Is our children learning? Part II

A while back I had an item on Dr. Don McLeroy, the fundie dentist and Chairman of the Texas State Board of Education. Dr. McLeroy (again, a dentist) believes that the earth is 6,000 years old. In his ongoing crusade to keep Texas children ignorant by infusing their science textbooks with Christianist mythology, Dr. McLeroy has again garnered national headlines in the NYT and elsewhere.

The scientific evidence demonstrating that the earth is billions of years old is, of course, abundant. Mr. McLeroy's evidence? It comes solely from a single book, a collaborative effort by some folks who -- though they may have been of above-average intelligence -- were by all appearances exceedingly superstitious and in any event lived hundreds and thousands of years before Copernicus or Newton were born and, indeed, before there was any such thing as the scientific method. I'll allow you to weigh for yourself the relative credibility which should be allocated to these competing sources.

But a commenter on this blog post asks a good question: "maybe the good dentist would like a chapter dealing with the tooth fairy".