The Battle Over Creationism in Texas

I missed this story in the New York Times yesterday, but the battle over creationism in Texas is heating up again. Clearly, the implications for this debate are big, since Texas is the largest producer of school textbooks in the country.

A while back, Texas adopted some weird language that directed teachers to explore the "strengths and weaknesses" of a scientific theory (read: Darwin's theory of evolution). The problem is that this language has nothing to do with science and ignores the fact that scientific theory is very strong and has lots of evidence. Basically, it is the creationists way of attempting to undermine facts. It's true that most teachers ignore the "strengths and weaknesses" doctrine when teaching science, but it seems weird that we would teach something that is unscientific rather than teaching evidence and the scientific method. No wonder we're lagging in science and math when we're struggling just to allow science to be taken seriously by schoolchildren and teachers.