As you may have seen over at Pharyngula, we've got some creationists running for the school board out here. That's not a good thing, but a few different events over the last couple of weeks have given me a lot of hope for this state.
Right now, I'm not very worried about the anti-evolution school board candidates - at least not the two that have made their positions known (Henry Hoeft and Brian Kessler). Right now, they are two of the fifteen candidates running for three "no departmental residency" seats on the board. The field will be narrowed from fifteen to six after the primary election on Saturday. There are a total of 13 seats on the board, and the current board has not demonstrated much of a desire to screw with science education.
One of the reasons that the BoE out here hasn't been screwing with science education lately has to do with the excellent scientific community we've got here. They did try to mess with evolution back in mid-2001, but the pro-science turnout at the public hearing was absolutely amazing. Pro-science testimony outnumbered the pseudoscientific by a huge margin, and the public opposition to the proposed changes was so huge that the motion was defeated unanimously - not even the original sponsor voted in favor of the measure.
Given this environment, the presence of anti-science candidates on the school board ballot is definitely concerning, and it's absolutely something to watch, but it's not all that alarming. I saw the article in Honolulu Weekly that's linked above, and I made a note to watch the outcome of the primary and see what happened to the anti-science candidates. I didn't do more because in the past I've had little luck in getting scientists to get motivated about something that isn't a clear and present danger. I've got to admit that I haven't tried too much lately - my last real attempts were about three years ago, when I was still an undergrad in the department, and I rapidly became cynical and stopped trying to get people to preemptively care.
Fortunately, not everyone shares my cynicism, and (also fortunately) it turns out that I was very much wrong about the likelihood of scientists caring about distant threats.
As PZ mentioned, a couple of local scientists who are regular readers of his blog saw the newspaper profiles of the anti-science candidates and emailed him for advice. Paul was kind enough to suggest that they get in touch with me, since I'm a little closer to the (geographic) action than he is. It took me a little while to get over my chagrin that people in a lab affiliated with my department found out about my interest in the topic via some dude with a blog in Minnesota, but aside from that, it was really good to know that there are other local scientists paying attention to the issue.
Yesterday, not long after PZ's post went up, some his correspondents and I met for lunch near campus. We discussed the school board race, and the really fantastic legwork that they'd already done in getting information from some of the other candidates, and in drafting a letter to the editor for the local paper, and we also discussed longer-term options.
Right now, there doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in getting a group together that would focus on evolution education issues out here. But there's a huge amount of interest in getting a group together that would look at a wide range of science and policy issues - something like 90% of the people I've talked to so far would be willing to get involved in a broad-based group. WIth any luck, we'll be able to get such a group up and running soon.
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