Bloggers who aren’t navel gazers are supposed to be up to the millisecond, but it just ain’t so. Strange Maps just put up a five-year-old map of how different states do in setting standards for teaching evolution, lifted from a May 2002 antievolution Web site, which lifted it from the March 2002 issue of Scientific American (text available here).
I liked the old map, because it was in color, it had funny comments, and it allowed for piquant observations about Indiana’s doing a much better job than Illinois (at least in statewide standards — what happens in the classroom stays in the classroom). But the author of all this information — Laurence S. Lerner, a University of Chicago alum and an emeritus prof at California State University, Long Beach — hasn’t stopped tracking the subject. A year ago January he published an update in Freethought Today on state science standards in general (Illinois scored a B, Indiana an A, 15 states got Fs) and evolution standards in particular (Illinois and Indiana both scored well; the worst states include Wisconsin, Mississippi, and Connecticut). The associated map is in shades of gray.
And Lerner’s accompany article is fun as well as informative. He writes, “As creationism has evolved under the selective pressure of a series of court decisions …”