A Stitch in Haste

Try saying this ten times fast: "Don't mess with Texas textbooks!"

The [Texas] State Board of Education approved health textbooks for Texas high school and middle school students on Friday, after publishers changed the wording in some of the approved textbooks to reflect marriage as being between a man and a woman.

A day earlier, some board members had said the books attempted to nullify Texas' law banning the recognition of same-sex civil unions because the books used terms like "married partners" but do not define marriage as an institution between a man and a woman.

One of the publishers changed its text to include a definition of marriage as a "lifelong union between a husband and a wife."

Board member Mary Helen Berlanga asked the panel to approve the books without the changes. "We're not supposed to make changes at somebody's whim," Berlanga said. "It's a political agenda, and we're not here to follow a political agenda."

The decision could affect dozens of states because books sold in Texas, the nation's second-largest textbook buyer, often are marketed elsewhere.

The elected board, which includes 10 Republicans and five Democrats, is allowed to reject books only because of factual errors or failure to follow state-mandated curriculum.

Um, "lifelong union between a husband and a wife"? Here's an utterly delicious factoid (I love when a Google search hits the jackpot):

The state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation is Massachusetts. At latest count it had a divorce rate of 2.4 per 1,000 population, while the rate for Texas was 4.1.

Heh.

Again, keep in mind that the textbooks said nothing about civil unions, domestic partnerships, evolving cultural norms or the political controversies currently swirling about. The "factual error" was merely the use of the gender-neutral term "married partners." Apparently that term, by itself, is enough to put the Texas dogmatists on Red Alert (or is that "Red-State Alert"?)

Once again: Don't tell me it's not about naked bigotry.

Related Posts:
Gay Marriage as the "New Abolition"
Naked Bigotry Update
Damn Right They're Bigots

"Evolution is a fact, not a theory." --Carl Sagan

"Evolution is a theory, not a fact." --A sticker in suburban Atlanta science textbooks currently being challenged by the ACLU on Establishment Clause grounds.

My money's on the late great Professor Sagan.

When scientists talk about a "theory," such as the "theory of evolution" or the "theory of general relativity" or the "theory of supply and demand," they do not mean "theory" in the common, popular sense of " an explanation that may be right or may be wrong." They mean instead "theory" as "the most comprehensive understanding we have thus far, and although subject to future revision, possessing of no indications that tend to disprove it."

By that standard, there is no such thing as the "theory of creationism," since it has been thoroughly disproven at every single turn. Every new fact uncovered further shows it to be religious mythology (and rather silly mythology at that).

Evolution, meanwhile, does get revised continually (that's the very definition of science), but never discredited wholesale. Anyone who sits and works his through way the paradigm (lots of eggs, cosmic rays, DNA, mutation, little bit of variety in offspring, an asteroid every few epochs, six billion years, etc.) knows -- yes, knows -- that evolution is indeed a fact.

For crying out loud, go to the zoo! Look at the crocodiles, alligators and gharials. Look at the African versus the Asian elephants (and think back to the mastodon skeleton you saw last week at the natural history museum). Look at the gorillas, then look in the mirror. And, of course, look at the beetle display.

Many bloggers have suggested that gay marriage advocates should stop calling gay marriage opponents nasty things like "ignorant bigots." I've never used the word "ignorant" or anything similar to describe those who are anti-gay ("bigot," yes -- but never "ignorant").

But creationists? IGNORANT! IGNORANT! IGNORANT!

More at Deinonychus antirrhopus, while Dispatches has a similar story from Wisconsin.

UPDATE: Dispatches now has a report from the trial, which seems to be going rather badly for the creationists.

MAJOR UPDATE: An even worse situation has arisen in a Pennsylvania town, where teachers are now being required to teach, as part of a "balanced presentation," the especially nonsensical "Intelligent Design" flavor of creationism. Two school members resigned to protest the child-abusive vote -- kudos to them. The local ACLU is evaluating the situation.

On the whole "balanced presentation" fraud, I like the way one scientist phrased it in this article:

"People in the audience say, Hey, these people sound reasonable. They argue, 'People have different opinions, we should present those opinions in school.' That is nonsense. Some people have opinions that the Holocaust never happened, but we don't teach that in history."

For more on Intelligent Design, see my previous post or Tim Sandefur's recent post at the excellent evolution blog Panda's Thumb.

MINOR UPDATE: Heh.

Related Posts:
How Evolution is Like Economics
My Day at the Zoo
Naked Bigotry Update: Tacky Texas Textbook Tactics

If the creationists (I'm tempted to start abbreviating that down to "cretinists") can't get to the kids in the schools, then they'll get 'em while they're on vacation:

[S]ome four million people annually visit Grand Canyon National Park, marveling at the awesome view. In National Park Service (NPS) affiliated bookstores, they can find literature informing them that the great chasm runs for 277 miles along the bed of the Colorado River. It descends more than a mile into the earth, and along one stretch, is some 18 miles wide, its walls displaying impressive layers of limestone, sandstone, shale, schist and granite.

And, oh yes, it was formed about 4,500 years ago, a direct consequence of Noah’s Flood.

How's that? Yes, this is the ill-informed premise of "Grand Canyon, a Different View," a handsomely-illustrated volume also on sale at the bookstores.
...
[The] book attracted little notice when it first appeared in the NPS stores in 2003, until a critical review by Wilfred Elders, a respected University of California geologist, brought it to light and took apart its pseudoscientific claims. That led David Shaver, who heads the Geologic Resources Division of the Park Service, to send a memo to headquarters urging that the book be removed from the NPS stores.
...
But when Grand Canyon National Park superintendent Joe Alston attempted to block the sale of [the] book at canyon bookstores, he was overruled by NPS headquarters, which announced that a high-level policy review of the matter would be launched and a decision made by February, 2004. So far, no official decision has been announced.

Even worse, according to the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), an organization that includes many Park employees, papers obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that no review has ever taken place. Indeed, PEER claims that the Bush Administration has already decided it will stand by its approval for the book and that hundreds more have been ordered.
...
Even more troubling, PEER charges that Grand Canyon National Park no longer offers an official estimate of the age of the canyon, and that the NPS has blocked publication of guidance intended for park rangers that reminds them there is no scientific basis for creationism.

Now, if the hyper-anarcho-libertarians will allow me just a little maneuvering room before pointing out that "there really shouldn't be public parks at all," then can we all just get along and agree that this is outrageous?

Apparently it has to be said, yet again: Creationism is not an "alternative scientific theory" -- it is mythology, fun to read perhaps but as wrong and as silly as the Moon being in the Seventh House or Atlas standing on a turtle (what was the turtle standing on, by the way?).

Even given that we have government-owned parks, and given that, for whatever reason, these NPS stores also seem to be government-run, the government still therefore has a duty to run these stores responsibly. Of course, "responsibly" is an open-ended term, but some basic first principles should be self-apparent: try to operate in an output-maximizing yet break-even way, be environmentally conscious, non-discriminatory, handicapped accessible to whatever extent is possible. Oh, and don't sell books that are factually inaccurate. Religion has absolutely nothing to do with it! There can never, under any circumstances, be a justification for the government selling factually inaccurate (as in "2 + 2 = 5 is factually inaccurate") books in a government-run tourist shop.

I'd prefer not to get paranoid, but was there no one, absolutely no one, from NPS Director to Secretary of the Interior to the President, who could stop this nonsense? Or, stated differently, do President Bush and his inner circle have nothing better to do than to order this kind of counterproductive claptrap in our national parks?

Our children are already dumb enough, thank you very much. Religious mythology presented as "a viable alternative theory" doesn't help.

UPDATE: More creationist debunking at Dispatches and Unscrewing the Inscrutable.

Related Posts:
Creationist Sticker Shock
How Evolution is Like Economics
My Day at the Zoo
Naked Bigotry Update: Tacky Texas Textbook Tactics

JunkYarkBlog throws down the gauntlet to libertarians on Bush's Intelligent Design gobbledygook:

We have two political parties. We have Pepsi and Coke. We have Mac and PC. We have Chevy and Ford. And Honda and Toyota.

We have lots of choices. And you libertarians seem to think that that's a good thing.

Or not. President Bush today said something about teaching intelligent design in public schools. And the libertarians react with a ferocity they generally reserve for caliphascists and Jimmy Carter-scale idiotarians.

I wonder — do they realize that they're acting like totalitarians? Do they even care? Nah. They just want to ridicule anything with even a whiff of Christianity about it.

Some hasty stitches:

--Intelligent Design and evolution are not analogous to "Coke and Pepsi" or "Honda and Toyota," but rather to astrology and astronomy. Or alchemy and chemistry. Or poison and nourishment. How would JYB react if a major politician advocated teaching astrology, as a viable scientific theory, in public schools under force of law and with taxpayer dollars?

--A "whiff of Christianity"? Actually it's the ID crowd who bend over backwards to insist that ID is not in any way religious, and certainly not "Christian."

--When people — libertarian or otherwise — debunk a fraud, it is not "acting like totalitarians." It is being intellectually honest. We're not the totalitarians, reality and truth are. If you don't want to be ridiculed, then don't hold ridiculous views.

It's amazing, and sad, to see how corrupting and corroding the little-tent, Bible-thumper conservatives are becoming to the Republican Party. They are convinced that they don't need libertarians.

They are wrong.

I hope they don't learn that the hard way. Republicans still have their good points, although with decreasing frequency.

UPDATE: Rick Santorum, of all people, is publicly disagreeing with the President on this issue:

"I think I would probably tailor that a little more than what the president has suggested," Santorum, the third-ranking Republican member of the U.S. Senate, told National Public Radio. "I'm not comfortable with intelligent design being taught in the science classroom."

Spoken like a man of true convictions...or of true presidential aspirations. One wonders just how long it took Tricky Rick to make up his mind on this issue (i.e., how much right-wing backlash to the president's gobbledygook he had to read before deciding to take a position). Could it be that the conservative (i.e., radical fundamentalist) base isn't worth pandering to like it used to be? Go figure.

Just two days after running an embarrassing "faith-based evolution" piece, Tech Central Station has reversed course by posting not one but two anti-ID commentaries. Glassman obviously knows which side his bread is buttered on.

First, a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica debunks the "gaps as disproof" fallacy:

I propose that we duplicate Galileo's rolling-ball-on-an-inclined-plane experiment. Our hypothesis will be that the ball will accelerate linearly over time. We build a simple apparatus, run a hundred trials, and plot our data. It looks as though our hypothesis is wrong, and as a conclusion we propose a new hypothesis, that the ball accelerates as the square of the time. Just a guess, you understand.

Comes the science fair. The judges, comprising the science faculty of the junior high school, are puzzled by our project. The presentation seems OK, but we failed to follow a basic rule of science projects: You are supposed to prove your hypothesis, not disprove it.

I wander around the fair looking at other projects. Many seem to me to be craft projects, perhaps something salvaged from a Cub Scout program. One apparently takes as its hypothesis "If you correctly connect a doorbell, a battery, and a pushbutton switch, and then push the button, the bell will ring." I try it, and it does. QED.
...
Even its opponents grant the prestige and accomplishments of science by pretending to do science themselves, whether in the form of "e-meters" that turn galvanic skin responses into signs of mystic energy flows in the body or in that of ID, which artfully turns "unknown" into "unknowable" in a flourish of bad math and illogic.

Indeed. This has been exactly my point in my debates with North Dallas Thirty: Evolution may not (yet) have 100% of the answers, but 100% of the answers found thus far have been 100% correct. That is exactly how science works -- critics of evolution are required to disprove it (e.g., by finding a gorilla's skeleton next to a dinosaur's). Observing that evolution may be empirically incomplete is not disproving evolution and does not mean those who accept evolution are doing so "on faith."

Intelligent design, by contrast, is unproven and unprovable (or, more correctly, "undisprovable"). It is therefore, by definition, not science and, by corollary, has no place whatsoever in science classrooms.

---

Professor Frederick Turner, meanwhile, reminds us that life's "intelligent design" isn't really all that intelligent:

What would we say about a creator who started a universe with the evident intention of producing life and intelligence, but who needed to step in every few billion years, or every few seconds, to fix the process, rewrite the program, give the actors new lines, touch up the brushstrokes of the painting, seize the conductor's baton and introduce a new melody? Wouldn't we say that such a creator was an incompetent artist, that if he knew what he was doing he wouldn't be botching it up all the time and having to come in to shore up the building or fire a midcourse correction burn?

A perfect creator would surely have no need to step in once the process was going. He would not be a "god of the gaps", where we bring God in just when we can't explain some connection in the history of the universe, on the assumption that this was where God had to fix some imperfection in the process. A perfect creator would not be hostage to the possibility that one by one the gaps would be filled by good clear science.

Indeed. Not every unanswered question remains unanswered forever. It is nothing more than an intellectual short-circuit to say that anything and everything we don't understand today is the "hand of god." And it is certainly not science.

"Wasn't it possible, the narrators ask, that the 14th-century frescoes in a Yugoslavian monastery showing what seem to be astronauts and space ships suggest visits from super-intelligent beings from outer space long ago? And what about the possibilities of other-world visitors to our planet in the dim, unrecorded past who could have left the know-how to build the scientifically precise pyramids or formulate the Mayan calendar, construct Incan cities, carve colossal statues on faraway Easter Island and lay out what seem to be air-landing strips in remote Peruvian plains that pre-date history?"
--New York Times review of "Chariots of the Gods," 28 February 1974

A self-described "researcher" is convinced that people are seeing UFOs:

Peter Davenport has received more phone calls than he cares to count that have an unusual opening: "Please believe me, I'm not crazy."

For Davenport, director of the National UFO Reporting Center in Seattle, it's part of the job.
...
After a lifetime of studying what many brush off as science fiction, Davenport is feels certain that UFOs exist and have been witnessed on Earth, and second, that the government has known about them for decades.

"I have not just a mountain of data, perhaps a mountain range of data. And I assure you, it's strictly by accident," Davenport told the Kentucky New Era in an interview.

I thought "Chariots of the Gods" was the coolest movie — when I was eight years old. But today, let's be just the slightest bit rational, shall we? With all the video cameras, digital cameras, satellite images, etc., available today, all around the world, isn't about time people realized that somebody, somewhere, should have snapped a clear, incontrovertible picture or videotape of a UFO by now?

Or that with all the (greedy capitalist) logging in the Pacific Northwest, somebody somewhere should have stumbled across a sasquatch carcass, or at least a few bones, at some point?

But of course it's possible that aliens visited earth in prehistoirc times. It's possible that there's a huge primate living in the forests of the most developed country and earth and nobody has bumped into one recently. It's possible that today's UFO's are so advanced that they can detect, and avoid, anyone with a video camera.

And it's also possible that a supernatural "intelligent designer" had nothing better to do than muck around with a speck of cosmic unimportance, just for the sake of ending up with (semi-)sentient beings that might take a few guesses about said designer's existence.

Like I said, it makes perfect sense — to an eight-year old.


Star Wars, Episode Zero?

In my last round of "intelligent design" debunking I emphasized the inaccuracy of what I call the "sticky species" fallacy — the idea that while we have observed tiny variations in life forms across generations, we have not directly observed one species "evolve" into another.

First, apparently this is not true; speciation (i.e., one species evolving into another) has indeed been directly observed. But in any case, the problem with the "sticky species" fallacy is that it completely fails to grasp the sheer enormity of geologic time. As I blogged previously:

[T]he idea that, since we have never seen a species "morph" from, say, a fruitfly into a fruit bat, we are therefore guilty of "faith." Again, it took nature a billion years to make a bacterium and 4.5 billion to make us. Any progress we've made, even going from wild boars to domestic pigs or from prehistoric maize to modern-day corn, is pretty damn impressive and pretty damn conclusive given the sheer enormity of geologic time. "Faith" has nothing to do with it. Those who can't grasp that are, quite frankly, arithmetically challenged..."

Today New York Times editorial board member Verlyn Klinkenborg echoes this fatal flaw in intelligent design reasoning:

One of the most powerful limits to the human imagination is our inability to grasp, in a truly intuitive way, the depths of terrestrial and cosmological time. That inability is hardly surprising because our own lives are so very short in comparison. It's hard enough to come to terms with the brief scale of human history. But the difficulty of comprehending what time is on an evolutionary scale, I think, is a major impediment to understanding evolution.

It's been approximately 3.5 billion years since primeval life first originated on this planet. ... That expanse of time defines the realm of biological possibility in which life in its extraordinary diversity has evolved. It is time that has allowed the making of us.
...
That is a lot to absorb and, not surprisingly, many people refuse to absorb it. Nearly every attack on evolution — whether it is called intelligent design or plain creationism, synonyms for the same faith-based rejection of evolution — ultimately requires a foreshortening of cosmological, geological and biological time.

Again, it is a total non-argument to fault scientists for not having been around for the millions of years necessary to directly observe "macro-evolution." We are not obligated to wait that long to "prove" the theory of evolution (and remember, theories are never proved — they are only disproved or revised). The arithmetic tells us what we need to know.

To deny evolution is to deny mathematics, not to mention the direct evidence of our senses provided by the fossil record and the present-day taxonomy of life on earth.

And to top it all off, time (the past, if not the future) is most definitely on our side too.

One of the all-important mysteries of the universe has been solved:

Anyone who has built sandcastles learns they hold up best if a little water is mixed with the building material. But until now scientists couldn't agree why.

Water holds grains of sand together by forming "liquid-bridges" between the contact points of the grains, a new study finds. The tension forces of the bridges creates an attractive force between the grains that is absent in dry sand.
...
Understanding the interactions between dry grains and liquids is vital not just for building sandcastles, but for industries ranging from mining to pharmaceutical development.

Sand research has some interesting analogies to the debate over whether "intelligent design" is science worthy of inclusion in a school curriculum.

If you're walking along the beach and you see a sandcastle, then you know, you know, that -- for a variety of physical and metaphysical reasons -- the sandcastle was intelligently designed.

But the question of sand cohesion in dry versus wet sand is an altogether different topic. For however long a period of time, scientists had yet to explain wet-sand cohesion. It wasn't that they could never explain it, they just hadn't yet.

Now suppose that an "intelligent sandcastle design" advocate had, prior to this discovery, asserted that, because there had not yet been an explanation for wet-sand cohesion, there could never be an explanation. Furthermore, since sandcastles are such a wonderful thing, the "inexplicable" fact of wet-sand cohesion could only be the result of a sandcastle-loving intelligence.

Such an argument is deceptively subtle. The "intelligent sandcastle design" advocate starts with a wholly sensible premise (i.e., "sandcastles are intelligently designed"), but then sneaks in an invalid progression -- that every yet-to-be-answered question about the underlying nature of sandcastles must also be the result of intelligent sandcastle design.

Would you take someone seriously who said "let's not study wet-sand cohesion and just say some supernatural force is responsible"? Would you allow such a person to call himself a "scientist"? Would you want such a person putting stickers in your children's textbooks?

Yet this is exactly what ID proposes -- when in doubt, just stop inquiring, assert that no further discovery is possible and label it "intelligent design."

There can be no such thing as the "science of just give up." It is an insolent contradiction in terms that destroys all objective meaning of the word "science."

Such an educational agenda can have one and only one constituency: those who are anti-science. They are not advocating "another theory" -- they are anti-theory. They are not for "teaching the controversy" -- there is no controversy to teach.

There is only science and anti-science.

And those who suggest that anti-science has any role in a science education are not only anti-science, they are also anti-education.

And if they win, then don't expect today's students to do much intelligent designing of anything after they graduate.

[POST SCRIPT: In case you're wondering -- according to the article, for sandcastle builders, "the best mix, it turns out, is one pail of water for every eight pails of sand."]

...But of course the intelligent designers are us:

The reason we targeted the dog genome for decoding is that it's useful for genetic research. The reason it's useful for genetic research is that dogs are neatly divided into breeds, each of which is plagued by specific diseases. And the reason dogs are divided into diseased breeds is that we made them that way.
...
Dogs were just a loose category of wolves until around 15,000 years ago, when our ancestors tamed and began to manage them. We fed them, bred them, and spread them from continent to continent. While other wolf descendants died out, dogs grew into a new species. We invented the dog.

In the span of evolutionary time, 15,000 years is absolutely nothing -- and look what we were able to do through our clumsy, trip-and-stumble, barely semi-intelligent designing.

Now go from 15,000 years to 15 million years to 150 million years to 1.5 billion years and beyond. The sheer enormity of evolutionary time more than compensates for the absence of an "intelligent designer."

Evolution is a fact, not a theory. Open your eyes, turn on your brain and deal with it.

Reason Magazine has a brief report of the revival of roadside dinosaur parks.

But of course, "revival" can also have a religious connotation:

[C]reationists have been buying roadside dinosaur parks around the country and turning them into anti-evolution museums. Visit the Cabazon Dinosaurs today, and you can pick up Darwin-bashing literature at the gift shop; at similar attractions you'll see the evidence, such as it is, that dinosaurs lived in the Garden of Eden and were transformed from vegetarians to carnivores by man's original sin.

To which my response is: Who needs creationist dinosaur parks when you have the Grand Canyon? As I blogged previously, the Bush Administration has explicitly approved the sale of creationist propaganda in bookstores affiliated with National Park Service. The creationist drivel "explains" how the Grand Canyon was in fact the result of Noah's Flood.

We should leave the dinosaur parks to the cretinists creationists and worry more about the adulteration of our national landmarks.

(Via Hit & Run.)

If so, then two questions:

1. How can lice be considered part of any intelligent design for the universe?

2. If evolution is a lie, then how come 80% of lice are now treatment-resistant?

Just wondering.

My favorite flyover state, Kansas, is at it again:

Evolution's defenders, working to defeat Kansas Board of Education members who oppose modern Darwinian theory, are challenging three incumbent Republican conservatives and the political heir to a fourth in Tuesday's primary.

A shift of two seats to moderate Republicans — or to Democrats — in November almost certainly would lead to a reversal of state science standards celebrated by many religious conservatives and reviled by the scientific establishment.
...
The Kansas standards have been denounced by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Teachers Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The editor of Scientific American, John Rennie — who has described the board's conservatives as "six dimwits" — posted on a blog to urge Kansas voters to defeat board members "who have inflicted embarrassing creationist nonsense on your home's science curriculum standards."

It's quite simple really: Some things simply should not be up for a popular vote. Like bigotry. And especially like science.

The question boils down to this: when will that other insular minority — the non-dimwits — take back their state governments, their schools, their public spaces, and most importantly, their states' reputations?

And remind me again why judges should defer to dimwit politicians, dimwit educrats or the dimwit voters who elect them?

Some things deserve no deference, but only contempt.

Like Kansas if the "dimwit slate" is re-elected.

UPDATE: The anti-science faction was mostly defeated. Thanks in part to my favorite Kansan.

More on Kansas here, here and here. More on Intelligent Design in the chain below.

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...)

After years of litigation, a redneck school district in Georgia has unconditionally surrendered along one front in the Culture Wars:

A suburban school board that put stickers in high school science books saying evolution is "a theory, not a fact" abandoned its legal battle to keep them Tuesday after four years.

The Cobb County board agreed in federal court never to use a similar sticker or to undermine the teaching of evolution in science classes.
...
The stickers read: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."

The "evolution is not a fact" crowd is, for all intents and purposes, the same as the Intelligent Design crowd, which in turn is essentially the same as the Creationist crowd, with each manifestation more pathetic than the next. They are anti-science, anti-reason, and therefore anti-education and indeed anti-humanity.

I blogged against the asinine stickers over two years ago, in a post titled "Creationist Sticker Shock.

---

"Evolution is a fact, not a theory." --Carl Sagan

"Evolution is a theory, not a fact." --A sticker in suburban Atlanta science textbooks challenged by the ACLU on Establishment Clause grounds.

My money's on the late great Professor Sagan.

When scientists talk about a "theory," such as the "theory of evolution" or the "theory of general relativity" or the "theory of supply and demand," they do not mean "theory" in the common, popular sense of " an explanation that may be right or may be wrong." They mean instead "theory" as "the most comprehensive understanding we have thus far, and although subject to future revision, possessing of no indications that tend to disprove it."

By that standard, there is no such thing as the "theory of creationism," since it has been thoroughly disproved at every single turn. Every new fact uncovered further shows it to be religious mythology (and rather silly mythology at that).

Evolution, meanwhile, does get revised continually (that's the very definition of science), but never discredited wholesale. Anyone who sits and works his way through the paradigm (lots of eggs, cosmic rays, DNA, mutation, little bit of variety in offspring, an asteroid every few epochs, six billion years, etc.) knows — yes, knows — that evolution is indeed a fact.

For crying out loud, go to the zoo! Look at the crocodiles, alligators and gharials. Look at the African versus the Asian elephants (and think back to the mastodon skeleton you saw last week at the natural history museum). Look at the gorillas, then look in the mirror. And, of course, look at beetles.

Many bloggers have suggested that gay marriage advocates should stop calling gay marriage opponents nasty things like "ignorant bigots." I've never used the word "ignorant" or anything similar to describe those who are anti-gay ("bigot," yes — but never "ignorant").

But creationists? IGNORANT! IGNORANT! IGNORANT!

More thoughts from UnCivil Defense.

---

EPILOGUE: By intelligent design sheer coincidence, today is Carl Sagan Day. I praised his magnum opus, Cosmos, in this post.

Cutest evidence of evolution you'll see today:


Look at the fur color. Look at the fur length. Look at the skull shape — the eyes, the ears.

And try to pretend that they didn't evolve from a common ancestor.

(Via Fark.)

P.S. Awwww... (Or, for the carnivores, "Mmmm...")