A student, Brandon Creasy, submitted an opinion piece on evolution to the school news magazine. The principal, Kevin Bezy, rejected it and has held up publication of the magazine until it is revised. Bezy explains himself, and it’s the usual kind of weasely nonsense that makes me very snarly in the morning.

When asked his opinion of evolution and how that may have factored into the situation, Bezy declined to discuss his feelings on the theory. He said he considers that irrelevant to the matter, believing it important to remain unbiased when making decisions.

I don’t give a good greasy squirt of slimy spit for Mr Bezy’s “feelings” about evolution. He is supposed to be a professional educator, and the unbiased status of the theory is that it is the only legitimate explanation for life’s diversity; no other explanation, including the page and a half of poetic metaphor and myth included in the book of Genesis, is even close. When censoring well-supported scientific ideas, hiding behind a false objectivity is not an option.

“The law gives the principal the responsibility to edit publications of the school,” Bezy said. “It is an important responsibility because the principal has to look out for the rights and sensitivities of all students, especially in a diverse and multicultural area.”

Man, this guy sounds like a pompous gasbag. All this talk about sensitivities and multiculturalism isn’t being used to promote a diversity of ideas: he’s using it to squelch the expression of any opinions that differ from the flavorless, mealy pablum to which he wants the cultural environment of the school reduced. A “diverse and multicultural area” should be one where there is an outspoken clash of ideas, not one where disagreement is silenced.

Continuing, he said of the piece: “It didn’t present the theory with a sensitivity for those who hold other theories. The teacher of the student was asked to take out language that stated his theory is the only theory.”

Other theories? Like what? Name some, Mr Bezy. Show us the courage of your convictions that these other ideas are worth abusing science for. Does it include young earth creationism, the claim that the universe didn’t exist prior to the time a few Hebrew patriarchs started scribbling down notes about how to control their tribes? Or perhaps you are thinking of Intelligent Design creationism, a fatuous pretense to scientific thinking that has no evidence, no research program, and no rationale other than that they want to put a false front over some silly old myths?

So far, evolution is the only theory deserving of the name … unless Bezy is confusing the scientific meaning of the word “theory” with the colloquial, and thinks it is equivalent to “brain fart”. It is not the business of a public school to inundate students with a variety of brain farts — they get enough of those in church on Sunday — but to provide a disciplined introduction to the best scholarly ideas. Which of those two alternatives is the mission of the Gereau Center?

The Secular Alliance of Indiana University took a field trip to Ken Ham’s Creation “Museum”…and they made a video!

Now nobody else needs to go. I suspect the nosh at the Waffle House at the end was the highlight of the expedition.

I’ve been wrong. I’ve argued that destroying America’s educational infrastructure and promoting stupid ideas like creationism will inevitably erode our country’s competitive standing in the world marketplace. I’ve always thought the only way to correct that was to improve public education — but there’s an alternative. Make other countries stupider!

Romania’s withdrawal of the theory of evolution from the school curriculum could be evidence of a growing conservative tendency in teaching. Evolution has been removed from the school curriculum in a move which, pressure groups argue, distorts children’s understanding of how the world came into being.

Meanwhile, religious studies classes continue to tell Romanian children that God made the world in seven days.

It puts this well-known chart in perspective. You might think that we ought to be struggling to climb the ladder and move from second to the last to the top by working hard and doing better than those other countries, but no — all we have to do is export some of our poisonous stupidity to other nations, and watch them fall below us.

We did it with Turkey — they borrowed heavily from teams of creationist “arkeologists” who visited their country to search for a big boat dumped on Mt Ararat by a world wide flood. Romania is next — in a few years, we’ll be third from the bottom without even working at it.

I bet it would be easy to knock tiny Iceland off its perch. A little free television programming, a faith-based initiative to send teams of televangelists on tour, a few Mormon and Jehovah’s Witnesses in missionary squads…yeah, it would be far easier to destroy their brains than to improve our own.

Cynthia Dunbar has written a book. It’s typical wingnut nonsense: it “refers to public education as ‘a subtly deceptive tool of perversion’ and calls the establishment of public schools unconstitutional and ‘tyrannical.’” It goes further and says that…

…she believes public schools are unconstitutional because they undermine the scriptural authority of families to direct their children’s education. Her own children have been privately educated and home-schooled.

Typical and unsurprising so far. It’s a shame that she’s abusing the intellectual development of her own children, but unfortunately, she has that right. At least she’s not harming other kids…uh, wait a moment.

Cynthia Dunbar is on the Texas State Board of Education.

Dunbar has served as the state board’s District 10 representative since 2006. Her district covers 16 counties in Southeast Texas, including half of Travis County. She is a member of the board’s instruction committee, which oversees curriculum and graduation requirements, student assessment programs, library standards, and the selection of textbooks.

America’s method of governing public education is severely broken when a kook and hater of public schools like this can be one of the top administrators of educational policy in one of the largest public school systems we have. And that she is evaluating textbooks and curriculum…I am appalled.

The Texas Freedom Network is on the case. I think we need something deeper than just booting this destructive lunatic off the board of education, though — we need sweeping structural change all across the country so that the only people put in charge of schools are those who have an interest in making them better. Do you think a corporation, for instance, would succeed if it promoted people to positions of power who openly admitted that all they wanted to do was destroy the company from within?

A columnist for the Cincinnati Enquirer is quite irate about the fact that we squelched the zoo/creation museum deal. If you read his article, you’ll discover a theme.

The live Nativity at the Creation Museum will have an actual, living, cud-chewing camel. Frightening.

There will also be goats and sheep. Terrifying.

Cuddly lambs might seem harmless to the average visitor, but some people are scared witless by the possibility that some innocent, devout secularist could accidentally wander onto the grounds of the Creation Museum and get exposed to radioactive Christianity or other dangerous ideas that should be outlawed.

The writer, Peter Bronson, hammers on this idea over and over — that scientists are afraid of creationists. By imputing a false motive to our actions, he goes farther and farther astray into never-never land, building up this astonishingly elaborate house of cards.

He does get one part halfway correct, though. He quotes another article on the Enquirer:

“Asking me to ‘tolerate’ this kind of worldview is akin to asking me to ‘tolerate’ illiteracy. Both are problems of education and intelligence. Creationist thought is … naïve, it is anti-intellectual, and it harkens back to pre-enlightenment thinking. I don’t have any tolerance for that.”

Got that? Creationists are stupid, illiterate, naïve and backward.

Naïve and backward is quite correct; they are promoting bad old ideas that have long been disproven. I do not think creationists are stupid — creationism is a deficit that you can overcome — and most are literate to some degree. If only Mr Bronson actually understood what he wrote, because it explains so much more than his “fear” thesis. We react as we do to the proposals of creationists because they are wrong. We aren’t afraid of such absurdities at all, it’s more of an intellectual commitment to addressing falsehoods.

Once again, though, the creationists have caught me brandishing my cyber pistol.

“It’s a little sad that the zoo would cave in to a cyber war,” Ham said. He believes most of the protests came from people who don’t live anywhere near Cincinnati – instigated by P.Z. Myers of Minnesota, a “godless liberal” blogger-atheist who has made a hobby of spiteful attacks on Christians, Christmas and the Creation Museum.

“They’re the ones who are being intolerant,” Ham said. “We’re not afraid of creationists going to the Zoo and seeing their messages about evolution. People have to stand on their own beliefs. It’s not up to us to say you can’t go to this place or that place.

And a fine, entertaining hobby it is, too.

And they make it so easy when they mischaracterize everything so grossly. Did anyone say people can’t go to the Creation Museum? Did anyone block the ability of the Creation Museum to sell tickets? Is anyone afraid of the Big Dumb Ham? Why, no. All that happened is that they were told they can’t borrow the good name of a legitimate educational and scientific institution when they are shilling for their museum. That’s it.

It makes me wonder: If the science is so unshakeable, what are they afraid of? Why wouldn’t they welcome a debate? Why not encourage open-minded exploration? Isn’t that what scientific inquiry is all about?

Again, abandon that premise. We are not afraid. The real issue is that this is a settled scientific question, long resolved and with growing evidential support, and there is little point in continuing the discussion.

Anyone who has had kids knows this situation: when they discover the word “why”, they learn that it is a tool for starting an unending conversation. Give ’em an answer, and they just say “why” again; explain that, and it’s “why” again; the game keeps going until the adult gives up in exasperation. We all know that the kid is not trying to think or get a complete answer — he just wants attention. We can answer for a while with patience, but at some point we have to stop and insist that the child exhibit a little more honest curiousity to trigger more answers.

Creationists passed the point of honest inquiry long ago. I would suggest to Mr Bronson that he go through his little essay and try replacing every instance of the word “afraid” with “exasperated” and he might see his way through to a little more truth.

Or maybe not. The rest of his essay reveals that honesty is not a word he’s interested in.

The obvious adult answer to the protesters is simple: If you don’t like it, don’t go. Buy your ticket to the zoo and enjoy the Festival of Lights. Your experience will not be contaminated by the opportunity to see the Creation Museum’s live Nativity. There is no proven scientific risk of catching contagious Christianity from merely touching a ticket.

But it seems like the only thing Americans have really perfected in the past 30 years is the art of being mortally offended by ridiculous trivialities. So here we go again. Some insecure secularists get scared by ideas they fear, and off we go – another brick wall of political correctness must be built to shield feeble minds from taboo thoughts and theories.

I suppose next they will try to ban Santa Claus because all that stuff about reindeer pulling his sleigh pulled across the sky has not been peer-reviewed in a scientific journal.

Christ would probably be outlawed too by the Secular Police, but his name’s on the holiday.

I repeat: nobody said you can’t go to the Creation Museum. Nobody is worried that you’ll catch Christianity from a poorly done pseudo-museum. Nobody is threatening to ban Santa Claus or Christianity, either. But these baseless accusations are just so useful to inflame the martyr gland of the poor Christian majority. I have to feel sorry for them — their sense of self-worth seems to reside in a belief that they are persecuted for their beliefs, and it’s just so hard to maintain when you’re a dominant majority trying to force-feed religious absurdities on people with educations.

Seth Godin is a marketing guy, and he recently turned his eye to the evolution-creation wars and offered a marketing perspective. That’s useful, but I don’t think he looked deeply enough, and his suggestions don’t really help much. In particular, he compares the acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution to Newton’s “law of gravity” and tries to extract a message about why one is unquestioned and the other is not.

1. If the story of your marketing requires the prospect to abandon a previously believed story, you have a lot of work to do.

Nobody had a seriously described theory of gravity before Newton named it. No one walks around saying that they have a story about why we stick to the earth better than the gravity story. As a result, there was no existing story or worldview to overthrow. Naming something that people already believe in is very smart marketing.

Actually, there was an existing theory of gravity — several, in fact. The best known was Aristotle’s, who posited that there was a natural place where every object ideally wished to be located. For most solid objects, that ideal place was the center of the earth, and for less substantial objects, like steam and smoke, it was in the heavens, so everything was drawn naturally to it’s optimum destination unless hindered. Simple.

Newton’s laws were accepted by the common people without question because they didn’t know what they were. Ask anyone now, outside of a university at least, and you won’t get many who say ‘G•m₁•m₂/d²‘, or even understand that he quantitatively described the force of attraction between any two masses. It’s enough that he didn’t say something crazy, like that apples fall up, therefore it was OK.

Godin is right here. Everyone simply takes the force of gravity for granted, so hearing that some smart guy figured out how to calculate the exact magnitude of that force is unchallenging. Evolution is different. There are lots of creation myths around, all of them created out of a complete absence of evidence and describing past phenomenon of which the storytellers had no understanding, and evolution is directly challenging all of them with facts and evidence. So, sure, it makes for a harder sell. It’s not particularly helpful to be told that your product is hard to market, though: it’s the product we’ve got.

2. If the timeframe of the message of your marketing is longer than the attention span (or lifetime) of the person you are marketing to, you have your work cut out for you as well.

Evolution is really slow. Hard to demonstrate it in real time during a school board meeting. Gravity is instantaneous. Baseball players use it every day.

Baseball players do not, however, use Newton’s laws. People can hit a ball with a stick without using a single equation, and had been doing so long before Newton started scribbling. Try going into a schoolboard meeting and convincing them that students need to learn G•m₁•m₂/d², rather than that they have to fund supplies for athletics. Then you’ll discover how well established gravity is as an educational essential.

We also have some immediately persuasive props for evolution, too: fossils. Plop a dinosaur bone down in front of students, and it is immediately effective, and far more impressive than bouncing a ball. What you find, though, is immediacy is not enough. Creationists go to great lengths to contrive elaborate rationalizations to dismiss direct demonstrations. There’s something more going on.

Godin’s explanations miss the key points of contention.

Number one is human evolution. All those surveys of people’s attitudes towards evolution experience major shifts if the questions are simply reworded: ask whether they believe humans evolved from apes, and half of Americans will say no. Ask them if animals evolved from simpler forms, and the yes answers surge upwards by tens of percentage points. It is not an objection to evolution in principle, but to evolution as an explanation of their personal history. I’m sure there’s a marketing principle to be stated there.

The second objection is to chance and the lack of purpose. People really, desperately want there to be a personal agency to causality — they become utterly irrational about it all if you try to imply that no, fate, destiny, and ultimate cosmic purpose guided them to their mate, for instance. It couldn’t have been just chance. I suspect this is a consequence of the first contention: people want to believe that they are important agents in the universe, and one of the implications of evolution is that they aren’t.

If a marketing guy wants to help out with the evolution debates, those are ideas I’d like to know how to sell better.