Heartening news from the heartland

Covering the creationism beat is usually an unhappy job, consisting of report after report of yet more stupidity bubbling up. There is hope, though. A Fellow of the Discovery Institute, Paul Nelson, paid a visit to my university (the University of Minnesota Morris) last night to lecture us on problems in macroevolution and the promise of Intelligent Design creationism in explaining them. He had a large crowd show up, and the wonderful thing is how UMM students responded. They didn't sit back passively, they didn't throw rotten fruit…they hammered him with solid, critical questions. The Q&A session went on longer than the talk itself, and with only one exception, the questions and comments were all smart and uniformly anti-pseudoscience.

That is how it is done. That's how we win this battle—with a well-prepared and intelligent generation of students who can recognize BS when they hear it.

(PLUG: Looking for a good liberal arts university? Prefer a school in the public system because it's less expensive? Want a place with access to the resources of a major research university system, but the student/teacher ratios of a small town college? Take a look at the University of Minnesota Morris. Plus, our students are brilliant.)