Creationism on the Rise in Texas
The Texas State Board of Education has begun hearings on teaching the “weaknesses” of evolutionary science—which means, of course, teaching the “strengths” of the creationist flavor of the month, “intelligent design.”
And in a creepy real-life inversion of Ben Stein’s “Expelled,” the Texas Education Agency recently fired their Director of Science, Chris Comer, for forwarding an email announcing an anti-creationism seminar. Here’s a video presentation on the case:
Andrea Grimes in the Austin Chronicle has a good piece on the rise of religious pseudoscience in Texas: Texas Fiction Science: The State Board of Education does its part to fantasize biology.
The first of several hearings on the science curricula updates occurred July 17 and 18, with this first meeting dedicated only to the delicate bureaucratic process of planning on how to plan those updates. According to SBOE chair and College Station dentist Dr. Don McLeroy, this year’s “battle is to bring in some of the weaknesses of evolution,” to ninth- and 10th-grade biology classrooms, retaining language requiring that teachers instruct students in the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories. But according to the Texas Freedom Network, a statewide organization that works to mitigate the influence of fundamentalism on state policy, it’s really just one singular theory that gets the critical treatment.
“The only theory they attack is evolution,” said Dan Quinn, Texas Freedom Network’s communications director. Heliocentricity, gravitational theory, and atomic structure all get the SBOE thumbs-up. Indeed, despite clearly worded endorsements of evolution’s validity as scientific fact from the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Science Teachers Association of Texas, and countless other scientific groups, McLeroy and six other conservative members of the 15-member SBOE remain unconvinced.
“I don’t think the evidence supports [evolution],” said McLeroy, a self-described creationist who believes that because “science is always trying to find problems with stuff,” evolution should not be presented as absolute fact. In McLeroy’s opinion, there are three major weaknesses of evolutionary theory that schoolchildren should be made aware of. He arrived at these conclusions by “reading everything [he] could get [his] hands on” and listening to podcasts.
First weakness: the fossil record. “There are gaps,” said McLeroy, that do not include enough transitional forms of life to support evolution. Second, McLeroy says there has simply not been enough time on Earth for the minute changes required by evolution to have taken place. Thirdly, McLeroy says the incredible complexity of cells proves divine design. Information contained in the genetic code is just too mind-blowing to have come from anywhere but an intelligent creator. “Where did this information come from?” McLeroy mused. McLeroy would like to see these assertions and more taught in Texas biology classrooms.
I asked University of Texas integrative biology professor David Hillis, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, about McLeroy’s list of “weaknesses.” In an e-mail exchange, Hillis said McLeroy was simply denying facts. “There is indeed a vast record of transitional fossils,” wrote Hillis, saying McLeroy’s fossil record claims are “completely at odds with the experts in the entire field of paleontology.”
As for McLeroy’s second assertion regarding length of time required for evolution to have taken place, Hillis wrote that the position “demonstrates an extraordinary ignorance of biology,” since rates of evolution observed in laboratory tests have been “more than sufficient” to prove natural rates of genetic change that coincide with the fossil record.
Finally, McLeroy’s cell-complexity argument does not even belong in a scientific discussion, wrote Hillis: “The argument that ‘It is too complicated, so God must have done it’ is not a scientific argument.”
And yet it appears that, all evidence to the contrary, evolution may still soon be taught in Texas as a weak theory. Since the SBOE has a near majority of anti-evolution members, the small problem of evolution actually being demonstrable scientific knowledge is only a political challenge to those who want schoolchildren taught otherwise.
