A Stitch in Haste

So say the "conservatives"* in Washington, who are finally getting the point that religion — whether called "creationism" or "intelligent design" or "zoop" — in science instruction is simply not an option.

Hence they are instead opting for a scorched-earth-sciences policy:

Like a gap in the fossil record, evolutionary biology is missing from a list of majors that the U.S. Department of Education has deemed eligible for a new federal grant program designed to reward students majoring in engineering, mathematics, science, or certain foreign languages.

That absence apparently indicates that students in the evolutionary sciences do not qualify for the grants, and some observers are wondering whether the omission was deliberate.

To be clear: a student can major in any of nine other fields of biology and still be eligible for the grants. Only evolutionary biology was specifically omitted.

26.1301 Ecology
26.1302 Marine Biology and Biological Oceanography
26.1303 ??? <--guess who...
26.1304 Aquatic Biology/Limnology
26.1305 Environmental Biology
26.1306 Population Biology
26.1307 Conservation Biology
26.1308 Systematic Biology/Biological Systematics
26.1309 Epidemiology
26.1399 Other

I sense an intelligent design by certain partisan bureaucrats and politicians. So much for the conservative lie that they want to "teach the controversy."

Note: Another category, 26.0908, is missing from the list of eligible majors, in the "Physiology, Pathology and Related Sciences" category. (PDF - 13 pages). I'll go out on a limb and guess it has something to with stem-cell research. [UPDATE: And I'd be right.]

(Via Hit & Run. More thoughts at Concurring Opinions.)

(*Not "conservative" enough, mind you, to oppose the federal bureaucratization of education. Ronald Reagan was so Twentieth-Century...)