Want proof evolution is real? Just look at creationism

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At the Creation Museum in Kentucky, a kid rides the triceratops statue. Just like our ancestors did, or something.

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by best-selling author Chris Mooney and neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas, also features a discussion of science in President Obama’s past (and future) State of the Union addresses, and the science of how short-term memory works. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Mindswas also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ shows on iTunes — you can learn more here.

Last week, we learned about the latest science education outrage. Writing at Slate, the pro-evolution activist Zach Kopplin highlighted the anti-science content that is apparently being taught in some state-funded Texas charter schools. That includes student biology workbooks that reportedly describe evolution as “dogma” and an “unproven theory.”

It’s just the latest of countless infringements upon accurate science education across the country in recent decades. The “war on science” in national politics has nothing on the war playing out every day in public schools, even if the latter is usually less visible. The attacks are diverse and ever-changing, showing a wide array of tactics and strategies. “If nothing else evolves,” explains longtime evolution defender Eugenie Scott on the latest installment of the Inquiring Minds podcast, “religion does. Creationism does.”

Scott spoke to us on the occasion of her stepping down as the director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), an organization that started out in her basement three decades ago and has since become the chief tracker of political and ideological attacks on science education across the United States. Joining the conversation was Scott’s successor, Ann Reid, who led the sequencing of the 1918 flu virus at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in the mid-2000s, and most recently served as director of the American Academy of Microbiology.

Eugenie Scott and Ann Reid, past and current directors of the National Center for Science Education.

Reid — who opined on the show that when it comes to attacks on science, you have to take the “long view” — will certainly be busy: NCSE recently added defending the teaching of climate science to its portfolio. That’s in part because conservatives have started including attacks on climate science in some of their proposed science teaching bills at the state level.

NCSE monitors all this action at state legislatures, school boards, and even in individual schools in some cases. And what emerges, again and again, is a process that looks very evolutionary: Teaching creationism in public schools has been repeatedly blocked in the courts, but anti-evolution advocates are constantly coming up with new strategies, new ways in which they hope to succeed.

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