News - Kathy Cox

When you’ve been both dissed by a Nobel Peace Prize-winner (Jimmy Carter) and called an idiot by the looniest flat-Earther in the General Assembly (Rep. Bobby Franklin), you know you’ve fucked up.

By the end of her disastrous press conference last week, it was painfully clear that state school Superintendent Cox — who plans to remove references to evolution from the science curriculum because it’s “a buzzword that causes a lot of negative reaction” — does not know what science is.

She made things even worse by suggesting that so-called “intelligent design theory” — basically, a gussied-up form of neo-creationism — is a scientific theory that might be taught in Georgia schools.

But intelligent design theory, which is being pushed by the Christian fundamentalist crowd, doesn’t even meet the standards of Cox’s own proposed middle-school science curricula — namely, that scientific inquiry requires independent verification, testable hypotheses, reproducible results and peer review by the legitimate scientific community.

Evolution has done all that. For example, scientists conduct experiments every day in which strains of bacteria mutate and evolve resistance to drug treatment. Those experiments can then be replicated.

Intelligent design theory, on the other hand, is essentially religious philosophy masquerading as science. In a nutshell, it claims that certain biological functions are so complex — the functioning of the eye, for instance — that gradual biological change can’t account for it. Therefore, such phenomena must have existed from the beginning of life, and that points to the existence of a designer, meaning God.

So, does Cox really not grasp what qualifies as science or is she willfully ignoring it to impose her religious beliefs on Georgia’s schoolkids? Whatever the answer, parents have good reason to wonder, along with our president, “Is our children learning?”

CL would like to recommend that, in order to give Cox a better appreciation and understanding of real science, she be launched without delay aboard the next rocket leaving for Uranus.