“A hopeful society has institutions of science and medicine that do not cut ethical corners and that recognize the matchless value of every life.
Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms; creating or implanting embryos for experiments; creating human-animal hybrids; and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.
Human life is a gift from our creator, and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale.”
Former president George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 31, 2006
I’ve always liked that quote, especially the part about creating human-animal hybrids. I’ve been facilitating the mass production of human-animal hybrids since 2000–thousands of pounds of them at this point. But others are way ahead of me–the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, for example, has been pumping ‘em out at the commercial scale since I was in grade school. But I don’t think that former president Dubya really understood that when he made the above remarks. I don’t think he really understands what “human-animal hybrids” are. I suspect he meant he’d been reading too much science fiction and got really emotionally involved in one of those stories where innocent humans are force-fed wolf genes as part of a secret government plot to create super-soldiers. I figure Dubya has no problem suspending his disbelief when it comes to the idea of the government doing stuff behind its citizen’s backs in the name of national security. It seems likely that he’s absolutely unaware that all the insulin, for instance, that has been distributed in the United States since 2006 has been derived from human-animal hybrids, and was the majority of it for a long time before that.
The reason I’m contemplating this fairly old quote anew is the most recent installment via the Texas Board of Education of the ongoing drama that is the attempt to teach only science theories in science classrooms. People like Dubya really can’t cope with science at all. In the majority of cases, and certainly in his case, that’s because they haven’t taken a single science class since whatever general crap they were forced to sign up for in high school to obtain the absolute minimum number of science credits required in their state to graduate, or possibly they copped into one of those “Physics is Phun!” courses that fulfill similiar minimum science credit graduation requirements in college. (I am so not making up that course name, by the way.) But that’s not always or exclusively the case.
Back to Texas:
Dueling theories of how the universe was created got a split decision Friday night from the Texas Board of Education, which required examination of “all sides of scientific evidence” in new science standards, but rejected language requiring teachers to teach the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories.
The debate pitted proponents of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution against supporters of religion-based theories of intelligent design, or creationism.
“Science loses. Texas loses, and the kids lose because of this,” board chairman Don McLeroy, a creationist, told the Dallas Morning News.
“A creationist.” Is that some kind of career, now..? A small bit of Googling reveals that Creationist McLeroy is actually Dr. McLeroy, a dentist, and got a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Texas A&M. Now, I don’t know what’s changed exactly in the past several decades since he attended college, but while electrical engineering degrees are not pure-sciences heavy, they do require a bit of college-level science courses, namely some freshman- and sophomore-level physics and chemistry. So we can’t really assume in his case a lack of real exposure to the knowledge that the world, not to mention the rest of the universe, isn’t made of magic and senseless acts of beauty. (Maybe that scared him off the electrical engineering track and onto dentistry, though–that’d make sense.)
But really, I can sort of empathize. The clear thread running through the anti-teaching-science-only-in-science-class camp is that knowing too much about the world and all the things in it from a science standpoint destroys the mystical and terrifying awe of what could possibly be the cause of rainbows, tsunamis and how a real live baby pops out of a woman’s body nine months after a man shoots some stuff from the pee hole in his penis that resembles nothing more than papier-mache glue into her vagina. The more you learn about how and why things work, first at the macroscopic level and then the microscopic level and even beyond, the less mysteriously gorgeous those little everyday miracles start to look. In other words, the less and less likely you are to believe the explanations and rationales for these things provided by the Holy Bible instead.
And in our public schools? Religion doesn’t get taught. Only, for example, biology gets taught. One might adopt the line of reasoning that, since public schools are required by law to remain silent about religion, then the only input that children receive on the subject is from their parents, whereas the school’s version of biology has no such monopoly–parents are free to instruct their children in biology as well as religion. However, the fact that the deck is already stacked in religion’s favor this way doesn’t sway these folks–they don’t want their children being taught biology in school at all if the answers that biology provides about the world around us disagree with the ones the Bible does. Since they usually can’t swing quite that, they strive to have the gaps and unsureties, no matter how major or minor, in scientific theories dwelt on and debated in the biology classroom. This, they say, is teaching the controversy.
You know, I’m willing to buy into this. Really, I am. I would absolutely go for this, if we get to do the same thing with Intelligent Design, which huge swathes of the folks of McLeroy’s ilk swear up and down isn’t religion and therefore, should not be a problem in public schools. I recommend we institute a mandatory new class for all high schoolers, that must be taken before they can graduate, and call it Evolution and Intelligent Design: Teaching the Controversy! The theory of evolution would be thoroughly explored, what it can explain as well as what it can’t…and the idea of an Intelligent Designer would also be explored, and what it can explain as well as what it can’t. The two course textbooks could be Of Pandas and People for the evolution controversy side, and The Blind Watchmaker for the intelligent design controversy si—
…yeah, like any of those people would ever let their kids anywhere near that book.
But if they’re willing to deal, I am. 
I leave you with this thought from our beloved Onion: The Theory of Intelligent Falling
We were taught the controversy in school, but only very briefly. For instance, we weren’t told that it had persisted beyond the 19th century.
Hey! Just cuz Bush was against human-animal hybrids doesn’t mean he wasn’t all for supersoldiers!
The clear thread running through the anti-teaching-science-only-in-science-class camp is that knowing too much about the world and all the things in it from a science standpoint destroys the mystical and terrifying awe of what could possibly be the cause of rainbows, tsunamis and how a real live baby pops out of a woman’s body nine months after a man shoots some stuff from the pee hole in his penis that resembles nothing more than papier-mache glue into her vagina. The more you learn about how and why things work, first at the macroscopic level and then the microscopic level and even beyond, the less mysteriously gorgeous those little everyday miracles start to look.
This just makes me sad.
The notion that someone couldn’t look at the long history of humanity’s desire to know and understand wtf is going on out there, and see glory and awe and wonder in every tiny thing we learn. The thought that a person can look at a rainbow and know that it’s the result of light from the sun refracting through a bazillion teensy water-droplet prisms, and not see both how fucking amazing it is that nature puts this show on whether we’re there to observe it or not, and how fucking amazing it is that we can marvel at the beauty and hope to understand what causes it. The notion that more knowledge could possibly make things less gorgeous. It spits in the eye of truth, of beauty, and of wonder.
That fills me with sadness.
Because godsdammit it’s amazing. It’s amazing that people keep asking questions we can’t answer. It’s amazing that we never stop wondering “How does that work?” “What makes that happen?” “What happens if I …?” “What put us here?” It’s amazing that we keep finding the holes in our own theories, testing them, poking at them, refining them, and arriving at successively better answers. It’s amazing that with only our own wits and wonder, we’ve learned so much, and that there’s so much more for us to learn. And the stuff we’ve learned! Chameleons and chromatophores, chemicals and catalysts, natural selection and nuclear physics! All that stuff is positively exploding with pure, unadulterated WOW.
It makes me sad that people need to take refuge in old stories, and can’t see the wonder in the ones we’re learning.