Texas, Continued

Last week, I wrote a post here about the fight over science standards that was happening within the Texas state board of education. The news, at that time, was good. Creationists had failed to get the needed votes to re-insert a clause into the standards requiring the teaching of "strengths and weaknesses" of the theory of evolution. Unfortunately, I jumped the gun a little, as Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy points out:

After that, the news sinks rapidly. The far-right Republicans on the Board were not finished. They put in language to weaken the Big Bang theory, saying that there are different estimates for the age of the Universe. You can try to be coy and say this is also strictly true, but again that’s a cheat and a lie. The woman who proposed this is obviously a young-Earth creationist, and when she says "different ages", she means 6000 years. This belief in a young Earth, is, simply, dead wrong. We know the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the Earth, while younger than that, is still 4.55 or so billion years old itself. This is not some random guess, this is rock-solid (literally) science, confirmed independently from such diverse scientific fields as astronomy, physics, chemistry, anthropology, archaeology… and even the study of how languages change over time shows the humanity is older than 6000 years.

These same people on the Board added language to the standards to weaken teaching about global warming. Don McLeroy, who is a creationist and also the Chairman of the BoE, said that climate change is "hooey". They also attack the science on the complexity of the cell, and the initial genesis of life (called abiogeneisis; life from non-life). These are all standard creationist tactics.

I guess the bright side of this is that maybe Texas will replace Kansas as the international laughingstock when science standards are discussed. But the damage that this could potentially do to science education in one of our largest states, especially in a time when society is so worried about our children falling behind the rest of the world in science, is extremely scary. You can believe what you want...that's your right. But to force those beliefs on the rest of society by manipulating the political system is not only illegal, but is a gross bastardization of religion.