which is what bush was going for with those vouchers, i imagine... but that's a political issue, not a philosophical one...

and lets stick to the philosophy of intelligent design, not its political aspects via certain schoolboards, scientists, and fundies, eh?

Thats why I said "public textbooks".

textbooks are generally the same, save for when it comes to science.

Are magnet schools religious? It just so happens that Catholic schools tend to be the best private schools, you would be free to use vouchers however to send your child to a non-religious school. Which is a good idea since public schools are shit.

in any case, that's not the point... let's get back on topic.

You put it back on topic, since you and her took it off topic, in the mean time I will indulge myself.

No, you won't... I said to get back on topic. That's a blanket ruling, so your next post better be... capiche?

in a chaotic system, how could complex life forms survive as long as we have?

Errantrouge, please stay on topic, we are trying to discuss things without you making idle threats.

The same way everything else does, you evolve around the obsticles.

doesn't seem like something holding sway would be applied randomly...

To "hold sway" is to have a controlling influence over something, not necessarily absolute control. Chaos theory holds that on a microscopic, atomic or possibly sub-atomic scale there is enough randomness to effectively eliminate any possibility of controlling or predicting a specific outcome, especially over long periods of time. The longer the period of time, the less controllable or predictable the outcome becomes.

and as for the random effects that AREN'T governed by the laws of physics?

The best way I can answer that is by example.

If you roll a boulder down a hill a thousand times, starting the roll from exactly the same place, and position the boulder exactly as you did the first time, the boulder is unlikely to roll exactly as it did the first time. Why? Because there are random variations in the conditions each time the boulder is rolled. Even if you did this experiment with as perfect a sphere as humanly possible, down a slope as perfectly smooth as humanly possible, there would still be slight deviations in each roll, because of random variations in the conditions under which the roll took place. Some of the variations would be so miniscule as to be virtually imperceptable.

no, that's not what i'm talking about... if physics only applies to those random moments, what applies the rest of the time?
could it not be an irrational set of rules guided?

I would suggest that the laws of physics always apply, and the randomness is the result of actions and reactions that have already taken place.

how so?

The answer would probably fulfill the requirements of a doctoral thesis...