Friday, August 25, 2006

More Stealth From W & Co.

Yesterday's NYTimes has a very disturbing article: "Evolution Major Vanishes From Approved Federal List."

Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students.

[...]

[T]he evolutionary biology sub-subsection is missing from a list of "fields of study" on the National Smart Grant list -- there is an empty space between line 26.1302 (marine biology and biological oceanography) and line 26.1304 (aquatic biology/limnology).

Despite protestations by spokesdrones from the Department of Education, this smells exactly like an intentional deletion. The one bright spot is that the agent was obvious clueless about editing documents.

So, you got your theocracy, you got your secrecy, and you got your incompetence. Just another day inside the Bush bubble.

Dr. Lawrence Krauss, whose NYT essay about the teaching of evolution I recommended a while back, put it more politely:

Removing that one major is not going to make the nation stupid, but if this really was removed, specifically removed, then I see it as part of a pattern to put ideology over knowledge. And, especially in the Department of Education, that should be abhorred.

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