[This week’s header was written by Corgizilla!]

Hello, PT, it’s your sometimes poster, often lurker, and first-time header writer, Corgzilla (thanks to Cordyceps for the help posting this header).

Today is Darwin Day when we celebrate birth of Charles Darwin. Were he alive today, he’d be a spry 219 years old. If you are not familiar with the guy, he came up with the idea of evolution through the process of natural selection, an idea that underpins and unifies the field of biology and, most surprisingly, has been a completely uncontroversial idea since first being published in 1859. Ha, just kidding. People have been going nuts over this concept from the start.

I’ve been teaching evolution to college students for well over 20 years now and I’ve noticed a trend. In the early 2000’s, I had some students stop taking notes when I talked about evolution in class. I even had some students want to discuss intelligent design in class (I declined). For the last 10 years or so, I’ve noticed that this anti-evolution sentiment has pretty much disappeared in my students. The political anti-evolution movement that occurred in 2001, driven by one Senator Rick Santorum* and his failed amendment to the No Child Left Behind act, has mostly faded from public discourse. Several states also tried passing laws anti-evolution laws under the guise of “academic freedom” that either died in committee or failed in other ways. Most recently, the West Virginia Senate passed an anti-evolution bill in January of 2024. That will most like die in committee in the House of Delegates there too.

Political change is often frustratingly slow and incremental. The public has started to take notice of all the crazy shit going on right now with the executive branch and the opposition has started. It too will be slow, but it is happening. Keep up the good fight y’all and be nice to Mayor McSquirrel, even if he doesn’t deserve it.

*froth not included