Monday, August 14, 2006

These are the things that depress me

My younger "sister" (cousin that spent a lot of time with us growing up) Tiffany spent the past weekend with us. She'll be 12 in November, and she's at the point where she's starting to question the things that she doesn't think make any sense.

Nate & I took her out for Vietnamese food and mini golf, and she was asking us some questions about evolution. Despite my anthropologist bias, I was able to give her a fairly plain-Jane scientific explanation of the Theory of Evolution and an extremely
high-level overview of the gross anatomical similarities between humans and apes. When I started to lose her in the details, Nate reined me in.

When she starts 6th grade at the end of this month, they'll be teaching both evolution and Creationism in her classroom. I'm saddened by inclusion of the latter due to a few religious nutjobs that assume everyone else is as willing as they are to disregard science and evidence that suggests that we're the descendants of earlier primates. Nevermind that there's no single shred of evidence to indicate proof of *their* position. Nope. Uh-uh. Blah, blah, blah, "In His image"-cakes.

Whatever.