Some good news from Texas

You gotta check out this website: Teach Them Science. It's put together by the Center for Inquiry and also the folks behind the Clergy Letter project, which I have blogged about before.

In other words not everyone in Texas has turned into some sort of Evangelical Fundamentalist who insists on believing that you cannot believe in God and support Evolutionary sciences at the same time.

What's great about the Teach Them Science it addresses the supposed controversy and highlights much of the mis-information about evolution

History shows that creationism and its alleged weaknesses with evolution are inseparable. The alleged weaknesses are creationism. They are false, and to teach them is to teach creationism.

The effort to invent and promote false weaknesses began with the Fundamentalist movement of American Protestantism in the 1910's. For most of the history of alleging weaknesses, anti-evolutionists have tried to replace evolution with some form of creationism. It's only recently that creationism has focused on teaching just “strengths and weaknesses” with evolution, while claiming not to want to teach creationism. Curiously, the Texas State Board of Education may have invented this approach in 1989.

It's a great site. While I really like Talk.Origins, sometimes it gets pretty technical on some of its refutations of many creationism arguments. This site is much simpler for many people to understand and tends to be short and sweet. So my suggestion, especially when someone shoots you an argument you haven't heard before, is check out this site. If you need more ammo, pop over to Talk.Origins.

Look at its advice for reporters! I bet Lauri Lebo would approve of this one :

Reporters: How to Avoid a Trap

Reporters admirably try to avoid taking sides in political battles, but they often fall into a trap set by anti-evolutionists. Reporters can help by avoiding this trap and reporting fairly. It's simple:

Say alleged weaknesses, not “weaknesses”

There are two sides to the political conflict. One side says that evolution suffers "weaknesses," and the other side says that it does not, that evolution is strongly confirmed science. But reporters frequently say this: ”One side wants the weaknesses taught and the other side doesn't.” This is one-sided reporting, as it tells people that there are weaknesses that could be taught. Reporters should instead say, “One side alleges weaknesses with evolution and wants them taught, while the other side says the alleged weaknesses do not survive scientific scrutiny and are false.”