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News on Sarah Palin’s Creationism

It looks like I was probably wrong when I said Sarah Palin wasn’t a creationist activist. Salon has an article about retired American Baptist minister Howard Bess, who lives in Palmer, Alaska, near Wasilla. Bess has advocated for gay rights since the 1980s, and published a book entitled Pastor, I Am Gay in 1995 that he says Sarah Palin tried to remove from the local library. Salon also has this to say:

Another valley activist, Philip Munger, says that Palin also helped push the evangelical drive to take over the Mat-Su Borough school board. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the board,” said Munger, a music composer and teacher. “I bumped into her once after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism—your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.’

“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”

Last week in Minnesota

I haven’t posted in a while. This is partly because classes have started and I’ve been spending most of my time reading, but it’s also because I was spending what time I had left following news from the demonstrations outside the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis and St. Paul. I’ve been waiting to post about these demonstrations and the police reaction to them until someone else did them justice in writing, and one of my favorite writers has: Chris Hedges in Tyranny on Display at the Republican Convention. Glenn Greenwald also covered the house raids that prefaced the demonstrations well, and Twin Cities Indymedia published some incredible first-person accounts and videos.

Wesley R. Elsberry on Sarah Palin

The marine biologist and critic of creationism Wesley R. Elsberry seems to have a perspective on Sarah Palin’s support for creationism that’s similar to mine:

Palin’s responses there indicate that she has bought into the “fairness argument” from the antievolution advocates.… I think this is primarily an issue of a candidate who hasn’t bothered to find out what’s going on, and who doesn’t know about the antievolution movement’s dependence upon falsehoods, misrepresentations, and underhanded strategies to pass off narrow religious views as if they were scientific information.

Is Sarah Palin a creationist?

Wired Science is reporting that “McCain’s VP Wants Creationism Taught in School.” As far as I can tell, though, Sarah Palin has only made a few vague statements about creationism. She’s certainly sympathetic, but not in any way that makes her stand out among American social conservatives.

The Wired Science post is based upon an Anchorage Daily News article, “‘Creation science’ enters the race,” reporting on a debate between Palin and two other candidates for governor of Alaska in 2006.

Palin was answering a question from the moderator near the conclusion of Wednesday night’s televised debate on KAKM Channel 7 when she said, “Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.”

This is the sort of “teach the controversy” rhetoric most often associated with the intelligent design movement. I’m frustrated that the article doesn’t actually include the question put to Palin and her opponents (and that I can’t find a transcript or video elsewhere), because I’d like to know whether the moderator used the word creationism or whether he asked about intelligent design theory.

In any case, there’s more of the quotation right below the article, and it’s relevant.

And you know, I say this too as the daughter of a science teacher. Growing up with being so privileged and blessed to be given a lot of information on, on both sides of the subject—creationism and evolution. It’s been a healthy foundation for me. But don’t be afraid of information and let kids debate both sides.

Palin, then, is not steeped in the literature of the intelligent design movement, which claims to be distinct from creationism. She seems to genuinely think that teaching the controversy would be fair, not merely use the idea as a strategy for bringing creationism into schools. In a followup interview by the newspaper, she said that “I don’t think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum.” On a personal level, Palin explained that “I believe we have a creator” but that “I’m not going to pretend I know how all this came to be.”

Palin’s views about evolution strike me as pretty typical for a conservative American Protestant who hasn’t given a lot of thought or attention to the matter. In this she’s reminiscent of a lot of Republican politicians, but most notably of George W. Bush when he was campaigning in 2000. If she is a creationist she’s not a very committed one, and certainly not a creationist activist.

Fall Courses

I’ve spent the last month settling into Philadelphia, but my classes start next Wednesday. Here’s what I’m taking my first semester of graduate school:

  • Seminar in the History and Sociology of Science: The standard introduction for new graduate students. We’ll basically spend a week on each of several concepts or approaches in science studies. The syllabus looks pretty exciting.
  • Reading Seminar in the History of Science: Despite the title, this course will be largely about how to teach a survey course in the history of science. It should also be fun.
  • The Information Sciences: This is pretty much exactly what I want to be studying as far as history of technology goes: the Cold War-era development of fields structured around the concept of information, including cybernetics, computer science, and ecology.
  • Research Seminar on Genetics and Genomics: The history of genetics is something I want to know more about, since the field is so closely related to evolutionary biology.