Texas has McLeroy driving pro-science people out of the Texas Education Agency, so Florida must be feeling left behind: a member of their state board of education has recently declared her opposition to evolution in the schools.

State Board of Education member Donna Callaway says she’ll be voting against the proposed new state science standards because evolution “should not be taught to the exclusion of other theories of origin of life” and says she hopes “there will be times of prayer throughout Christian homes and churches directed toward this issue.”

“As a SBOE member, I want those prayers,” Callaway said, according to a Nov. 30 column in the Florida Baptist Witness, a weekly newspaper based in Jacksonville that is an official organ of the Florida Baptist Convention. “I want God to be part of this. Isn’t that ironic?”

Florida Citizens for Science has been on top of this for some time. It’s completely incomprehensible to me: the court precedent is very clear that you don’t get to insert your sectarian religious beliefs into the public schools, yet these bizarre creationist uprisings always begin with some clueless, bleating official on a school board babbling about bringing back prayer and god and appealing for Christian support. I thought for a while we might have to seriously worry about a new DI strategy of more effectively divorcing themselves from religion, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards: they are whining about religious persecution in the Gonzalez tiff, and we can reliably trust their followers to bring out the sacred, holy knife of their blessed lord Jesus and publicly slit their own throats with it, guaranteeing that the case will never be seen as a secular issue.

So now I’m wondering which state is going to have the dubious privilege of hosting the next spectacular time-waster of court case. Texas is looking good, and that would be a nice place to drive a stake into the creationist movement, but Florida is coming on strong. There are also tales of a few smoldering possibilities in Louisiana. Or perhaps some dark horse crazy will come galloping out of one of the northern states and surprise us. We should start a pool.

Who best to talk about the Gonzalez tenure case? Since he’s an astronomer, how about another astronomer? Phil is unimpressed:

So when ISU denied Gonzalez tenure, I applauded them. Faculty members are de facto representatives of the University, and having one advocate for a provably wrong antiscientific load of crap… well, it seems counterproductive. Denying someone tenure on that basis alone is, in my opinion, perfectly valid, and in fact should be demanded.

It will feed their martyr complex a little more, but it’s true — when you’re trying to peddle weird pseudoscience and you don’t have the evidence to back it up, you don’t get to join the ranks of professional scientists.

And how about the opinion of someone who was there? Evil Monkey reports direct from Iowa, and he makes the point that Gonzalez’s grant record did not come close to that of his colleagues, and that’s counting an chunk of change straight from the Discovery Institute.

So Gonzalez brought in about 1/10th of the funds of his other colleagues, on average, at best. A good chunk of that went back to the University of Washington to pay a grad student, not ISU. The Templeton grant to write Privileged Planet would pay a portion of his salary, not fund research and advance the mission of his department. And the DI grant (having probably the most fortuitous timing I’ve ever seen) of $50k over 5 years won’t even pay a technician for two full years. The DI claims not much money is needed to do astronomy research, simply on a computer to crunch numbers (which is laughable as typically universities provide some computers to their professors). But somebody, be it a technician, a grad student, or a postdoc, has to be paid to collect data, which that requires salary, benefits, and ‘scope time. Obviously it does require serious cash, as his peers are pulling in over ten times the money Gonzalez is. By way of comparison, I coauthored a grant that netted $198,000 over the course of one year when I was a postdoc.

Poor Guillermo. What he should be doing is either writing grant proposals, or writing applications for jobs that have lesser requirements for bringing in external funds. Instead, he’s looking on as the DI digs a deep grave in which to bury his career.

Now the NY Times has an editorial deploring the politicization of the Texas Education Agency. This one is going to burn the creationists, I think; it’s an opportunity to turn their slogans about fairness right around and skewer them.

Forgive me. This is disgusting.

Glenn Beck + Ben Stein.

Stein repeats his ignorant caricature of the origin of life as “lightning striking a mud puddle,” and then…oh, man, this was unbelievable:

If they’re so sure that they’re right, what are they afraid of? If they’re so sure that their position is unassailable, let the other guy talk and then blow him out of the water and say, “You fool, you didn’t know this, this and this.”

Gosh. That sounds exactly like Pharyngula.

This is exactly what we all do over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. And now Stein has the gall to pretend we never engage the creationist claims?

The DI had their press conference. They unveiled their killer evidence, emails from his university colleagues obtained via a Freedom Of Information Act request. They revealed — oh, horrors! oh, tea and crumpets! oh, I feel a swoon coming on! — that his colleagues had discussed Gonzalez’s involvement with intelligent design in a negative way before the tenure decision was made.

[Read more…]

The NY Times covers the Chris Comer resignationtoday. This story is a wonderful window into the events transpiring within the Texas Education Agency — they are gearing up to shut down biology education in the whole damn state. And why now?

The standards, adopted in 1998, are due for a 10-year review and possible revision after the 15-member elected State Board of Education meets in February, with particular ramifications for the multibillion-dollar textbook industry. The chairman of the panel, Dr. Don McLeroy, a dentist and Sunday School teacher at Grace Bible Church in College Station, has lectured favorably in the past about intelligent design.

There’s a major standards review coming up, and the guy running the show is a bible-thumping clown of a dentist. Note the hint of the wider ramifications: Texas is a huge textbook market, and what goes down in Texas affects what publishers put in books that are marketed nationwide. It is time to start thinking about ending Texas’s influence. If you’re a teacher, a school board member, or an involved parent, and if you get an opportunity to evaluate textbooks for your local schools, look carefully at your biology offerings. If you’re reviewing a textbook and discover that it has been approved for use in Texas, then strike it from your list. It’s too dumb and watered down for your kids.

Let’s hit the publishers where it hurts. Tailoring their books for the Texas market should cut them out of the national market.

Other news to keep your eyes open for today: the Discovery Institute will be having a press conference in Iowa in a few hours. They claim to have juicy revelations in the Guillermo Gonzalez case; I suspect it will be something along the lines of someone on the tenure review committee called Intelligent Design creationism a mean name in an email somewhere. Anyway, we may hear more from either Tara or an Evil Monkey later today.

The creationist blogs will probably be full of indignant outrage over the Gonzalez case for a while, but don’t expect a whisper from them on the Comer case.

Now the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal is running an op-ed critical of Ken Ham.

There is a great educational injustice being inflicted upon thousands of children in this country, a large percentage of whom come from the Kentucky, Ohio and, Indiana areas. The source of this injustice is a sophisticated Christian ministry that uses the hook of dinosaurs, the guarantee of an afterlife, and the horrors of hell to convince children and their families to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. The tax-exempt ministry, Answers in Genesis, and its new $28 million creation museum in Boone County has become the de facto source of science information to thousands of Christians who are throwing away reason and 500 years of scientific inquiry and replacing it with ignorant dogma.

And it just gets fiercer and fiercer from there…

We do not need citizens who are closed-minded, anti-knowledge fundamentalists who want to see the world move closer to the Biblical prophecies of an Armageddon. (AIG also believes in a literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation.) Unfortunately, the creation museum in Northern Kentucky has been very successful at encouraging their non-thinking, anti-reasoning philosophy, especially among young, dinosaur-loving children. Inaction in this matter may come back to haunt us in the future.

Now that’s what I like to see in our media!

It’s good to see that the Austin American-Statesman can see the obvious:

Is this state’s education agency being driven by a political orthodoxy so fierce that it dumped its science director for passing along a harmless e-mail? It’s possible.

Chris Comer was director of the science curriculum for the Texas Education Agency for nearly a decade when she was forced to resign recently. Her offense, as unbelievable as it is to relate, was forwarding an e-mail message about a presentation by an author critical of the intelligent design approach to science education.

We knew when McLeroy was appointed to run the agency (and before) that Texas education was going to be subordinated to promoting a religious doctrine. Maybe this little episode will finally wake a few people up.