As those of you who live in my home state may know, the Texas Board of Education has been under pressure from pro-Creationism members and from external organizations to water down the teaching of Evolution in the science curriculum in Texas. This attempt to completely subvert the integrity of science education in Texas has been going on for years, aided by an electorate that seems incapable of critical thinking when it comes to evaluating the merits of candidates for positions on the board (wake up people!).
This posting from Digby enumerates the extremely negligible qualifications of Don Patton, one of the opponents of the teaching of Evolution as part of the education process in Texas, who testified at recent board hearings on science teaching.
Based on my evaluation of his claimed qualifications, if he can call himself "Dr", then I ought to start claiming myself as a Professor. You see, unlike Mr. Patton, I actually have a degree in Geology, from the University of Manchester (1976).
Sadly, like many dangerous demagogues of the past, Patton does appear to be able to speak superficially plausible nonsense in a resonant, well-modulated voice. His opponents may lack in bombast, but as this posting from P.Z. Myers makes clear, opposition to his brand of unscientific religious nonsense spans most of the spectrum of academia, including (in this case) historians. The contempt of these people for the entire education process appears to know no limits.
In a related set of wackiness, the Insitute of Creation Research, whom Mr. Patton was representing in his appearance before the Texas board, has recently filed a complaint against the Texas Higher Education Co-Ordination Board in federal court for an injunction requiring the THECB to issue the Certificate of Authority and permit ICR to issue Master of Science degrees in science education. This follows the THECB rejection of their 2008 request to permit the ICR to offer a Master’s degree in science education in Texas.
This blog posting by a practising lawyer outlines the numerous ways in which this complaint is a waste of dead tree products and court system bandwidth.
The entire complaint seems to me to be another attempt to create publicity and engage in some martyrdom, with the education and the court systems ultimately being pointed to as the nasty villians.
This sort of devious, intellectually dishonest behaviour from supporters of Creationism is likely to continue until electors start to apply much more rigorous thinking and evaluation processes to education board candidates in Texas. Voting for candidates who, by a process of defective reasoning, seek to elevate the teaching of Creationism to the level of science may make people feel more virtuous (I guess), but if continued, the election of backward-looking, unthinking individuals to positions of power in the U.S. education system will undermine the system over time to the point where it ceases to have any credibility, either inside the U.S.A. or in the rest of the world. The obsession with Creationism is regarded in Europe was a weird, illogical and highly suspect behaviour pattern peculiar to the U.S.A. (Even the Roman Catholic Church, that most hierarchical and conservative of organizations, formally accepted Evolution as an explanation for the development of intelligent life on Earth years ago.)