Lets get rid of that Judge Jones caricature on the home-page

Does anybody else think we should get ride of the anti-Jones stuff on the home-page? I think it looks a bit immature. The home page of this site reads:

"He's a Wacky, Zany Activist
He's a rogue,
And he loves that old-time
Darwinian Religion"

Did we loose in Judge Jones' court because he perverted the course of law (a scandalous accusation) or because our side presented a legally weaker case? Could it be that we lost because the other side were more experienced litigators and had prepared stronger arguments? Could it also be that our side simply picked the wrong fight at the wrong time?

We all know that courts do not decide science - but courts decide legal battles and unfortunately we lost in Jones' court. Should we keep fighting this battle or get over it and move on to the next issue?

I do not want history judging us as the sore-looses. This seems like the kind of school-yard taunting that can only hurt our efforts to reach out to the scientific mainstream.

Helena

x

Helena asked: "Could it also be that our side simply picked the wrong fight at the wrong time?

We all know that courts do not decide science - but courts decide legal battles and unfortunately we lost in Jones' court. Should we keep fighting this battle or get over it and move on to the next issue?"

Actually, the Discovery Institute has consistently maintained that trying to force intelligent design into the classrooms is the wrong way to proceed. They tried to dissuade the Dover school board from this approach. It was a portion of the Dover school board that persisted in this extremely minimal, yet not well advised, attempt to promote ID through policy choices.

Discovery Institute strongly supports academic freedom for teachers, but they also believe that ID must first earn its place through making its case. It should not be mandated into the classroom.

Instead, students should get a full instruction regarding evolution, which includes showing both its strengths and its weaknesses, both what it answers and also where it has difficulty supporting answers. In short, it should be treated as a scientific position, not as a dogma that may never be questioned or examined critically.

So, yes, you are right that the court case doesn't decide science, and also that trying to mandate the inclusion of ID is not the right way to go. Discovery Institute agrees on both counts. ID needs to first earn its spurs.

That said, as a legal case, when the judge "writes" his judgment by copying large portions of documents supplied by one side verbatim, uncritically including errors, there is a strong indication of bias. The copy-paste judge failed to demonstrate an independent grasp of the issues as presented by both sides.

However, I do know something about it, so will clarify one point: The people who promoted the Dover case were NOT the usual ID crowd, and were very determined to go their own route, despite emphatic warnings by the latter. They ended up quarrelling with much of the ID crowd. I did get around to reporting a bit of that at the Post-Darwinist.

That's right - my problem is that by mocking Judge Jones on a site that is known to be connected with the DI, and even on the same page as pictures of professors Behe and Dembski strongly creates the impression that we believe that the dover decision was unjust.

My personal belief is that the dover case was il-advised and Dover School-board's lawyers were ill-prepared to take a church-state separation case against the ACLU lawyers who had been litigating this single issue the whole of their professional lives.

Furthermore, having reviewed the testimony my impression was that our witnesses were unprepared for the kinds of arguments that the opposition unleashed - the simple fact is that Dover was lost fair and square.

Does anyone else want the points board? To steal a phrase, what's the "point" of it?

What is the "points" board. Can you explain?

While we are here, what other changes would blog users like to see?

Denyse - I have a suggestion but you might not like it. I'd ask for less cross-posted content. Many of the regular readers of this site (including myself) also subscribe to your blogs, and the other blogs you cross-post articles from. That means I get over-notified about new articles.

Also,because you are posting so much it creates a powerful dis-incentive for anybody else to post articles. I no longer bother because I know that any article I write will only appear on the home page for a day or so before it is quickly displaced by a flood of short posts which mainly advertise content on other sites.

Hi, Bob!I mean the board that is currently near my top right, which shows me as having "1857 points".

Denyse, yes I agree - it's somewhat redundant.

Thanks for your comments re crossposting. My preference would be a news roll, but until it happens, I don't know how to alert those who don't regularly read other ID-related blogs about new content. We don't even have a blogroll here.

What about cross-posting at a lower frequency, e.g. once per week with the very best articles from the other sites - so every week you might limit yourself to a single post referencing the five articles that you feel are most insightful.

That way you could ease a newbie into the scene by pointing them to the few best articles first. I think with the amount of cross-posting on the site today it would be very easy for a newb to become overwhelmed.

I've no fundamental objection to cross-posting (after all, that's how blogging started), however I do feel that there needs to be a balance between cross-posts and original articles.

Most active blogs in my experience have top content changed frequently, often several times a day or hourly.

That is true - I worry that this blog is not as popular as it once was - and I suspect that the main reason for this is that there are fewer articles of the type that attracts debate: It's mainly cross-posts that link new-visitors elsewhere.

Bob

Denyse, I'd suggest using the RSS feed on your primary site, Design of Life. OE already has an aggregator that displays such feeds from other sites like UD and TelicThoughts. Click on the "Latest News" tab to see them. I went ahead and set up Design of Life. Hopefully updates should be showing up shortly.