Tennessee puts homos in its scopes

When Crockett joined Bowie and Travis at the Alamo, they had more in common than Old Betsy. 

They represented the same lineage which today finds species specious, if of the human kind. 

Nobody, not even a few thousand Mexicans, made a monkey out of them, Pilgrim.

Fighting evolution one monkey law at a time opinion by Fred Grimm in the Miami Herald.

Evolution has been voted down in the Tennessee legislature.

School kids there need not be bothered by confusing allusions to homo erectus, homo ergaster, homo antecessor, homo heidelbergensis, homo neanderthalensis and other ancestral contradictions to that Old Time Religion.

The Monkey Bill, as it’s known thereabouts, became state law earlier this month. the national media has had a good time remembering Tennesseans acting like anti-science yokels back during the 1925 Scopes trial.

Once, the Monkey Bill would have been regarded as only a local curiosity. But lunatic legislation no longer occurs in a vacuum.

Tennessee’s Monkey Bill was based on the “Model Academic Freedom Statute on Evolution,” contrived by the Discovery Institute (which promotes teaching intelligent design over evolution) to nudge up to the very limits of the U.S. Constitution. Ostensibly, it protects the rights of teachers to present alternatives to evolution, global warming, human cloning and “the chemical origins of life.”

All eight of Tennessee’s members in the National Academy of Sciences asked the legislature not to pass the bill, signing a statement that, just a few years ago, would have been belaboring the obvious.

“The evidence for evolution is overwhelming. There is no scientific evidence for its supposed rivals (‘creation science’ and ‘intelligent design’) and there is no scientific evidence against it.”

No matter.

Last year, Sen. Stephen Wise of Jacksonville attempted to push an anti-evolution bill through the Florida Legislature, saying, “Why do we still have apes if we came from them?” You can figure creationists will be reprising those Wise words next year.

Read more at the link above.

Oh, and the Tennessee/Texas connection alluded to above?

Texas Bored of Education decision too complex to result from chance

Another dinosaur roams Texas

Dinosaurs at it again in Texas

Dinosaurs in Texas: But Wait, There's More!

In the interests of Fullish Disclosure, Guambat sheepishly (how'd sheep get into this? Oh, yeah, that thing about sheep and cowboys) admits his ancestry passes through both Tennessee and Texas on the way back to his evolutionary beginnings.   He has no ID how many times.