must have been powered by the same release of Apple Computer's system software as the laptop computer that delivered the virus."
"The good thing about the laws of physics is that they require no law enforcement agencies to maintain them, although I once owned a nerdy T-shirt that loudly proclaimed, "OBEY GRAVITY."
"The only people who still call hurricanes 'acts of God' are the people who write insurance forms."(and Michele Bachmann, just saying)
"The physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who in 1964 proposed the existence of quarks, and who at the time thought the quark family had only three members, drew the name from a characteristically elusive line in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: 'Three quarks for Muster Mark!'"
to deny or erase the rich, colorful history of scientists and other thinkers who have invoked divinity in their work would be intellectually dishonest. surely there's an appropriate place for intelligent design to live in the academic landscape. how about the history of religion? how about philosophy or psychology? the one place it doesn't belong is the science classroom.
if you're not swayed by academic arguments, consider the financial consequences. allow intelligent design into science textbooks, lecture halls, and laboratories, and the cost to the frontier of scientific discovery - the frontier that drives the economies of the future - would be incalculable. i don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. the day that happens, americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before.