Even the Guardian is at it

The Guardian as created a Creationism special podcast, interviewing the ironically named Truth in Science who distributed "intelligent design" material to all the schools in Britain.

The Guardian uses the term "controversy" twice in the text there; let's be quite clear about this: There is no controversy over the teaching of Evolution. The only controversy is that created in the minds of the religious who are upset that the facts of nature do not appear to match their dogmatic view of christianity - that their god, not evolution, created the diversity of life on this planet.

The belief in intelligent design - that some organic processes are too complex to have arrived at by evolution alone - is not just wrong, it is also both intellectually lazy, and - worse - boring

There is nothing interesting in the view that life was created by an intelligent designer whose attributes are deliberately left un-spoken. It only shifts the problem. If intelligent life created life, then what created the intelligent life to create life? What process did it go through to create life? How did it itself evolve, or come in to existence? These questions would be interesting if they were posed, and the existence of a creator really was necessary, but they aren't. Intelligent design quite deliberately avoids these questions like the plague (one presumes, incidentally, that the intelligent designer must necessarialy also have created plauges).

What about another hypothesis: the unintelligent designer? Or the deliberately negligent designer? The psychopathic designer? Surely these would be attributes better placed on an entity that deliberately created the brutal and harsh life that we actually observe. If a designer is ever shown to be necessary for abiogenesis, then I don't think attaching the label "intelligent" to it does the english language any favours. Perhaps just the Blind Watchmaker

Product of the year?

One of the problems of working from home, is watching appaling day-time television, and - worse - even more appaling adverts. One of the more appaling adverts if for a shampoo product 'Herbal Essences' which - the advert triumphantly informs us - was "voted product of the year 2006, by 12,000 consumers".

This initially sounds pretty impressive. 12,000 people have tried various products and decided that Herbal Essence was clearly the best shampoo on the market, right? Right?

This would be a rather boring blog if its first entry was to say that Herbal Essence is the best shampoo on the market, now, wouldn't it.

At the bottom of the final show in the advert is a link to the Product of the Year web-site, which was just begging to be visited by someone who is bald, and therefore has no use of hair-care products.

The site is somewhat bizzare, as it appears to be, principally, a corporate product - not something one would normally expect to be pointed to by a shampoo advert - and also strangely revealing as to how someone would win the award. The process appears to be:

1) To get your product nominated, you send in an application form. Any product that has been launched within the past 18 months can be nominated. Note that it is the company manufacturing the product that nominates it for an award

2) The product of the year jury then draws up lists of finalists, and determines which category your product would go in to should yours be selected. There's just one catch. If your product goes forward, it costs you £3,950. No, there's two catches: every year the categories available change, and - the website assures us - each category will contain between 2 and 6 entries.

3) Now the real part - the public votes! Yay public! There is, however, a catch. According to the site, a questionnaire is sent out to some 20,000 people of which - last year - 12,593 responded. There's some discrepency here too: The choosing the winners link assures the would-be product of the year winner that the questionaire will be sent to "more than 12,000 households", from which 60% can be expected to respond. Quite how this tallies with the earlier 12,593 I'm not certain.

Now here's the clever part: The questionnaire contains "colour photos of all the products in each category with an explanation of what they are used for and why they are innovative".

In other words, Herbal Essence is voted product of the year, by people who have not necessarially ever used it.

Oh.  And there's just one more catch: If you win, it'll cost you another 11 grand to advertise
the fact.