Giving skepticism a bad name

Chris Mooney, CalPundit, Signal+Noise and others have been doing a great job of keeping track of the woeful textbook battles down in Texas. The Board of Education there has been arguing over how evolution should be presented in the textbooks they're about to buy for the state's high school students. The Discovery Institute, the headquarters of "Intelligent Design" proponents, has been lobbying them hard to present their ideas on equal footing with those of evolutionary biology. It looks this morning like they've lost (again). The conservative members of the board are disappointed--they say they wish that textbooks weren't so "dogmatic" about evolution. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram article to which I link above quotes Don McLeroy, a Republican board member, as saying, "People don't realize the threat of scientific dogmatism [with regards to] evolution in our society." You hear this rhetoric a lot these days from the various opponents of evolution. ...