A few days ago, the Louisiana legislature rejected Senate Bill 26 which sought to repeal the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act which allows for creationism to be taught as valid science in schools. Two previous attempts at repeal in 2011 and 2012 also failed.

As a high school student in 2011, Zack Kopplin started the repeal campaign with the support of 78 Nobel laureate scientists. He said at the time that he kept hoping that either an adult or an organisation would take up the issue. Dismayed that no one did, he took up the cause himself, even testifying before the state Senate. He is now a Rice University student and is still pushing ahead with this campaign.

In his most recent testimony, Kopplin was quoted by the Associated Press (May 1, 2013) saying, “This law is about going back into the Dark Ages, not moving forward into the 21st Century.” He added, “Louisiana students deserve to be taught sound science and that means the theory of evolution, not creationism.”

Check out Zack Kopplin’s recent op-ed in the Guardian Newspaper:
• Louisiana counts the cost of teaching creationism – in reputation and dollars
by Zack Kopplin (Guardian, 1 May 2013)

For me, one of the disturbing aspects of this issue is the support of likely Republican presidential hopeful, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal for the creationist cause.

Last month, in an interview with NBC, Jindal said,
“I’ve got no problem if a school board, a local school board, says we want to teach our kids about creationism, that people, some people, have these beliefs as well, let’s teach them about ‘intelligent design’…What are we scared of?”

What we are scared of, is that the USA still exercises a critical influence in the world, so to have a person like Jindal as a potential leader of that country is frightening for the future of science and education.

See the full NBC interview with Jindal here:
• One on One with Governor Bobby Jindal.

For about half the last century, the USA led the world in academic excellence and scientific discovery. Then along came the religious nutters in the form of creationists who support the teaching of intelligent design as science, to help Americans find their way back to the 15th century. When I ask myself why news like Louisiana’s rejection of SB 26, makes me seethe with anger, I answer… It’s because the hubris of these closed minded politicians and the nutters they represent, causes millions of kids to be taught lies. They are sanctimonious bloody child abusers. These kids who don’t know better, rely on their teachers to safeguard their future and help them become fully functioning adults. Instead, by allowing the teaching of creationism and intelligent design as legitimate science, they’re raising a generation of kids who wont have the choice to become geologists, paleontologists, physicists, cosmologists, astronomers, anthropologists or biologists. You can’t teach the scientific method alongside creationism or intelligent design because they are incompatible. Creationism and intelligent design which is supernatural pseudo-science, cannot survive the scrutiny of the scientific method which requires that theory withstand all evidence. Creationism and intelligent design requires only that selective evidence support theory, while ignoring all evidence to the contrary. In other words, Creationists make the evidence fit the theory, not the other way round.

All natural science disciplines have provided us with overwhelming evidence that the world and the universe are billions of years old, so again they are incompatible with creationism and intelligent design which posits that dinosaurs co-existed with humans less than 10,000 years ago. All these scientific disciplines also require an understanding of the interwoven and independently verifiable history of our planet and universe not the untestable supernatural pseudo-science of creationism and intelligent design.

When you’re looking for oil, it helps if you have an understanding about the process that transforms dead organisms into liquid oil over millions of years. It helps if you know how tectonic plates have moved over millions of years so you’ve got an idea where to look. It also helps if you can identify rock stratification that has occurred over millions of years. So, if you’re a creationist who wants a job in Petroleum geology, forget it because there’s nothing in creationism or Intelligent design that will help you find oil, you need real science for that. If you’re developing new medicines, it helps if you have an understanding about how pathogens evolve and for that you need real science like evolution not creationism or intelligent design.

Louisiana is not isolated in its support of creationist pseudo-science. The rise of secular rationalism has seen Christian fundamentalists fight back with a strategy designed to circumvent the ‘separation of church and state’ by insidiously introducing this intelligent design crap-science into schools. This program is backed by the cleverly named Discovery Institute (remind you of anything? perhaps the Discovery Channel), a Seattle based right-wing Christian, Creationist lobby group, thinly disguised as a ‘think tank’. This pernicious organisation’s stated goal is to Teach the Controversy and create an aura of doubt around evolution. Its purpose seems to be to undermine the long established scientific method, which requires science theory be based on measurable and verifiable evidence, unlike the supernatural intelligent design pseudo-science which is not empirical science.

Indoctrinating kids with creationism disguised as legitimate science is the kind of blatant distortion of truth, dressed up as fact that was a hallmark of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. That’s why it makes me so f***ing angry.

More:
• Here is an excerpt from Kopplin’s 2013 Louisiana Senate testimony:
Claude Bouchard, the former Director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, calls the LSEA “anti-science” legislation whose intent is to diminish the role of science in elementary and secondary schools when teachers discuss with their students such hot topics as evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.”

Dr. Bouchard says that the LSEA has economic consequences. “If you are an employer in a high tech industry, in the biotechnology sector or in a business that depends heavily on science, would you prefer to hire a graduate from a state where the legislature has in a sense declared that the laws of chemistry, physics or biology can be suspended?”

Because The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology pulled a prescheduled convention from New Orleans in response to the passage of the LSEA, the repeal of this law is important to our state’s tourism industry.

According to Steve Perry, the President of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, the LSEA “is a poor symbol of our state’s actual commitment to being on the cutting edge of modern science. And, it has a damaging impact on our bringing hundreds of millions of dollars of major international meetings and conventions in medical and basic sciences.”

Perry says “It is such an embarrassing, antiquated law to have on the books when we are making such transformational new investments in biotechnology, gene therapy, and neurosciences. With our entire country voicing the need for more investments in the teaching of science and mathematics, here we are re-living the kind of discussion the Catholic Church must have had with Galileo.”

• Creationist Science Committee Chair seeks to sideline Peer Review:

The creationist agenda has been boosted by the appointment of creationist, Texas Republican Congressman Rep. Lamar Smith, as chairman of the House Science Committee (truly ironic, given his anti-science agenda). Smith has proposed legislation, the High Quality Research Act, which implicitly provides for political judgments on research merit and could allow climate change deniers and creationists to weigh in on possible applications of research projects. Chairman Smith is pushing for the stripping of the peer-review requirement from the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant process and substituting a new set of politically motivated funding criteria that is significantly less transparent and not reviewed by independent experts (ie. scientists). The funding criteria also seeks to diminish the role of research that independently verifies experimental results, a result that wouldn’t displease climate change skeptics and the scrutiny averse creationists.

More links:
See Bill Moyers’ excellent April 2013 interview with Zack Kopplin (who knew that 46% of Americans believe God created the Universe and the Earth less than 10,000 years ago… scary):

Check out Kopplin’s 2011 testimony in support of repeal of the Creationist Law here:

See more of Kopplin’s video here:
• Zack Kopplin’s Repeal the Act YouTube Channel.

Also see the complete Louisiana Senate 2013 hearings here (Kopplin’s testimony begins after about 80% has elapsed – look for SB 26 on screen):
• Louisiana Senate SB 26 hearings.

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I think allowing creationism to be taught as legitimate science in schools is dangerous, because it doesn’t require the application of the scientific method and it therefore undermines and devalues rigorous science. Am I right?

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