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Fun With Intelligent Design

This Alternet article gives some helpful hints to science teachers forced to teach intelligent design in addition to evolution:

Intelligent design is not creationism per se. It holds that higher forms of life are so complex they must have been created by an unspecified higher power. The key word here is “unspecified.” Many school board members who support an intelligent design mandate believe that higher power is Jesus. But they aren’t forcing anyone to teach that in schools.

What they do require is that teachers offer a critique of evolution and suggest alternative theories about the origins of life. How might a good science teacher comply with these new directives without compromising their principles or their dignity? Or to put it slightly more aggressively, how might a biology teacher educate his or her students while at the same time teach meddling school board members a lesson?

…I recommend that biology teachers begin by discussing Elisabeth A. Lloyd’s decidedly scientific book, The Case of the Female Orgasm. No school board member should complain. The book’s subtitle, “Bias in the Science of Evolution,” clearly fits with the new requirement that teachers critique evolutionary theory.

Darwinians can explain the male orgasm. After all, the male ejaculation is necessary for the survival and perpetuation of the species, and if giving the male great pleasure while doing so promotes that, then natural selection would eventually endow the male orgasm with that characteristic.

When it comes to the human female orgasm, however, evolutionists are stumped. No other female of the animal kingdom experiences an orgasm. Professor Lloyd examines 21 evolution-based explanations for the female orgasm, and demolishes every one of them.

Here the biology teacher might offer the class the alternative explanation of intelligent design. Is the intelligent power simply leveling the playing field between the sexes? Or is Professor Lloyd right that the female orgasm is “just for fun,” and the intelligent power is female?

Then there’s the question of male homosexuality. From a Darwinian perspective, it’s a puzzle. The theory of natural selection should guarantee the disappearance of males that don’t reproduce. But they keep hanging around, in considerable numbers, in every culture and every era.

Evolutionists have their theories. Psychologist Louis A. Berman argues that it has to do with embryonic development. Medical doctor Lorne Warneke suggests that homosexuality actually offers a natural advantage. Homosexuals instill a more cooperative impulse that helps perpetuate the kinship group and tribe.

A good science teacher will follow the school board’s guidance and propose intelligent design as an alternative explanation for male homosexuality. Could there be an intelligent power that has created and nurtured male homosexuality? Does that mean God is gay?

PZ et al, pay attention. There’s more.


11 thoughts on Fun With Intelligent Design

  1. excellent! obviously, this female higher power wants females to have a lot of orgasms, which means that sex education in schools should include instruction in cunnilingus and other methods of clitoral stimulation. Perhaps Ian Kerner can be commissioned to help design the “intelligent design” sex ed curriculum.

  2. You got it! Intelligent Design is the perfect tool to reintroduce The Goddess to classrooms. Woohoo! Silly evolutionists, everything comes from and thru the Great Mother and is guided by Her Loving (get it? loving?) Hand.

    Mm-hm.

  3. Many school board members who support an intelligent design mandate believe that higher power is Jesus.

    I don’t know if it was just Alternet being dumb, or idiot “Christians” who skipped reading the Bible, but Jesus did not create the world in any story anywhere. God the Creator/Parent did that.

    Clearly, despite what fundamentalists would have everyone believe, this god enjoyed sex a lot, and wanted us to have the same experience, both male and female. Why do fundamentalists hate God?

  4. I got stumped right after “[Intelligent design] holds that higher forms of life are so complex they must have been created by an unspecified higher power.” What th-? If higher forms of life are so complex that they need an explanation, how does it follow that that explanation is some yet more complex form of consciousness? Balderdash!

    The female orgasm: Total fringe benefit. Douglas Adams would’ve had something clever to say about it.

  5. I haven’t read the book, but I would think female orgasms are an example of natural selection: if the female of the species doesn’t find sex pleasurable, she has no reason to want to have sex. Whereas a female who does find sex pleasurable would naturally have a lot of sex, and have a higher fertility rate–more offspring, who share her genes.

    They mentioned that no other animal has female orgasms, but plenty of them go into heat. It accomplishes the same purpose.

    I’m probably wrong. But I’m thinking. The fundamentalists hate that.

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  7. Going into heat accomplishes the purpose way better than orgasms. Is the Higher Power stupid?

    The theory of natural selection should guarantee the disappearance of males that don’t reproduce.

    It doesn’t. Males who don’t reproduce can still ensure the survival of their genes through siblings. A gay man’s brothers or sisters share his genes. Not to mention that “gay” doesn’t mean “can’t make babies”.

  8. And if that (Kyra’s idea) were the reason, orgasms more reliably stimulated by intercourse would be a good idea. And you don’t need to have “sex” to have an orgasm, so orgasms aren’t necessarily an incentive to have intercourse.

  9. and nobody knows enough about female orgasms at this point to know how it relates evolutionarily. I mean c’mon, we’ve only been told we have them for how long? 50 years?

    Took me 15 years to get any good at my own.

  10. “They mentioned that no other animal has female orgasms”

    And as others have pointed out, they do. Perhaps the human observers should have asked the female animals themselves instead of just peeping ‘n’ presuming 😉

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