As Darwin Day approaches, we are facing an increasing assault by right wing extremists on Darwin's theory. Kansas is one of the big battlegrounds, of course, and it is depressing watching the battle unfold.

A recent issue of Science covered the upcoming Kansas state school board elections and let me tell you, it really is embarassing to read about this shit happening in 2006 America!

In the past I have written about the right wing's attack on science, including the Intelligent Deception Lobby and Lobby of Denial and urged you to lobby for restoration of some science funding that Bush has cut. Well, here is further evidence of a right wing attack on science...and a top scientist who is sick of it.

Not long ago I wrote a diary on the validity of global warming. I followed that up with a description of how the right wing in America is attacking science, with an emphasis on the "Intelligent Deception" movement. I now want to put the former in the context of the latter and discuss the "Lobby of Denial," a concerted effort to interfere with genunine science in studying climate change.

Intelligent Design as a scientific theory is an impossibility. Science requires any theory to be subject to one rule: it must be falsifiable, in other words to be science a theory may be wrong.  Intelligent Design, with its reliance on magic, miracles and supernatural intervention cannot be proven false. Reliance on God to fill the gaps in material knowledge is NOT science, it is metaphysical philosophy. If this subject must be taught in our public schools, teach it as philosophy, or teach it in the humanities along with other mythologies that ascribe creation to the divine.

Recently I posted a diary on global warming which drew some offline interest from global warming deniers which I covered in the comments to that story. I don't know much about those who attacked me offline, and I don't much care. Whether they intend it or not, they are part of a right wing attack on science that I recently wrote about on Daily Kos but which seems worth updating for the benefit of Political Cortex.

It started when I was reading a biography of Darwin and had just come to the part where the publication of Origin of the Species has produced a huge religion vs. science debate at an Oxford scientific conference. I was struck by how far we have come since then only to see reactionary forces pulling us back towards willfull ignorance. My anger at the willfull ignorance of a wide section of American culture is what led to this article.

In C. M. Kornbluth's 1951 sci fi short, The Marching Morons, a modern day huckster takes a one way trip to the future and discovers that progress didn't quite go as expected.  The breeding rate of smart, educated people versus that of the not-so-bright underclass has left the world with an average IQ less than the temperature of Milwaukee in January, and only said conman can save the few smarties left from moronic domination.  The story is racist, classist, elitist, terribly dated, and really quite funny.

But of course, Kornbluth got everything wrong -- well, everything but the results   Because if some researchers are right, America is facing a huge shortage of a resource that can't be fixed no matter how many national parks we're willing to drill, or how many old growth trees we chop down.  We're running out of smart people.