Because some people are more than uncomfortable with the current established views of such things as evolution and climate change, they cling to the belief that those scientific facts aren’t any more real or settled than, say, the old view that the Earth was the center of the universe or that disease was caused by demons.
Galileo proved that Aristotle was wrong, this school of thinking goes, so why shouldn’t we assume that, say, Darwin was wrong, too?
That was the argument that the Utah State School Board wrangled over, for eight months of review by a committee of experts and, on Thursday, five hours of patiently suffering through a great deal of anti-intellectual dogma before voting to approve a new set of science standards for students in the state’s public elementary and high schools.