Texas is Doomed

The creationists never give up. After the Supreme Court ruled that creationism cannot be taught in the schools they first tried to rename it as intelligent design. They ran into legal problems in Dover, and political problems in Kansas as the IDiots were voted out of office. PZ Myers believes that they have a new strategy which might be in use in Texas.

If the creationists cannot convince enough people to drop creationism their next plan is to embrace the word “evolution” but redefine what it means. On the surface it would appear that the recent decision by the Texas school board not to include intelligent design in science classes is a victory. If Myers is right, the evolution they will wind up teaching is not actually evolution:

It’s a cunning plan to sow confusion, which is ultimately all the Intelligent Design creationists are good at. If state education standards mandate instruction in evolution and if the laws of the land make teaching Intelligent Design creationism illegal, well, they’ll adapt and teach “evolution” … it’s just that this version of “evolution” flouts the ideas of experts, ignores the evidence, misrepresents the theory, and promotes a role for design in “evolutionary” history.

It’s an interesting tactic. Simply write a very bad book about evolution, market it appropriately, and find enough ideologically motivated science teachers to use it, and they will have effectively continued their efforts to subvert science education in this country. After all, the successful court challenges to block creationism in the classroom have done so on the basis of their violation of the separation of church and state, not so much on their quality and competence; propagating awful science is probably constitutional.

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