Creationism Crap

Once, while I pursued my Master's, a professor made an offhand comment about how Kansas doesn't believe in evolution. I took it in stride, as evidenced by the e-mail I sent to the professor immediately after class (formatting issues below are not entirely my fault):

On August 11, 1999, the Kansas Board of Education voted 6-4 to drop
evolution-based questions from standardized tests taken by Kansas students.
The decision to exclude evolution from the new science standards was a
result what the board thought to be logical reasoning. In their own words:
The proposed draft of the standards presented to the board elevated
evolution to one of the five unifying concepts of science. This was the
only theory given such status, thus suggesting evolution was above
investigation or question. This seemed to contradict a statement in the
document that said students should '...use critical and logical thinking
and consider alternative explanations.' Such a process would not have been
possible in the area of evolution, given the manner in which it was
presented.

The vote had nothing to do with what children were taught within local
schools. Indeed, the very same adopted standards stated, As a result of
their activities in grades 9-12, all students should develop an
understanding ofbiological evolution (p. 79). At no time was there any
mandate from the state board of education to stop teaching evolutionary
theory.

Interestingly, Kansas was not the first state to consider revisions of
evolutionary theory in state science standards. In the three years before
the vote made by the Kansas Board of Education, Illinois, Arizona and New
Mexico experienced similar debates, according to the National Center for
Science Education. Those states did not receive national media attention,
while major national newspapers wrote front page stories concerning the
situation in Kansas. The coverage signaled the beginning of an ambush
against the state's population, with many media personalities -- assuming
that the actions of six men and women in Topeka spoke volumes about the
citizens they were elected to represent -- used the opportunity to get in a
seemingly endless number of jabs against the Sunflower State.

Kansas was not amused. Governor Bill Graves called the board's decision
"terrible, tragic, embarrassing" and his constituents fervently agreed.
Nearly 15 months after the science standards were restructured, four of the
six that voted to drop evolution were incumbents in the fall election.
Only one was re-elected.

(Interestingly, the victorious incumbent was the same man, Steve Abrams,
who was primarily responsible for drafting the 1999 standards. He was
supported by a creationist group based in Missouri, the Creation Science
Association for Mid-America. It would not surprise many Kansans with
knowledge of their state's history that Missouri had a hand in this debacle
-- since the Missouri Compromise of 1821, Missouri has been nothing but a
bad news for its neighbor to the west. That bill indicated that future
states above the southern boundary of Missouri (36030') would be free of
slavery. This idea held until the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of
1854. The new bill, along with the Compromise of 1850, introduced the
notion of popular sovereignty -- territorial settlers themselves would
decide if their state's stance on slavery. Kansas entered the Union in
1861 as a free state, amidst conflict between pro-slavery forces in
Missouri and the population of Kansas -- all means necessary were employed
to influence the new state's stance. Missouri's efforts to influence
Kansas culminated in Quantrill's Raid on the town of Lawrence, Kansas, one
of the few cities in America founded for a purely political reason: the
abolition of slavery. The following is taken from Lawrence's Visitors
Bureau website, just a few clicks away from information on the University
of Kansas and its first basketball coach, Dr. James Naismith, who invented
the game:

"On August 21, 1863, Lawrence suffered what some historians have called the
greatest atrocity of the Civil War: Quantrill's Raid.

While Lawrence slept, pro-slavery guerrilla William Clarke Quantrill and
approximately 400 men from Missouri prepared their attack. Shortly after
five in the morning, they rode into the city. One witness recounted: "The
attack was perfectly planned. Every man knew his place. They flowed into
every street... The order was to burn every house and kill every man." They
killed only men and young boys; women and children were robbed but not
harmed. The raiders killed approximately 200 men that day, leaving slews of
widows and fatherless children. Fires devastated Lawrence's commercial
district; only few buildings remained. As many as 185 homes were burned
during the four-hour raid.

The resilient citizens of Lawrence buried the dead and banded together on
the road to recovery. Within days, makeshift stores re-opened and
rebuilding began. By the following spring, new stores, two newspapers and
telegraph wires were established. The first bridge across the Kansas River
at Lawrence was also finished. Only months later, the railroad came
through. Lawrence had survived and would adopt the city motto: 'From Ashes
To Immortality.'")

The new Kansas Board of Education acted swiftly and purposefully, with a
resiliency similar to those that settled in Lawrence more than 150 years
ago. New standards were adopted in February 2001. Now, teaching
evolution is practically required, and Kansas among the leading states in
preventing religious theory from being taught in science classrooms.
Unfortunately, less media attention was given to this reversal, prompting
the need for essays like this every now and then.

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Now it all might happen again. As (I'm told) the director of KU's Natural History Museum puts it, "If there's such a thing as intelligent design, why do men have nipples?"