Aha, so the reason Paul Revere was ringin' those bells and sendin' those warning shots was to warn the British about Darwin. (I borrowed that little quip from AMERICAblog commenter Nicho.)
A quite illuminating post from Mother Jones. Apparently, a good deal of the recent crazy talk from the far-right of the GOP (i.e., it's leadership) is based in the teachings of an amateur historian from Texas (of course). He's teaching them, among other things, that the Founding Fathers debated evolution vs. creationism, and ended up siding with creationism.
Funny, then, that Darwin wasn't even born until 1809, and didn't write the Origin of the Species until 1859. As MoJo notes, those Founding Fathers had to be pretty prescient to debate a theory in 1776 that wasn't fully formed until they were all long dead.
Not to mention, who cares what the Founding Fathers thought about a particular aspect of science in 1776. Are Republicans honestly going to apply a constitutional test to science now? We're only going to teach kids what was known, thought, in 1776? Check this out, from the GOP's quack historian:
"As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, they'd already had the entire debate over creation and evolution, and you get Thomas Paine, who is the least religious Founding Father, saying you've got to teach Creation science in the classroom. Scientific method demands that!"Well yeah, the scientific method of leeches.
Not to mention, as MoJo notes, Paine died in 1809, the same year Darwin was born. So it's not entirely clear how Thomas Paine debunked Darwin before Darwin even existed.
No, we wouldn't want to disagree with the prevailing scientific theory of nearly two hundred and fifty years ago. So let's explore some of those scientific beliefs the Republicans would have us teach our school children.
First off, no meteors. They don't exist. After all, as the French Academy of Sciences famously proclaimed at the time, “Rocks do not fall from the sky."
If you got sick in the 1700s, it was common for a doctor to bleed you with leeches. And there's no sterilization of medical instruments or hands, because germs don't exist.
No antibiotics in case you have an infection, because, as we just noted, germs don't exist - so if you get sick, you get herbs.
In good news, you did have a few choices beyond herbs. Two in fact:
In Edinburgh the writer and lecturer John Brown expounded his view that there were only two diseases, sthenic (strong) and asthenic (weak), and two treatments, stimulant and sedative; his chief remedies were alcohol and opium.So which should we be giving school kids, opium or alcohol? Maybe we should look at what Thomas Paine preferred.
Surgery was frowned upon. Then again, your surgeon was quite likely your barber as well, so it's understandable why it wasn't a welcome practice. (Fortunately, the barber-surgeon started getting phased out in the middle of the 1700s, but since germs didn't exist, nor did sterilization, you were probably going to die anyway.)
And during the 1700s, people still believed that the touch of a king could heal you, like in The Lord of the Rings.
Yes, let's do look to what the Founding Fathers believed about science.
Here's the quack informing us of what the Founding Fathers decided 250 years ago about the theory of evolution, which didn't fully even exist yet.
