Rationality (in the guise of high school biology) is on the march. With wins in Pennsylvania and, more recently, in the Florida science standards real science appears to be making headway. After an expensive (for the state) lawsuit and a loss in drafting new science standards for Florida the Discovery Institute seems to be changing its tactics a bit.

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Last week, Brendan claimed that creationism is not a huge issue in the upcoming election. He’s right, insomuch as no one is talking about it. But Brendan is wrong, because a candidate’s stance on creationism reflects his or her stance on science and that is a very important thing indeed.

When I first brought up creationism in my little spat with Thomas I offered that we need to reject intelligent design (for the sake of any argument made with me regarding creationism, the terms “creationism” and “intelligent design” are equivalent, until demonstrated otherwise) because our country is falling behind in science and math. I’ll admit that this was a bit of a red herring, my distaste of creationism runs quite a bit deeper than that.

You see, science is based on a small number of very important concepts: falsifiability, testability, repeatability and honesty. Sadly, cdesign proponentsists don’t understand that last one, which leads them to ignore the others. Creationism discounts legitimate scientific findings out of hand, proposes that claiming that evolution is wrong is a scientific theory in itself (hint: it’s not) and presents an ever rising (and completely irrational) bar for evolutionary biology to jump over. At the same time, creationism does not include any experiments (that prove its ideas - proposed experiments that no cdesign proponentsist has ever tried don’t count) that can be performed in a lab, cannot be proven false and, really, doesn’t offer any explanation that helps us understand our world or predict what may happen in the future.

The thing that really bugs me about creationism is that it ignores all of the evidence that we have for evolutionary biology. The fossil record, differences in speciation across vast distances and countless experiments all point to evolution as the driving force behind the adaptation of every species that has ever existed - and will ever exist - to the changing conditions of its environment. Evolution is an elegant, beautiful description of how life develops (at least on earth). As an asiide, I highly recommend the Nova program Intelligent Design On Trial as a good, basic overview of some of the evidence behind evolution (and against intelligent design).

But the worst part about the recent outbreak of creationism in the United States is its insistence that everyone else has to agree with it. Monotheism has always bugged me for this reason; I find it hard to insist that my god is the right god, and someone else’s is the wrong god. It’s especially difficult for me to cope with different sects of a religion that disagree on the minutiae of dogma or who should be the successor to a particularly important prophet. But that’s all fine, you can have your religion and I will have my (no) religion; I’m not (yet) as militant as Dawkins or Hitchens. As long as you let me be I will do the same to you.

As soon, however, as people start imposing their religions beliefs on others I get upset. That’s what creationism in our schools is: imposing religious belief on other people. Well, that and just plain dead wrong. Our country and our tradition is founded on letting others practice (or choose not to practice) religion as they choose.

Back to the relevance to the current presidential race. Last May, when the Republicans had their first debate, three of the candidates indicated that they do not believe in evolution. Granted, two of the men in question don’t seem to be going anywhere in the polls, but one of them, Governor Huckabee, is in the middle of a surge. Let me say this for the record: Evolution is not something to be believed in. Sure, you can reject all of the evidence behind evolution, but that doesn’t make you less stupid just because it’s for religious reasons. The claimed holes in the fossil record are not there; the claimed scientific debate over evolution does not exist. Evolution is accepted, by consensus, in the scientific community because it does an excellent job of describing biological development, not because of a vast conspiracy against the Christian faith.

Rejecting evolution, then, is a demonstration of an individual’s willingness to ignore the evidence presented to him or her and, instead, to base his or her actions on conjecture. We’ve seen where that has gotten us during the current presidency. This country does not need a president who acts on belief. We need a president who logically analyzes real evidence and takes rational actions based on the facts.

Don’t know if anybody out there caught this, but humans are evolving at much faster speeds than previously expected. It turns out the fast globalizing, flattening world isn’t producing a more similar race, but the continental divides (and in some cases, ethnic/religious) have people evolving differently depending on where they live.

Pretty amazing stuff. Even Mike Huckabee might find it interesting…

(image credited to Joseph Di Nicola)

Shifting gears, since it’s December it must mean… appropriations time!!!! And with that comes massive omnibus spending bills that are loaded with lots of stuff nobody really cares about or need. These big, stinky bills are usually not overly difficult to ram through Congress once all the chips are down and the clock is ticking on the year (egads, somebody might lose some vacation time if they don’t finish!). Every so often, Congress is forced to pass a continuing resolution because they can’t work out a compromise on new appropriation legislation… so they have to just continue the previous year’s. This happened last year… mainly because Congress fully flipped for the first time in 12 years and the Republicans weren’t about to let a spending bill go through right after a devastating loss.

Well, that’s fine (and to be expected), but this year they’re having major problems again. They’ve spent the whole year haggling, arguing, and ahem… OBSTRUCTING. But when the chips are down (hooray for a repetitive cliche!), they pass spending bills because it’s their bread and butter. Not this year, not yet at least. Gleaning from the media reports, it seems that agreements had been reached and they were on the verge of passing next year’s spending bills.

But wait! Republicans can’t let that happen!! No no no, they need to show how weak the Dems are… and the Dems are usually more than willing to comply. Thankfully, David Obey, chairman of the Appropriations committee and man with steel huevos, is standing firm and giving his counterparts the proverbial omnibus middle finger. This can lead to two possible conclusions… one, the appropriations process gets deadlocked and we’re forced to endure another continuing resolution which means that for a WHOLE CONGRESS, the Dems have had Republican spending bills on the books. The other requires the majority party standing firm and shoving this bill down the obstructionist’s throats.

It’s obvious which conclusion I’m rooting for.

I always approach Baptists with caution. Growing up a Presbyterian in Alabama makes you rather defensive in fending them off when they want to make sure you are “saved” and don’t get it when you explain that Presbyterians just don’t think of things exactly like that. Of course, the stuffy Presbyterians could stand to learn a thing or two about passionate faith from the Baptists, but that is neither here or there in this discussion, because I think I have found a Baptist I can trust, and he is in politics of all places, where one should never, ever put trust in someone. More surprisingly, he is a Republican, and his economic beliefs that led him into that party are where I disagree highly with him, but of all candidates out there for the Republican nomination, Huckabee is the right man for the job. He might be a bit more of a “moralist” than I would like, but you can’t fault the guy for holding true to his beliefs (unlike 21st century Massachusetts candidates tend to do). However, while he may be from the so-called “fundamentalist” camp, he doesn’t seem to be such a fundamentalist. From what I can tell, the guy’s faith led him to understand the necessity of compassion and did his best to inject compassion – not hatred – into Arkansas’ laws while he was governor.

Huckabee did what he could to improve the lives of immigrants while governor, which in the long run will benefit America as a whole much more than trying to deport 12,000,000 million hard working people from our country. (By the way, where are we going to look for a logistical game plan for forcibly moving this many people across a continent? Hitler? Stalin? Amin? Mugabe?) He tried to give the children of illegals a hand up to success, which I thought was what America was all about. Of course, as I write this, Huckabee has apparently toughened up on his stance to do some pandering himself, which is almost as disappointing as his belief that capital punishment has a place in the US. In all honesty, I think he knows better than this in his heart, and I am disappointed in him for not standing by his beliefs there.

While we are on the topic, I would like to point out that Huckabee is not, as another S&P blogger says, a “new earth creationist.” I typically thought such snap beliefs and litmus tests for candidates were held for the Jerry Falwells of the world, but I guess I was wrong. I believe God created the heavens and the earth. There is not a doubt in my mind about that. Does that make me a “new earth creationist?” No. Why? Because no where in the Bible does it say “On the first day, which was 24 hours long with the sun rising at 5:58 a.m. and setting at 7:32 p.m., God created the…” Who are we to limit God to our time frame? Who are we to limit God to what our minds can comprehend – or even what our science can explain? I believe God created the world, and I also see no reason not to accept the prevailing scientific theories regarding the Big Bang and evolution. Why should I not think that one of God’s days could have lasted a 100 million or 100 billion years? Some might want to limit God to their petty minds and say, “The earth has to be only 6,000 years old because that is the way I read my translation of the Bible and that’s how it fits in my time frame,” but I think that is very short-sighted. And, as I understand it, Huckabee feels the same way, according to his standard line for that question: “I believe God created the heavens and the Earth… I wasn’t there when he did it, so how he did it, I don’t know.”

But, getting back to the presidential race, which has absolutely nothing to do with some petty human argument over something as awesome as the beginning of the world… when it comes to the pandering fields of has-beens, paranoids and demagogues running for the Republican nomination, Mike Huckabee stands out like a shining star compared to the rest. We don’t need and can’t have another insider running the country if a Republican wins the election. The current Harvard-and-Yale-educated-son-of–a-former-president-vice-president-and-CIA-director-who-resurrected-the-cabinets-of-Nixon-Reagan-and-Bush-all-at-one-time president (otherwise known as the ultimate conglomerated insider) has screwed things up worse than any one could have imagined seven years ago. Not even the ridicu-liberal wing nuts thought it could get this bad.

• Not having an insider means no John McCain, who would make a solid secretary of defense. Despite holding to his morals on many things (McCain-Feingold, for example), he is way to hawkish than America needs right now. If John McCain ran the country, we would get into WWIII before his first term ended. The SoD role might be just right for him, because it keeps him restrained under the president. That is, if the president stands his ground, and Huckabee – who does not seem like the kind of guy who would start a war at the drop of a hat (like Bush did, and like I think Giuliani and Romney and Thompson would) – might fill that role nicely.

• Romney and Giuliani are jokes. Watching them stand there during the You Tube debate and try to make each sound more and more evil for ever speaking/looking at an illegal immigrant was just pathetic pandering. Giuliani knows he wouldn’t be on that stage if it were not for the millions of amazing people in New York that happen to be immigrants, and Romney (despite his flaws) is too brilliant of a financial mind to be pandering on an issue like immigration. He knows immigrants’ value in the economy, and it disgusts me that he wants to pander to that ugly wing of the Republican Party and abandon his Wall St. roots. He would make a good secretary of the treasury, but nothing higher.

• Who else is running? Oh, that’s right, no one else adds any value to the already dumbed-down discourse. Moving on…

Huckabee also took on an important issue that we need to pay more attention to: FAT PEOPLE. He lost over 100 pounds and became a marathoner! Fat people get sick and are a drain on our economy, an embarrassing waste of our wealth in our country, and set a poor example for our children – leading to a type 2 diabetes epidemic. Am I prejudice towards fat people? Yes, I am. Am I a “weightist”? Yes, I am that, too. Do I feel bad about it? No, because I would probably pack on a few pounds too if I didn’t get out and exercise and watch what I eat. There are few things I would rather do than sit on my couch and eat dougnuts, ice cream and fried chicken all the time, but I’m not a fat slob, so I don’t. If Americans simply quit drinking soda and eating so much fat and sugar, we’d all be better off. I generally don’t complain about taxes, but I have little sympathy for fat people who drain Medicare and Medicaid because they can’t resist eating that last drumstick. With a Huckabee presidency, the national dialogue about fat people could be elevated.

As governor, Huckabee also came up with a creative way of working to lower the divorce rate in divorce-happy Arkansas, with his covenant marriages, which allows couples to opt into a marriage that does not allow for divorce without serious counseling beforehand. It’s not forcing anyone into anything people don’t want, and even the ACLU is ok with it! Even though a Baptist pastor came up with the idea! Gosh, someone might even think the ACLU isn’t as anti-Christian as the Christian Coalition makes them out to be! Who would have thought they could be fair and want the best for the country?

So, from one of the tree-hugging hippies, I disgree again. We need someone better than John McCain, we need Mike Huckabee.