Yet Another Republican Shows How Science Education Has Failed Him

I saw this in another place, but Panda's Thumb has a video of amateur historian David Barton who, well, let's let Mother Jones tell us:

On Wednesday, Right Wing Watch flagged a recent interview [David] Barton gave with an evangelcial [sic] talk show, in which he argues that the Founding Fathers had explicitly rejected Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Yes, that Darwin. The one whose seminal work, On the Origin of Species, wasn’t even published until 1859. Barton declared, “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!” Paine died in 1809, the same year Darwin was born.

Here is the video




Barton runs the website WallBuilders. Here is part of their mission statement:

WallBuilders is an organization dedicated to presenting America's forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built – a foundation which, in recent years, has been seriously attacked and undermined.

Let's hope the rest of their “forgotten” history is better than this.