Texas BoE Chairman

I don't know where to begin with this one...it's like a school lunch, you've just got to digest it for awhile:

I do like the part about "somebody needs to stand up to these experts." I agree. Who do they think they are being all..."experty" and stuff. That's the last thing we need in education is experts.

It's good of him to bring up Stephen Jay Gould, and he's right that Gould had issues with both the stasis of species and the Cambrian Explosion...so you know what Gould did about that? He proposed a new theory...a new model...a new idea of how evolution works. It's call punctuated equilibrium, and you can read all about it in almost any biology textbooks. Gould's work strengthened the theory of evolution, because it's an example of GOOD, SOLID SCIENCE.

Oh, and the Cambrian explosion took place over about 30 million years. And while that's still a relatively short period of time in the Earth's 4.6 billion year history, it's not really as sudden as creationists would lead you to believe.

Natural selection is not an unguided process. Beneficial traits are passed on in greater frequency than harmful ones because organisms with beneficial traits in a particular environment are more likely to pass on their genes to the next generation. That is a guided, selective process...there's nothing random about it.

Stasis (groups of organisms that stay the same for long periods of time) absolutely supports the theory of evolution by natural selection. If we understand that organisms that are better adapted to their environment are more likely to pass on their traits, then it follows that a type of organism that is well adapted to its environment probably isn't going to change much unless there is a significant change to the environmental niche that they occupy.