triceratops & whale

Ignorance is alive and well and living in classrooms everywhere. If you need to know the cost of teaching stupidity, and most importantly of funding stupidity, creationism is a place to start. Rick Warren is a creationist, and clearly that qualifies him to give a benediction to the nation. Warren is slick enough to have sponged his website of the relevant text, but he has reaffirmed these beliefs in the last month.

Creationists are reliably anti-environment hit men. Global warming denial and creationism are often promoted by the same people. Obviously creationism has selective fitness, since it gains favor from rich elites.

Creationism evolves by what could be called "social selection." Variants that can secure funding and win court cases live, those that can't die. One reason that creationism may be so endemic, is that political appointees may get fired for talking about the truth.

The Scientific American article underlines the current strategy of the Creationist virus: create the illusion of controversy, demand equal time for unequal views, and declare that this is about "freedom."

Of course, the illusion of controversy is easy to create: just pay people to do it, like, for example, the Tobacco Institute, or declaring that Saddam was close to having atomic weapons.

It also helps if the President gives a prominent creationist a spot on the stage at his inaugural.

Not long ago, there were those that preached unfacts with unscience about the inferiority of those of African or Jewish descent. At enormous human cost, we learned that while it is impossible to eradicate such views, it is possible to debunk them and force them from the sphere of public acceptability. Obama now backs modern versions of the same infection: unscience that preaches that ignorance is strength, and that some people are not entitled to the same rights as the rest of us. It's time he realized that he isn't inviting Warren to speak at his private gathering, as reciprocation for being invited to Saddleback, he is officially endorsing, as President of the United States, the same views that, a century ago, would have been used to endorse laws against miscegenation, and to declare that "the negro" was inferior. Having lost that battle, the social selection of bigotry now has turned to other targets.