Thursday, August 24, 2006

MEDIA PARANOIA, OR IT MUST BE AN CHRISTIAN PLOT

The New York Times has hit the panic button because "evolutionary biology" was omitted from a government list of acceptable majors for federal grants:
The omission is inadvertent, said Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, which administers the grants. “There is no explanation for it being left off the list,” Ms. McLane said. “It has always been an eligible major.”

Another spokeswoman, Samara Yudof, said evolutionary biology would be restored to the list, but as of last night it was still missing.

And what possibly could be the cause of such an omission? Well it must be creationists, of course!
That the omission occurred at all is worrying scientists concerned about threats to the teaching of evolution.

One of them, Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University, said he learned about it from someone at the Department of Education, who got in touch with him after his essay on the necessity of teaching evolution appeared in The New York Times on Aug. 15. Dr. Krauss would not name his source, who he said was concerned about being publicly identified as having drawn attention to the matter....

Dr. Krauss said the omission would be “of great concern” if evolutionary biology had been singled out for removal, or if the change had been made without consulting with experts on biology.

Yawn. Tempest in a teapot. If there's any plot it's on the part of the evolutionists (including the NYT) to promote hysteria based on what is most likely a mistake that amounts to a typo. To read the article one would imagine that no one could possibly study genetics at all without doing so in the context of Darwinian evolution.

1 comment:

Ken said...

Does evolutionary biology serve any useful purpose