See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contr...ns/128.59.6.192
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contr...s/96.246.116.76
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contr...s/96.246.108.44

(one user, IPs are all NY-area Verizon and Columbia)


who added 'Intelligent design advocate', entirely f alsely, to numerousRepublican poltiicians in quick succession on April 2009.

Most survived for five months, before being removed by a self-proclaimed atheist, nearly Marxist, supporter of evolution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contr...ions/LinkinPark

There is clearly very little resistance to this form of 'category libel'. Of a dozen or people so labelled, only two were fixed in a prompt time-scale, one by an anon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=283647898

one by a regular user:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=283645349

One was removed following a Talk discussion after two weeks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Pat_Toomey

The others were taken out only after several months

And Chuck Grassley's is still there: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=390551828

If there was less trust of IPs when it comes to editing living people, this wouldn't have happened....

I agree, it seems to exist outside of the usual "NPOV" framework.

I'm not sure how this is any less a statement of fact than being categorized as a LGBT-rights activist.

Whether it's true or false for person X bears closer inspection, but that's nothing new.

Also the question of thresholds: in what amount of activism/advocacy must one engage for this label to be applicable?

And let's be fair about this. Wikipedia has no problem labeling everyone from actor Charlie Sheen to comedian-philosopher Bill Hicks as "conspiracy theorists" despite being entertainers foremost.

A given politician (person) might oppose 'don't ask, don't tell', or support gay marriage, etc. That doesn't necessarily make them an 'activist', but clearly it's a more factual label than slapping 'Intelligent design advocate' on someone who has never said anything about intelligent design at all and who in fact doesn't believe in intelligent design.

Those two things are on different sides of the House POV though. That explains a lot. But maybe that was your point.

The title does leave a bit to the imagination however. It may help to make the meaning clearer, that the person advocates the teaching of creationism in public schools, alongside or in lieu of actual science, evidenced by public statements similar to this example:

http://www.adn.com/2006/10/27/217111/creat...s-the-race.html

On the other hand I could call myself an "intelligent design advocate" because (a) I think it would be great if things were designed intelligently, (b) I am intelligent and I advocate designing stuff, even do a bit of my own, or (c) maybe I really mean that humans—geneticists, even—should more thoroughly assume this "intelligent designer" role, pulling the right strings to cheat natural selection.

Problem is, promoting the traits favorable to said designer over those of the fittest would amount to eugenics, so obviously don't tell people I advocate that. But I guess if I were some kind of deity doing the same shit whilst being worshiped by them it would be acceptable.

Is Intelligent Design synonymous with Creationism? I had always hoped that it might include the Leibnizian "best of all possible worlds" concept, which is attractive to a Deist such as myself.

There you go.

Eugenics is something altogether different. Eugenics is a demented effort to eliminate diversity among humans, and a bestial location of human identity in biological or racial traits. Man as "intelligent designer" would be Vernadskian, greening the deserts, developing better strains of rice, and generally cultivating the biosphere.

Only if you were an extremely stupid politician. Intelligent design, at least as most commonly used, is synonymous with creationism, see Kitzmiller v. Dover (T-H-L-K-D). It would be along the line of calling yourself a Marxist because you find Groucho Marx to be the best person ever.

As has been noted, the words "eugenics" and "intelligent design" both have connotations that make them unusuable, however apt they may be for some purpose.

Today we call eugenics "genetic counselling" when we're trying to eliminate negative traits (Tay Sachs and cystic fibrosis), and we don't even have a name for it on the positive side, though it's implicit in mate-selection (actually I think we call it "eharmony", "hotness", and "eligability").

Darwin knew that sexual selection and artificial selection both work much faster than standard garden variety environmental natural selection, because the element of "designed mating" puts far more pressure on the system than other types of environments. Human mating is simply a hyperdriven cross between artificial and sexual selection; we have always been at least as interested in breeding ourselves as our domesticated crops and livestock, and look what we've done with THOSE over just the few thousand years of recorded history! The various human races are no doubt a result of vigroous self-selection, just as much as dog breeds, cat breeds, and crop varieties. This sort of thing descreases diversity on a small scale, but increases it on a large scale. Are dogs less diverse than wolves? Any given breed is, but the entire collection is more diverse. That's how evolution WORKS.

HK's comment about it being "bestial" to locate human identity in biological or racial traits, is very odd, as it's clear that our identity as a species is partly in our culture, and partly not. You can't turn a chimp into a human no matter how you raise it (this has been tried). You can see this in other animals that have been domesticated: you'll never ride an African elephant, no matter how well you train it, or how young you start. But with an Indian elephant this is a possiblity. Similarly, it's possible to ride a zebra if you start very early and are very lucky, but breaking a wild zebra is totally impossible-- there's no comparison with breaking an adult mustang horse, which has the genes to be broken for the saddle, just as the Asian elephant does. To imagine that humans don't have as many "domestication" genes as dogs, cows, and Indian elephants is very, very naive.