Texas Freedom Network

We suppose having a sense of humor is important when elected officials are turning your state into a national laughingstock. Religion Dispatches offers a shocking photo of the rare “dog-cat” that Texas State Board of Education member Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio, must have been talking about during the recent debate over teaching about evolution. Mercer has argued that the absence of transitional animals like a “dog-cat” and a “cat-rat” is proof that evolution is a fraud. Humor aside, Lauri Lebo’s accompanying article is an excellent review of what happened in Texas. She even gets board Chairman Don McLeroy, R-Bryan, to once again argue that science should include supernatural explanations.

And in a wide-ranging interview with the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Science Magazine, the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology, John Holdren, weighs in on the Lone Star mess:

(M)y impression from reading about it is that it was not a step forward but rather a step backward. Of course, all science needs to be skeptical. It’s hard to be against skepticism. But when you get into the domain of promoting particular views about the basis for skepticism of evolution, and those views are not really valid, then I think we have a problem. I think we need to be giving our kids a modern education in biology, and the underpinning of modern biology is evolution. And countervailing views that are not really science, if they are taught at all, should be taught in some other part of the curriculum.

Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, will talk about the battle over science curriculum standards for Texas public schools on NPR’s Science program Friday (April 10). The program airs from 2 to 3 p.m. Eastern time. Check here for a list of stations carrying the program.

Our friends at NCSE have been wonderful national partners in the campaign for sound science education in Texas for many years, including during the adoption of new biology textbooks here six years ago. And they are continuing to battle efforts by creationist pressure groups to dumb down science education in states across the country. Check out the show.

Don McLeroy, the esteemed evolutionary biologist dentist and creationist who serves as chairman of the Texas State Board of Education, spent a lot of time last month trying to persuade his fellow board members that scientific evidence for natural selection is wrong. Perhaps he should read this piece from the New York Times:

In a worldwide survey of 50 populations, a team of geneticists has identified many fingerprints of natural selection in the human genome. These are sites on the genome where specific sequences of DNA show signs of having become more common in the population, presumably because they helped their owners adapt to new climates, diseases or other factors.

The genetic regions where natural selection has acted turn out to differ in various populations, doubtless because each has been molded by different local forces on each continent.

“Our work supports the notion that regional populations have adapted in a variety of ways, some shared, some not, to the selective pressures they encountered as they dispersed from the ancestral African homeland some 80,000 years ago,” said Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago.

The authors of the new study are Dr. Pritchard and his colleagues Joseph Pickrell and Graham Coop. It was published online last month in Genome Research. It is the first to look for signals of selection in DNA samples gathered by the Human Genome Diversity Project.

Science marches on.

(Hat tip: musings)