Dinosaurs in Kansas
May 16th, 2005 by JoshHunter, over at DailyKos, has found a great post about the whole silliness that’s going on in Kansas from The American Street.
I’ve only briefly visited modern Kansas, but the Kansas of my imagination is a fiercely exotic ocean, a warm and savage sea richer than any place still extant. Try mentioning the magic word “Niobrara� to a paleontologist, or any enthusiast familiar with Mesozoic reptiles…their eyes will light up as it conjures visions of the world of 85 million years ago, a world well documented in the incredible fossil beds of Kansas. It’s a powerful, evocative word that links us to a wealth of evidence and a complex, fascinating history.
Reading about the ridiculous anti-evolution trial going on there was rather depressing. It isn’t just that the creationist arguments are so poor, but that they are making them in Kansas, where beneath their very feet are the relics of an ancient world that show them to be wrong. Don’t schoolchildren there take pride in the paleontological wealth of their home? Do the people bury their imaginations and avoid thinking about the history that surrounds them?
A lovely combination of paleontology and blogging. LINK.
May 17th, 2005 at 1:03 pm
wait, wait, wait – hasn’t anyone read what’s the matter with kansas?. Thomas Frank points out that the whole creationist scandal is not *actually* about changing textbooks (so far, nothing has been changed, i think) – it’s about causing a big to-do that makes moderate republicans look like evil liberals, further splintering kansas republicans into “God-fearing” and “immoral liberals.”
May 17th, 2005 at 1:06 pm
Did you learn HTML?!?
May 17th, 2005 at 1:10 pm
i’ve known HTML for some time – i built a few webpages in college, too, really basic ones. i pretty much gave up once there were better ways to build webpages.