Kansas Not Totally Stupid

Good news from Kansas — enough smart people voted in the school board elections yesterday to defeat the previous stupid-supported majority:

Moderate Republicans scored key primary victories in State Board of Education races, wrestling control from conservatives in a battle shaped by the debate over the teaching of evolution.

Conservative Republicans began Tuesday with a 6-4 board majority. However, one of their incumbents lost, and a pro-evolution moderate won the GOP nomination for a seat held by a retiring conservative.

The results left only four board members who voted last year to adopt science standards that questioned the validity of evolutionary theory.

Best of all, Connie Morris, Queen of the Stupid People, lost her seat. In celebration, I'm proudly wearing my FSM t-shirt.

But my exuberance is tempered by this write-up by John Hanna of the AP. He closes with this:

The [Kansas] standards say that the evolutionary theory that all life had a common origin has been challenged by fossils and molecular biology. And they say there is controversy over whether changes over time in one species can lead to a new species.

And the part where he reports that evolution represents the consensus view of the scientific community, that these "challenges" and "controversies" are coming from a few crackpots, that fossils and molecular biology support evolution, not undermine it, that evolution is one of the richest and well-supported theories that science has ever produced, a landmark achievement in the history of human reason… oh, he didn't put that in. This story doesn't even rise to the level of he-said-she-said reporting so common in bad science writing. Here we just have one side, and it's the wrong one.

But Hanna does get a point back for including this wonderful self-refuting quote:

"I feel like if you give two sides of something, most people are intelligent enough to make up their own minds," said Ryan Cole, a 26-year-old farmer and horse trainer from Smith County, along the Nebraska line.

Sorry Ryan, better luck next time.