Speaking of derp, over at Wonkette they’ve dug into yet another Kansas state BOE candidate who is, as expected, a raving creationist:

KANSAS SCHOOL BOARD CANDIDATE WILL SOLVE BUDGET PROBLEMS BY ELIMINATING EVOLUTION

Meanwhile, a more scholarly evaluation of creationism shows up in this month’s Geological Society of America’s mag “GSA Today”:

The evolution of creationism

The author (David Montgomery) traces the origins of modern creationism through key players:

[…]

The roots of modern creationism run directly back to George McCready Price (1870–1963), an amateur geologist with no formal training. In a book designed to look like a geology textbook, Price (1923) asserted that there was no order to the fossil record. Rejecting the idea of fossil succession, he argued that the succession of organisms that geologists read in the fossil record was really just a mixed-up sampling of communities that lived in different parts of the antediluvian world. He considered the fossil record too incomplete to confidently reconstruct the past, citing the occasional discovery of animals thought to be extinct and known only from fossils.

Leading fundamentalists praised Price’s book, calling it a “great and monumental” work of an “up-to-date scientist”—“a masterpiece of real science” by one of “the world’s leading Geologists,” and “the sanest, clearest and most irrefutable presentation of the Science of Geology from the standpoint of Creation and the Deluge, ever to see the light of day” (Numbers, 1992, p. 98). But even some of Price’s most ardent supporters had questions about his new flood geology. In a 1924 review in the evangelical journal Bibliotheca Sacra, the editor credited Price with throwing “a wrench into the smooth running machinery of the evolutionary theory” butwondered why it was that when fossils were found in the wrong order, they were always in exactly the reverse of that predicted by geologists (Numbers, 1992, p. 95). How could strata have gotten flipped upside down after Noah’s Flood laid them down if the Bible did not mention subsequent catastrophes? Despite such qualms, fundamentalist proponents of flood geology were inclined to assess Price’s credibility by the conclusions he reached rather than the strength of his arguments or evidence.

[…]

He then goes on to mention Whitcomb and Morris etc.

He concludes:

Generally left out of the resulting “debates” is the simple fact that creationists lack any independently supported geological evidence to support their views. The late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould described a global flood as “the only specific and testable theory the creationists have offered,” noting that “the claim that creationism is a science rests above all on the plausibility of the biblical flood” (Gould, 1982, p. 12, 10). And yet, the geological case for a global flood that creationists offer as an alternative to evolution was discredited before Darwin set foot aboard The Beagle.

Geologists assess theories by how well they fit data, and creationists evaluate facts by how well they fit their theories. This simple distinction frames an unbridgeable intellectual rift. […] How many creationists today know that modern creationism arose from abandoning faith that the study of nature would reveal God’s grand design for the world?

Worth the read.