Photo credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/K. Poppenhaeger et al; Illustration: NASA. Click image for story at Bad Astronomy
Why would conservatives who know better care about issues like creationism? Same reason they gin up outrage over school prayer or sex ed or anything else. Anything to drive a wedge between middle-class parents and their own interests, in this case giving their children a good education generally paid for by progressive property taxes. They're up to it
again in Texas:
It looks like the Lone Star State’s reputation as a hotbed of anti-science fanaticism is about to be reinforced. At least six creationists/”intelligent design” proponents succeeded in getting invited to review high school biology textbooks that publishers have submitted for adoption in Texas this year. The State Board of Education (SBOE) will decide in November which textbooks to approve. Those textbooks could be in the state’s public school science classrooms for nearly a decade.
Among the six creationist reviewers are some of the nation’s leading opponents of teaching students that evolution is established, mainstream science and is overwhelmingly supported by well over a century of research. Creationists on the SBOE nominated those six plus five others also invited by the Texas Education Agency to serve on the biology review teams. We have been unable to determine what those other five reviewers think about evolution.
The dollars. With these greedy clowns it's always the fucking dollars benefiting the middle-class and poor they can peel off and hand over to the super rich. And too much is never enough.
- I may apply for this, but I'd feel bad not telling everyone else about it.
- Climate change occurring "orders of magnitude faster" than anything seen in the fossil record.
- Speaking of dollars, I may have something going on Kickstarter in a few months. Until then ... I Know Nothing!
- A Republican Case for Climate Action ... and it's for real!
- New evidence suggest everyone alive today might able to trace their ancestry, if using patrilineal descent alone, to a single male nick-named Adam. But before Islamo-Christian Old Testament creationists get too excited, there's more:
The findings, detailed Thursday in the journal Science, come from the most complete analysis of the male sex chromosome, or the Y chromosome, to date. The results overturn earlier research, which suggested that men's most recent common ancestor lived just 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. Despite their overlap in time, ancient "Adam" and ancient "Eve" probably didn't even live near each other, let alone mate.
It also doesn't mean that every person alive just after Y-chromie Adam was descended from him. It only means that eventually, perhaps only in the last few generations, one y-chromosome won out, similar to the way one mitochondrial DNA line won out for mt-Eve.