Thursday, August 18, 2011

This Texan is a raving loony

Rick Perry (who could well become the next US president) is an appallingly dumb guy, with a big mouth and a tiny intellect, who knows fuck-all about science.

We knew that already. What we didn't know, until this morning, is that this idiot has an amazingly fuzzy conception of what is currently being taught to school kids in his home state. In New Hampshire, a little boy asked Perry what he thought of evolution. Here's Perry's reaction: "It's a theory that's out there. It's got some gaps in it. In Texas, we teach both Creationism and evolution." Well, just about everything in Perry's reply happens to be disastrously off the mark—that's to say, wrong—in a way that blows up in his silly face.

• The first two sentences—about evolution being a theory with gaps in it—are so ridiculous that we need not waste time in demolishing them.

• Things become fascinating, on the other hand, when Perry asserts—off the top of his silly head—that Creationism is being taught in Texas. Everybody knows that, in educational environments, fundamentalist Creationism of the primitive Genesis kind went out of fashion long ago. It was replaced by a pseudo-scientific thing known as Intelligent Design. Genuine scientists repeat that Intelligent Design is nothing more than Creationism served up deceptively in a new sauce… and Perry's words to the schoolboy add weight to this accusation.

• Perry is totally wrong, however, when he attempts to make the boy believe that Texan schools propose textbooks that present an alternative to evolution, no matter whether it's called Creationism or Intelligent Design. The only teaching materials authorized in Texan schools today are based exclusively upon evolution.

How is it possible that a great nation such as the USA, with its vast resources in the domain of scientific knowledge, can give birth to, and encourage the ascension of, a shitty gutter-level specimen of shallow stupidity such as Perry, who doesn't even know what's happening in his home-state schools?

No comments:

Post a Comment