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.

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.