Well, nuts. I may have been wrong. And while in science being wrong generally leads to new and better insight, in this case it leads to a heightened feeling of doom. In a recent post (the third in a most likely infinite series) about Texas, I said that several of the members of the State Board of Education were pushing back against the teaching of creationism being propounded by the head of that board, Don McLeroy, a know-nothing creationist. However, I may have been wrong. Synapostasy points out that McLeroy himself says that that the members of the Board from 2003 wanted to teach "weakness of evolution" (creationist code for creationism). Many of the members of the Board in 2003 are still members now, so one may assume that they still want to use creationist tactics to weaken science. At this point the battle gets confused. I am in no way inclined to trust anything McLeroy says, since he clearly has no contact with reality. Yet he is the one saying the Board wants to weaken evolution teaching. Do we trust him on this? Well, no. I would be happier to hear from all the Board members myself on their stance in this issue. Unfortunately, my schedule is a bit swamped; I have deadlines for the book, a cruise to jump on in a few days, and several other projects. I also suspect that my contacting those members may not be met with much progress, since I am not a Texan. So: are you a Texan, and willing to go the distance? Contact all the members of the State Board of Education, and ask them clear questions, such as these: 1) Do you agree with Don McLeroy that evolution is wrong, and that its weaknesses should be taught? 2) Is evolution science? Is ID? 3) If evolution is shown to have problems, does that strengthen ID? 4) Is ID different than religion? How so? I'm sure you can think of your own questions too. So, we must now ask instead of aver: Texas: Doomed?
