"But she said evolution should be taught as a theory, not as a fact. "

The school board candidates in Brunswick, NC are squaring off over creationism and the local community is getting involved. Anna Ribeiro has swept out into the community and found out what people think is going on.

It seems that the candidates vary in their positions. Some, like Shirley Babson want evolution "taught as a theory and not a fact." Apparently, she hasn't taken a biology class lately or read the evolution chapter in most biology textbooks lately. Evolution is both the fact of modified descent and the predictive and explanatory theory of evolution. Sometimes it's very easy to see why scientists just wear themselves out trying to deal with this nonsense because it's almost always the same argument and same misunderstanding and the same willful nonsense that refuses to see what the theory of evolution claims. But I pontificate too much.

The other school board members vary in their support or rejection of evolution. One candidate, Christy Judah, writes, “I’m feeling really uncomfortable with some of these responses." As she should. They are anti-scientific, anti-educational, and anti-constitutional. If acted upon, they are legal trainwrecks in the making. Ribeiro writes as much by highlighting the recent Dover and Kansas dustups and Edwards v. Aguillard in which the Supreme Court found so-called "scientific creationism" unconstitutional.

The article pulls a nice touch by finding that some local biology students are promoting evolution as science and consonant with their beliefs. I don't particularly agree with them, but at least we can share the understanding that evolution is unequivocally real. Metaphysical fights are for some other time. Monique Weddle, a biology student at UNC Wilmington is working to promote evolution.

“You can’t deny something that’s scientifically proven,” Weddle said of evolution, adding, “I still believe very strongly that God created the world, but you can’t disprove evolution.”

There are a lot of scientists who both believe in God and accept that life evolves, said Marcel Van Tuinen, an evolutionary biologist at UNCW and one of Weddle’s former professors. A group of Brunswick County parents showed up at a lecture on evolution at the university last month, concerned about the county school board’s talk of teaching creationism, Van Tuinen said.

We will see how this fight carries on. I don't know how much more the state's board or department of education can do on this matter besides dissuading current and potential board members from enacting a creationist policy. Let's hope that the board members haven't bought into former Dover board member Bill Buckingham's lunatic distrust of the media so common with many of our ultra-conservative fellow citizens. If they have, and see Ribeiro's article as just some partisan shot, they may entrench themselves. On the other hand, they might behave pragmatically and pass on it, save themselves a lot of time and legal fees, and let science educators actually teach good evolutionary science.