Texas, again


That place is just a magnet for nuts. There is going to be a review of the science curriculum next month, and the creationists on the state board of education are gearing up by appointing more creationists to staff the panels. Furthermore, they’re gathering specific curriculum materials, and skewing them towards lunacy.

One submission has come from a company called International Databases, LLC. It’s a one-man operation run by Stephen Sample, who says he has a degree in evolutionary biology and taught at the high school and junior college levels for 15 years.

The material he submitted consists of eight modules dealing with current issues in biology and ecology. Most are well within the mainstream scientific consensus. But there are two that deal with the origin of life. Those sections say the “null hypothesis” is that there had to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things. It is up to the scientists proposing a naturalistic explanation to prove their case.

International Databases, LLC is a grand name for a shell — all it is is those eight modules. There are collections of pdf files there that you can download, but don’t bother — they’re all password protected, so you won’t be able to read them. So all I have to go on is the summaries.

But that’s quite enough. The null hypothesis is that there is a super-intelligent, all powerful being manipulating the universe? Madness. How does one test against a hypothesis that is ill-defined, shifts constantly, and makes no specific predictions? “My null hypothesis is that god will or won’t affect the results of my experiment, depending on his mood, which I can’t measure.”

It’s just more stealth creationism, gussied up to look sciencey with a few abused science terms.