YOU'VE HEARD OF MARKET FAILURE

Well, here's an example of Democracy Failure - a barbarian is the head of a state school board. He was appointed by Gov. Perry¹.

Texas School Board Set to Vote on Challenge to Evolution
By STEPHANIE SIMON
MARCH 23, 2009
Wall Street Journal

The Texas Board of Education will vote this week on a new science curriculum designed to challenge the guiding principle of evolution, a step that could influence what is taught in biology classes across the nation.

Texas school board chairman Don McLeroy also sees the curriculum as a landmark -- but a positive one.

Dr. McLeroy believes that God created the earth less than 10,000 years ago. If the new curriculum passes, he says he will insist that high-school biology textbooks point out specific aspects of the fossil record that, in his view, undermine the theory that all life on Earth is descended from primitive scraps of genetic material that first emerged in the primordial muck about 3.9 billion years ago.

He also wants the texts to make the case that individual cells are far too complex to have evolved by chance mutation and natural selection, an argument popular with those who believe an intelligent designer created the universe.

The textbooks will "have to say that there's a problem with evolution -- because there is," said Dr. McLeroy, a dentist. "We need to be honest with the kids."

This move has the backing of the state Republican party and doesn't seem to differ in important respects from Lysenkoism², another case of ideology trumping science.

¹Conservative to lead state education board
Perry picks chairman as panel prepares to revisit several course standards
09:34 AM CDT on Wednesday, July 18, 2007
By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News

²"Lysenko's doctrines and claims varied with the amount of power that he held. Between 1948 and 1953, when he was the total autocrat of Soviet biology, he claimed that wheat plants raised in the appropriate environment produce seeds of rye, which is equivalent to saying that dogs living in the wild give birth to foxes."
Source: Lysenko, Trofim Denisovich. (2009). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved March 23, 2009, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online:
http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9049549