Texas Continues its Assault on Reason

Sigh. The euphoria over the Texas School board's vote to get rid of the "strengths and weaknesses" language is gone and the Houston Chronicle headline today reads "Scientists Grim as Panel Tinkers More on Evolution." As I was suspecting a few days ago, the victory is largely negated by new language introduced undermining the idea of universal common descent. The story is on the Houston Chronicle's website now, but with the different headline "Scientists: Board Proposals Undermine Evolution Teaching."

This is the sort of thing that makes me doubt the current conventional wisdom among some folk who call themselves "postmodernists" (though I know not all postmodernists think this way, and it may be a misrepresentation of the PM mainstream) that everyone is equally biased and there is no such thing as an objective point of view. It may very well be that no one's point of view is completely without bias, but there are differing degrees of bias and some points of view are more objective than others. (And of course a bias doesn't always make one wrong. I may be biased in favor of modern medicine over folk remedies, but that doesn't mean antibiotics don't work.)

This Creationist nonsense is the epitome of a biased outlook. Here there are non-experts in the field of biology making decisions about how evolution should be taught not on the basis of any scientific reasoning (they didn't have any experts suggest the language that got added) but on the basis that the mainstream expert opinion is in conflict with their interpretation of their religion. The Bible may be a great book (or it may not) but it should have absolutely no effect on how we teach biology.