State Rep. Marti Coley!

In a news release Tuesday, Coley stated she will “resist efforts by evolution-only advocates who are attempting to rewrite Florida’s curriculum to exclude scientific theories which compete with the theory of evolution … We should adopt standards that help our students understand and consider the full range of views that exist.”

This is the classic argument used by the religious right whenever they start pushing to include creationism (or its twin sister, intelligent design) in science classes. It’s a bad argument, since neither belief is a “competing scientific theory”—science has disproved them over and over as it has many scientific theories that competed with our current understanding of evolution, such as catastrophism or Lamarckianism.

But in an interview with the Daily News’ Tom McLaughlin, Coley backs off and says she just wants evolution taught as a theory because there are “components of the theory that no one can prove” but that she accepts certain parts of the theory that have use in, for example, agriculture.

This may sound more reasonable, but it’s really another recitation of a key creationist talking point: That despite fossils, carbon-dating and even evolutionary events in the present, nobody can actually prove what happened in the past. Any part of the theory that can’t be denied—adaptation and natural selection play roles not only in agriculture but in medicine (they explain why bacteria and insect pests become immune to antibiotics or pesticide, for instance)—is accepted, but if you point out that shows evolution works much better than creationism or ID (which have produced reams of news releases but not one scientific insight), the response is “No, all the rest of evolution is just a theory, nahnahnah, can’t hear you!”

Coley told McLaughlin that “I want to keep the religious debate out of this … That is not a battle I want to fight.” Too bad for her, because that’s exactly the battle she’s fighting.

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