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Dissing Darwin: as Texas grapples with the future of biotech, our long-standing hostility toward one of modern science's founding fathers is about to cost us plenty.

Article Excerpt
By all accounts, Charles Darwin was quite a nice English gentleman. A former divinity student who had once hoped to become a county parson, the reclusive naturalist was so concerned for his family and friends that he kept his theory of evolution to himself for a couple of decades; he was finally forced by a competitor to reluctantly publish On the Origin of Species in 1859. Still, that turned out to be at least 146 years too soon for most Texas, whose animus toward one of the founding fathers of modern a science has been a remarkably enduring feature of our cultural and political landscape. [paragraph] While it would be political suicide in today's Texas to fling early-twentieth-century prejudices at African Americans, Hispanics, or women, this particular dead white male can still be bashed as blithely as he was eighty years ago. If anything, the vehemence has only amped up across the generations, from Governor Miriam "Ma" Ferguson, who vowed in the twenties that she was "not going to let that kind of rot go into Texas textbooks," to current House majority leader Tom DeLay, who blamed Darwin for the Columbine massacre ("Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud"). This perennial pique was a fairly cheap indulgence throughout the twentieth century; despite widespread conviction that the age of the earth did not exceed the Biblical six millennia, we always had enough geologists who understood how to find oil in rocks hundreds of millions of years old. But as Texas enters the twenty-first century, dissing Darwin is about to get very expensive.

That's because the scientific revolution Darwin started in the nineteenth century--transforming biology from the domain of amateur naturalists like himself into a disciplined science probing ever deeper into the...

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