Blizza Blizza

In what comes as a refreshing bit of good news for anyone who is not engaging in pseudo-Christian jihad against the basic principles of science, U.S. District Court Judge Clarence Cooper ruled that stickers pushing a Creationist agenda be removed from science textbooks.

Colin Purrington has an interesting perspective:

[I]t’s really too bad the Cobb County school district, the loser in the decision, now has to pay the rather large legal fees, sucking valuable assets away from school budgets. To cover the expected revenue shortfall, and to avoid tax increases in Cobb County, perhaps Marjorie Rogers (the Creationist who started the whole mess) can extract donations from the 2,300 supporters who signed her original petition that objected to evolution instruction.

He also has a new sticker to be placed over the old one:

Please read this entire textbook before the end of the year. Due to insufficient funds, you will not have a teacher for this class. If you would like to thank somebody for this situation, please contact local Creationists, who helped bankrupt the district.

The district’s legal counsel is also being blamed (by a small legion of organised crackpots called the Discovery Institute, whose agenda, among other things, appears to be the promotion of intelligent design) for mounting an “incompetent defense.”

(Also on Slashdot)

I’m not saying the stickers were the best idea, but it should be up to the teachers to convey that evolution is a theory. The problem is, teachers tend to present it as fact.

I happen to be both a creationist and an evolutionist…sort of. I believe creation, yet I have no doubt that evolution does occur. It’s obvious. What’s no obvious is the magnitude of evolution that non-creationists like to rant about.

While it’s true that evolution is a “theory,” most people confuse the scientific definition of “theory”:

A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.

with the layman’s definition of “theory”:

An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture.

Someone on Slashdot put it even more succinctly: “A hunch.”

The rabid fundie Creationists rely on the confusion of these definitions to play their games with the courts. If the general public had any idea how the wool was being pulled over their eyes, they would see right through this nonsensical crusade and tell these fundies to go bother someone else.

cl