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.

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.)

It’s too bad my Viking blood does not confer upon me the ability to read Norse, because the Norwegian media is lighting up with the tale of a school that is denying evolution in the enlightened land of Scandinavia. I’ve found one account in English, and at least it looks like the creationists have been slammed silly with a widespread negative outcry. I guess I’m not the only one with a little Viking ferocity left in me.

The one thing I got from the article is that apparently the crazy creationism proponent tried to argue that there is good evidence that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Has Answers in Genesis been showing old Flintstones episodes on Norwegian TV or something?

Also, Casey Luskin demonstrates his inability to comprehend a science paper, again. Creationists are obsessed with the idea that every nucleotide in the genome (and now the transcriptome) must have a function, an idea that is actively rejected by the available data, so Luskin reads a Nature paper on RNA and gets it completely backwards. Larry Moran has a quote from the paper that directly and plainly contradicts Luskin’s misinterpretation. Once again, we can all laugh at the inanity of the Discovery Institute.

I’m trying figure out how this insane bill could even get a hearing. State Representative Leo Berman (R, of course) was peeved that the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board ruled that the Institute for Creation Research would not be allowed to grant degrees. So, he came up with an amazingly stupid idea: pass a law that would allow private, non-profit education institutions to grant degrees without the board’s permission. Which, if you think about it, is actually kind of brilliant in the sense that it’s hard to imagine a worse solution.

If it were to pass, though, I’d like to move to Texas for a few months, open a free daycare, and issue doctoral degrees to every toddler who can go a day without pooping his pants. I’d have the diplomas printed on diapers, too.

That’s about what a degree from a Texas university would be worth if Berman had his way.

I hope all you Texans with real degrees from real universities are frantically writing off to your representatives explaining why this would be a very bad idea.

The media are all agog at the fact that the Creation “Museum” has an exhibit on natural selection. Whoop-te-doo, I say — anybody who has been following creationism at all knows that they happily trot out this claim all the time. We’ve got all kinds of concrete examples of observed evolutionary change in lizards and insects and birds and fish, so their argument has always been that they accept a small amount of change, but there are magical limits.

A new exhibit at the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum argues that natural selection — Darwin’s explanation for how species develop new traits over time — can coexist with the creationist assertion that all living things were created by God just a few thousand years ago.

“We wanted to show people that creationists believe in natural selection,” said Ken Ham, founder of the Christian ministry Answers in Genesis and frequent Darwin critic.

The exhibit might seem peculiar to many who have watched the decades-long battle between evolution scientists and creationists, who take the Bible’s Genesis account as literal truth.

No, it isn’t. This is old stuff and an elementary distortion of evolutionary theory that the creationists have been using for years. It’s the same as their old distinction between microevolution, which they say they accept while not understanding what it is, and macroevolution, which they say they reject while in a similar state of blind ignorance.

The newspapers are getting played for a chump. They even asked Eugenie Scott’s opinion of this “development”, and she flat out told them it was old news.

But the idea that creationists can accept natural selection “isn’t really new in creationism, though it’s interesting that Answers in Genesis would have an exhibit on it,” said Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, Calif.

It’s interesting that they have an exhibit in that we would like to see how they’ve mangled good science this time.