The Florida anti-evolution bill I mentioned yesterday? It is an ex-bill.

How did Texas screw up public education? It’s complicated. The rational members of the board managed to exclude the ‘strengths and weaknesses’ language, which would have invited an immediate assault by the ignorant on a well-established scientific principle, but at the same time the ignorant members of the school board managed to hammer in several amendments:

analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations in all fields of science by using empirical evidence, logical reasoning, and experimental and observational testing, including examining all sides of scientific evidence of those scientific explanations so as to encourage critical thinking by the student.

Analyze and evaluate the evidence regarding formation of simple organic molecules and their organization into long complex molecules having information such as the DNA molecule for self-replicating life.

analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning the complexity of the cell

Superficially, those sound fine — of course we want students to analyze the scientific evidence! The problem is that the creationists are going to come back with a novel definition of ‘scientific’ evidence that treats Intelligent Design as a scientific hypothesis, and they’re going to demand textbooks that include a treatment of all kinds of nonsensical ‘theories’. ID is not scientific. It has no evidence in its favor (pointing out that we lack intermediate fossils showing the evolution of the lesser red-necked Argentinian swamp leech is not evidence that it was designed). But the Discovery Institute does have another bad textbook waiting in the wings for the next round of textbook-buying decisions in Texas.

There are other obvious problems with those additions. High school students are expect to study all sides of scientific evidence? Really? I’ve been in the high schools. Texas students must be truly brilliant if they can master the whole of the scientific literature in a semester-long grade school level introductory course to biology.

Texas students are going to study abiogenesis? Really? How much organic chemistry and biochemistry do they have under their belts before they begin this class? Perhaps this is just an opportunity to use the students’ ignorance of the basics to insert their own ridiculous (and ignorant) claims into the instruction.

Oh, and “complexity of the cell” is a common creationist phrase. Yes, the cell is complex. The response they expect from us is awe and incomprehending acceptance of their claim that it is too complex to have evolved, and must have been designed. Sorry, guys, design is better at producing simplicity, while evolution tends to produce complexity. Evolution already explains how you can get complexity. But they won’t tell the students that.

One further irony: the Houston Chronicle blandly reports that “Scientists from throughout Texas helped shape the new science curriculum standards.” What they don’t bother to mention is that these insertions into the standards were generated in opposition to the input of scientists, in defiance of what the scientific position would propose.

It’s terribly unfair. Not only are the paladins of evolution handsomer, wittier, more charming, and with a deeper grasp of the truth than the orc-like hordes of creationism, but even our ancillary skills are wielded with more effortless panache than our opponents’ primary talents. Here’s a beautiful example: Richard Dawkins, a mere biologist, wrote a clear, simple program in BASIC about thirty years ago that has had the Isaac Newton of Information Theory scratching his head in puzzlement. How did a program running a simple selection algorithm turn a random text string into the specific string “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL” so quickly? He must have cheated! There must be some trick in the code! The poor bewildered ‘experts’ of Design Theory struggled to comprehend, and floundered trying to create a program of equal complexity.

As Ian Musgrave shows, the program is trivial, and even us biologists can whip one out in minutes. Once again, the ID camp shows themselves to be less a research group than a gaggle of stumblebum clowns, with the capacity to embarrass themselves with their own incompetence.

Texas is getting all this attention — they’ve got Don McLeroy! Reviews of curricula with creationists chipping away at them word by word! Insanity reigns, and everyone just acts as if it were standard operating procedure!

I think Florida was feeling neglected, so that state slipped in another creationist education bill. It’s like this is a competition for craziest, most ignorant state in the union.

It’s a good try, Florida, and you’ll always have a place in my heart as the home of so many wackaloons, but you’ve got a long ways to go to beat Crazy Ol’ Uncle Don. Don’t feel like you’ve got to try harder, though. You’ve got better things to which to aspire. Why, I’ll always remember sitting down at that beach in Miami when the lovely young brown-skinned lady stood up in front of me, unselfconsciously took her bikini off, and started oiling herself up all over…that’s the most Florida I want you to be, OK?

I was premature in mentioning the good news from the Texas hearings: the situation is much messier than I thought. The ‘strengths and weaknesses’ amendment lost on points, but the creationists responded with a flurry of new amendments to various pieces of the science standards — most of them look like very nit-picky changes in wording that have deep meaning to creationists, I assume. Science wasn’t murdered by the Texas board, but is only being wounded and made to suffer the torture of a thousand cuts.

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The Texas Freedom Network has released a summary statement.

The word “weaknesses” no longer appears in the science standards. But the document still has plenty of potential footholds for creationist attacks on evolution to make their way into Texas classrooms.

Through a series of contradictory and convoluted amendments, the board crafted a road map that creationists will use to pressure publishers into putting phony arguments attacking established science into textbooks.

We appreciate that the politicians on the board seek compromise, but don’t agree that compromises can be made on established mainstream science or on honest education policy.

What’s truly unfortunate is that we now have to revisit this entire debate in two years when new science textbooks are adopted. Perhaps the Texas legislature can do something to prevent that.

I am no longer confused, just unhappy.

The effort to insert the ‘strengths and weaknesses” nonsense into the Texas science curriculum by creationists has been defeated. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that it was a real squeaker, defeated by a 7:7 vote. It was a ridiculous notion, and it’s similarly ridiculous that it was even close.

Scientists are baffled by his ability to survive. After the recent discovery of transitional fossil octopods, I predicted that creationists would abuse the discovery…and Denyse O’Leary fulfilled my prediction of stupidity by claiming that the fossils showed that cephalopods hadn’t evolved at all. Wouldn’t you know it, but Joseph Farah of World Nut Daily has upped the ante by being even more explicitly wrong.

¹Scientists are baffled by the latest fossil find.

²
It’s an octopus they claim is 95 million years old.

³
And, guess what? It looks just like a modern-day octopus — complete with eight legs, rows of suckers and even traces of ink.

⁴
In all that time, it seems, the octopus hasn’t evolved — not one tiny bit.

¹Scientists aren’t baffled at all by this discovery.

²Superficially, this is true — they do say it is 95 million years old. Farah is trying to spin it, though, by implying it is only a “claim”. It is a conclusion supported by the evidence.

³There are hundreds of octopod species. The level of description Farah provides is about what a four-year-old with a crayon might say, and it’s false. They (there were several species identified) do not look like modern octopods, but have several tell-tale differences.

⁴Completely false. Farah hasn’t read the paper, which fits these fossils into a long history of evolutionary change in the lineage.

That’s an impressive collection of falsehoods. It takes a creationist to screw up a story that thoroughly, I guess.

The Texas Board of Education is led by Don McLeroy, a creationist dentist and plagiarist who believes that the earth is only 6000 years old.

Just stop there and savor it. The man who wants to dictate what all of the children in one of the largest educational systems in the country should learn about science believes his pathetic and patently false superstition supersedes the evidence and the informed evaluation of virtually all the scientists in the world. There is no other way to put it than to point out that McLeroy is a blithering idiot who willingly puts his incompetence on display. His job is not at risk, and he’s even advancing his freakish agenda with some success.

It’s a marvel, isn’t it? A fellow just wants to laugh and shoo him back to his church and his dental practice, but instead, he’s been given all this power over the education of American children, and it’s hard to laugh, because it is so damned terrifying.

But wait! The unbelievable insanity is not yet complete! The Texas school board is debating and will vote on a revised curriculum this week, a curriculum in which the uninformed, uneducated doubts of this arrogantly ignorant man will be enshrined in the lesson plans of every child in Texas. And the board is about evenly split!

There’s a deeper problem here than the simple superficial fact that we’ve got influential people trying to push nonsense into science classrooms. It’s that somehow, we have a system that gives flaming incompetents this kind of power — that we willingly hand over important decisions about the education of our children to people who aren’t qualified, who have no understanding of science, and who want prioritize a page and a half of vague, poetic metaphor from a ragged old hodge-podge of a book of mythology over the concrete, well-tested, and well-documented body of modern scientific information.

It’s ludicrous and painful to watch. Steve Schafersman will be live-blogging the proceedings. I think we’re obligated to follow along, in order to suffer for our national shortcomings. Think of it as penance, and as an object lesson. We need to correct the structural problems in the governance of our educational systems, no matter which way the decision goes. If you are in Texas, and you care about good science, then you should plan on showing up and testifying.

Even that is sad and pitiful. We rely now on getting enough presentable people to show up and speak forcefully in order to persuade a state board of education to support science?

Last week, I wrote about the spectacular Cretaceous octopus fossils, and I made a blatant prediction.

Accustomed as I am to the workings of the minds of creationists, though, I’m sad to say that I also immediately saw how this find will be abused. I guarantee you that Harun Yahya is grabbing these images and planning to stuff them into his next bloated and repetitive tome, with a caption that announces that there has been no change in octopuses over 95 million years, therefore evolution is false.

After explaining the differences between these fossils and modern forms, and showing a chart that illustrated the transitional nature of their morphology, I further stated:

Don’t be fooled by the superficial resemblance — there are more subtleties to being an octopus than simply having eight arms. What these fossils reveal is more detail about the evolution of the octopods.

Well, my only error was on pinning this kind of stupidity explicitly on Harun Yahya. I should have known there were plenty of local idiots who would, in their sublime ignorance about cephalopods, leap to the false conclusion that this is an example of stasis (it isn’t: these are different than modern forms), and claim that the octopus “did not evolve at all”. Please note: having eight arms is a very general property of the octopods. You can’t just throw away all the evolutionary change that is described because you are so unaware that you see everything with eight arms as being the same creature. There are over 200 species named in the family Octopodidae, with over 100 waiting further description and classification, and no doubt many more awaiting discovery. They are incredibly diverse.

What these blind kooks are doing is the equivalent of pointing out that paleontologists have discovered 365 million year old tetrapods, that all mammals today still have four limbs, and claiming, therefore, that evolution did not occur.

(Hat tip to Canadian Cynic; personally, I can’t stomach reading the odious Denyse O’Leary, and rely on others to point out her more flamboyant inanities.)