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.
 

BILL NYE AND TONIGHT'S EVOLUTION DEBATE -- RIGHT GUY, WRONG STAGE

So tonight Bill Nye, the Science Guy (and a good guy he is) will be debating Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum. The topic: Evolution versus Creation.

Why?

For reasoning people, the matter is beyond debate. Evolution over time -- and the understanding that the  theory itself is constantly refined and thus more clearly understood over time as a result of scientific investigation -- is a fact. It is, in fact, the central fact of life on earth. I am confident that we will discover when (and if) we ever find any, that evolution is the central fact of life elsewhere in the universe. In the scientific community, and among the scientifically educated populace, when it comes to the validitry of evolution, there is no debate.

So, again why have one?

I think that Bill Nye, whom I admire, and whom I met a few times when I was editing OMNI, holds a deep and serious concern for the state oif scientific education and scientific literacy in this country. And he is right -- this is, after all, the country that is home to the Creation Museum, which uses all of the tools of museum display and presentation to show its quarter of a million annual visitors the "truth" of Biblical Creation.

The Science Guy's chances of persuading any believers in that fundamentalist "truth" of the facts of evolution as it is understood it are small to nonexistent. Biblical fundamentalism does not welcome, and often does not permit, debate. Believers in absolute truths are limited by the nature of their beliefs -- rational argument does not apply to them, because their beliefs do not rest upon anything like the rational system of thought that is the fundament of real science.  

But Bill Nye is a showman -- and a good one -- as well as a champion of science education, and I suspect he thinks that tonight's debate will be a good show.

I fear that he is going to be proved wrong, no matter how clearly and effectively he sets out his evidence and makes his points.

The debate is taking place at Ham's facility, which Ham calls a museum, as if it were one, and at Ham's invitation.

By giving this palace of foolishness whatever credibility as a venue for rational discussion his presence confers, Nye risks accomplishing the opposite of what he is setting out to do.

The investment, the architecture, the technology, the care with which the crazinesses of this so-called, self-titled, museum are presented in the same manner as real science museums present their own real, and actually evidence-based, exhibits all serve to paint creationism, and belief in the Biblical account of creation as a scientifically legitimate exploration of our past.

Children, one can easily imagine, would love the place, and come away convinced that the nonsense it contains is a valid explanation of the world which they will inherit.

And because the trappings and the cosmetics and the stagecraft of the place are effective with the gullible, and because as much as a third of our population is gullible, the prospect of Bill Nye failing to make points with the facility's founder on the founder's stage is not pleasant.

But one wishes Nye well. He is fighting the good fight for the cause of science and rationalism, of evidence and investigation and the fact of evolution.

He's just fighting it on the wrong stage tonight.

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NOTE: The debate will be streamed live tonight, but I am not providing a link. In order to view the stream you have to give your email address, and it';s unclear who is collecting those addresses, and what will be done with them. The link is easy enough to find on your own, of course.

If you do visit the signup page for the live stream, don't miss the DVDs and other capture of the debate being shilled across the bottom of the page. Some money is going to be made from tonight's event, and I hope that, at least, Bill Nye gets some of it.