SOUTH CAROLINA'S MAMMOTH PROBLEM

One of the state's mammoth problems, anyway.

This is one of those stories where a plucky, smart elementary school student -- in this case an eight-year-old third grader named Olivia McConnell -- gets caught up in the sheer excitement of science that she writes a letter to a public figure, seeking to enlist official aid in celebrating and sharing the joy of learning.

Good for Olivia! We have always had smart and fearless children among us, but we've never had enough of them, and we never can.

In Olivia's case, the cause was getting her state, South Carolina, to designate a state fossil, something that more than three dozen other states have done. (Not, oddly enough -- or maybe not -- North Carolina, the state where I was born and lived for much of my life. The state fossil for Virginia, where I live now, is a fossil scallop.

Olivia's fascination with -- and obvious study of -- paleontology led her to nominate theo fill the role of South Carolina State Fossil. As she pointed out in her letter to her representatives in both the South Carolina House and Senate, mammoth teeth found by slaves in a South Carolina swamp in 1725 were the first vertebrate fossils found in North America.

Impressed with the letter -- which closed:"your friend, Olivia" -- the representatives filed bills in their respective chambers, legislation which would designate the Columbian mammoth (a less hirsute species than the more familiar woolly mammoth) as the official state fossil.

Early this year, as the bills worked their way through committee, Olivia was reported to be both pleased with the results her initiative was producing, and tracking the progress of the bills through the legislative progress, adding knowledge of the workings of government to her knowledge of the workings of the past. You can't stop a kid like Olivia from learning, and who would want to?

Some members of the South Carolina legislature, evidently.

Over the course of the last few weeks she's been able to add lessons about another kind of fossil -- fossilized beliefs and the walking fossils who promote them and seek to inflict them on their constituencies (and everyone else)-- to her her arsenal of knowledge.  

The simple and straightforward official fossil bill ran into unexpected -- although probably it shouldn't have been a surprise -- resistance from one of those proponents of fossilized beliefs, State Senator Kevin Bryant insisted that the following words be added to the bill:

"And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, the cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good."

As I said, probably should have seen this coming.

While the bulk of the biblical verse was ultimate removed, the senator did manage to have the bill amended so that each mention of the word "mammoth" included the phrase, "as created on the Sixth Day with the other beasts of the field." The amended version passed the Senate, and is now, evidently, back in committee for reconciliation with the House bill, which passed without language referencing a creator.

Among the many distressing things about this story and its implications is the thought that Kevin Bryant is hardly alone in feeling it appropriate for legislation to include biblical explanations for scientific facts. One wonders what his response would be to the facts, as paleontology knows them,  of the Columbian mammoths' extinction, some 7,800 years ago. The youngest known fossil of the species is 7,800 years or so old, and was found in Tennessee (a state that does have an official fossil -- a Cretaceous bivalve -- and evidently managed to designate it as such with recourse to biblical justification).

Deeply held beliefs and the faiths upon which they rest can be lovely things. But to inject those personal beliefs, and their creation myths, into legislation is not only inappropriate, it's wrong, and it's dangerous.

Choosing to believe in a creator who worked wonders in six days is one thing -- insisting that that creator be credited in a state law is something else altogether. It represents the same sort of thinking that leads some legislators and other officials -- some of them in South Carolina for sure, but plenty of them throughout the rest of the country, too -- to insist on teaching evolution as unproven, or as an insufficient explanation for how life developed.

Wearing only slightly less fundamentalist clothing is the Intelligent Design nonsense, which some seek to have taught as science, proving that they either bend the nature of science to suit their own personal beliefs (and the faiths on which those beliefs rest)-- or their inability to cope with or to comprehend real evolutionary science.

This sort of thinking -- that beliefs should be taught not only alongside knowledge, but also as knowledge and, frankly, in opposition to real knowledge -- is becoming all too common, and risks becoming a, you will pardon the expression, mammoth threat to science education, not to mention the role and posture of science as reflected in legislation.

I have no idea what Olivia McConnell believes about the origins of life and their development, nor is it any of my business. But I do believe that her earnest, polite, and well-reasoned  attempt to recognize and officially acknowledge a real fossil deserved better than to run into, and possibly be run over by, legislators who think that their beliefs are the only beliefs, that their faith and their religious text is absolute truth.

Too bad it's the mammoth, a noble creature, that's extinct, and not the anti-scientific attitudes of some decidedly less than noble legislators.