Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana and potential running mate for John McCain in the upcoming US Presidential election, recently signed the Louisiana Science Education Act into law.  (Watch this: I’m about to cram an entire bill into one sentence.)  The bill aims to allow and assist educators to create and foster an open environment for the discussion and criticism of evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning; most importantly, it specifically allows the introduction of supplementary texts to aide in these discussions and critiques.  This is the first academic freedom bill to pass through a state legislature.  This bill, or at least the motivation behind it, will certainly warrant an entry or two in the future.  I’ll give it a quick paragraph now, and then I’ll get back to Governor Jindal and Entry 08.

The effort to get religion into science classrooms is evolving before our very eyes; it would be humorous and ironic if it weren’t so serious.  They first tried branding creationism as creation science, brazenly replacing the ism with the very word science itself.  When that failed, they moved onto intelligent design, coyly leaving the designer unspecified, for a few decades and counting.  Now, between the Dover case and the ongoing drubbing the scientific community is putting on Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity, ID might actually be on the way out.  Even the Discovery Institute, a well-known ID think tank, has apparently been shying away from the term intelligent design of late.  So now, everybody who wants theistic creationism taught in school has moved on to promoting academic freedom in hopes of getting their unscientific ideas into science classrooms.  That’s enough of that for now, so let’s bring it back to the guv’nah.

As I write this, Governor Jindal hasn’t released a statement regarding this bill, at least as far as I can tell.  I find this a bit surprising, considering the level of scrutiny the bill has received from the scientific community.  As such, we must turn to past statements he has made regarding science education, in hopes of ascertaining his opinions on science education overall and evolution in particular.

I found one such statement, made during his gubernatorial (what an awesome word!) campaign, on a couple websites covering the bill brouhaha:

“Let’s talk about intelligent design.  I’m a biology major.  That’s my degree.  The reality is there are a lot of things that we don’t understand.  There’s no theory in science that could explain how, contrary to the laws of entropy, you could create order out of chaos.  There’s no scientific theory that explains how you can create organic life out of inorganic matter.”

This really is quite an impressive paragraph.  The quote continued on to advocate teaching the ‘controversy’ and academic freedom, even directly using the word creationism rather than any of its science-y euphemisms.  No worries, though … there’s plenty to work with here.  Let’s break it down sentence-by-sentence:

  (1)    Do we have to?
  (2)    Argument from authority.
  (3)    Reemphasis from authority?
  (4)    Mystery-mongering, setup for god-of-the-gaps.
  (5)    Scroll down to Entry 08 for details.
  (6)    Confusing abiogenesis with evolution.

Five of the six sentences in that paragraph contain a crummy argument, and the one that doesn’t contains the phrase intelligent design.  That’s a big oh-fer six, if you’re filling out your scorecard at home.

The crux of his argument really seems to be the bit about entropy, since the rest of his recorded opinions on the matter don’t actually address what he thinks about evolution itself.  This is quite disheartening to me, because the man is now a Governor of one of the fifty states in the Union.  He actually expressed the sentiment that there are no theories in science that can explain how order arises out of chaos.  Right now, there are people sailing and swimming on a large lake less than a mile from my apartment.  Within six months, people will be ice fishing on the same lake.  The icy order that will be created out of the current liquid chaos in the lake is staggering to comprehend, but it happens every winter and is fully explainable by basic thermodynamics.  That Governor Jindal feels this phenomenon is beyond the capabilities of modern science to explain is remarkable.

There’s really not a whole lot more to say about this, hence the 08a rather than 12.  This bill is a huge disservice to the people of Louisiana, and the possibility that its passage is based on blatant pseudoscience is alarming and demoralizing.

As Governor Jindal’s genetics professor at Brown quipped when asked about his former student, “without evolution, modern biology, including medicine and biotechnology, wouldn’t make sense.”  Professor Arthur Landy continued, “Governor Jindal was a good student in my class when he was thinking about becoming a doctor, and I hope he doesn’t do anything that would hold back the next generation of Louisiana’s doctors.”  Hear, hear, Art!  I know it’s a cheap rhetorical ploy to yell "they’re hurting the children!", but this bill ultimately will hurt Louisiana schoolchildren.  What students are going to want to study biology if one of their teachers takes full advantage of this law?  Evolution will be framed as just a theory rather than as the fundamental cornerstone of modern biology, and its gaps and flaws will be emphasized over its awe-inspiring successes.

Science and reason lost a battle when Governor Jindal signed this bill into law.  While it’s a sad day for science and reason, it’s a downright depressing day for Louisiana.  Students in a science class taught by a teacher that takes advantage of this law will leave with both a terrible understanding of and a deep mistrust in science.  We rely more on science and technology with each passing year, and untold classrooms full of Louisiana students will only fall further behind their peers because of bills like this.