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The expense and backlash from the Dover, PA court case seems to have scared creation science advocates away from public education, at least for now. The National Center for Science Education, which defends evolution as the foundation of biological science, maintains a list of news stories on local controversies. A review of their web site shows the trend.

* The Board of Education in Cobb County, GA voted in 2002 to put stickers into science textbooks that described evolution as “a theory, not a fact.” Parents filed suit to remove the stickers; the case was decided in their favor in January 2005 but then remanded for retrial. Twenty thousand stickers were scraped off with razor blades, and everyone elected to the county board in July 2006 went on record as opposing them. The case was settled out of court in December 2006 with the School Board agreeing permanently not to take any action that “would prevent or hinder the teaching of evolution.”

* The Ohio State Board of Education adopted state science standards that were critical of evolution in 2002. The ensuing fight was settled in 2006, when the Board fixed the standard and dissolved a committee that had been considering further revisions. Voters added an exclamation point in the 2006 elections, when four Board seats and the Governorship went to candidates who rejected creationism as science.

* The Kansas State Board of Education adopted standards in November 2005 that misrepresented evolution as scientifically controversial. After intense criticism, they reversed the decision in February 2007.

* Anti-evolution bills were defeated in the Florida Legislature in May 2005, the Utah Legislature in February 2006, and the Alabama legislature in April 2006.

The few Creationist proposals that remain active in state legislatures now have a different tone. South Carolina legislators are considering a bill that would require instructional materials to “emphasize critical thinking and analysis in each content area.” A citizens’ group called South Carolinians for Science Education opposes the bill because its sponsor, Rep. Robert Walker (R-Spartanburg), is an avowed creationist. The group suspects that if Walker prevails, he would use the law to make another run at the state standards.

In Tennessee, state senator Raymond Finney (R-Maryville) introduced a resolution in February 2007 that would formally ask the State Education Commissioner whether the universe “has been created or has merely happened by random, unplanned, and purposeless occurrences.” When he introduced the bill, Finney said that his long-term goal was to bring creationism to science classes. But a month later he said, “I’m not sure I’m going forward with that . . . I probably made a mistake in approaching it from a creation aspect. People get so sensitive about whether children might be exposed to any sort of religious thing.”

“Creationists aren’t going away,” said Dave Thomas, President of New Mexicans for Science and Reason. “They’re just getting sneakier.”

Dr. Harold Varmus has a Master’s in English from Harvard and an MD from Columbia. He is author of over 300 scientific papers and four books, including a general-audience introduction to the genetics of cancer. He has a wall of scientific prizes, including the Nobel. He was head of the National Institutes of Health during a time when its budget doubled. He is currently CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. So when he says the barbarians are at the gates, you’d better listen.

During a recent talk called “The Future of Science in America,” Varmus recited a long and familiar list of problems scientists have been having with Federal politicians. Funding for research is flat or declining, evidence of climate change is being ignored, stem cell research is endangered, and on and on. He said that the difficult situation in Washington isn’t all the fault of George W. Bush, but reflects a divide in the opinions Americans hold about science. Then he showed a slide titled “Top 10 Places Where Science Education Is Under Threat,” which came from a report issued in September 2005 that describes local efforts to introduce the doctrine of Biblical creation into science courses at public schools. A busy guy like Dr. Varmus probably hasn’t had time to catch up on what has happened in these places in the last two years, so we will do it for him in the next few posts.

The big news comes from the number one town on Varmus’ list, Dover, PA. Back in October 2004, Dover’s school board voted 6 to 3 to require all ninth-grade biology teachers to read a statement before teaching lessons on evolution. The statement said that evolution is a “theory…not a fact,” and that “gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence.” Teachers were also required to refer to a book called Of Pandas and People that promotes a doctrine called intelligent design, which argues that the vast complexity of natural systems is proof that they were created by a divine being. The Dover board members who voted against the change resigned, and the rule was soon challenged by a group of parents in Federal District Court. A year after the school board’s ruling went into effect, Judge John E. Jones III reversed it. His opinion attracted wide attention because it held that teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in a public school classroom violates the separation of church and state clause in the First Amendment and is therefore unconstitutional.

The decision in Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District was a serious blow to intelligent design activists, who had hoped that cross-examining scientists in court would squeeze the truth out of them and prove evolution was non-scientific. The spectacular failure of this “vise strategy” was particularly embarrassing in Dover, because the district’s legal bills totaled about $2 million. Three of the six board members who had supported the rule resigned during the controversy, and two more supporters were voted out a month before the judge’s decision. The new board voted 8 to 1 in January 2006 to remove the rule and not appeal the court’s ruling. The “no” vote came from Heather Geesey, the sole survivor of the 2004 board, who is up for re-election this year. The whole story is ably told by reporter Edward Humes in a new book, Monkey Girl.

Maybe Dover doesn’t deserve reputation for science-bashing any more, but it’s going to be stuck with it. The Kitzmiller decision reverberated across the country and might have been the high-water mark of the campaign to put the Bible into public schools. So is Varmus just an alarmist? Not hardly. Only 48 percent of Americans agree that “the scientific theory of evolution is well supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community,” according to the Newsweek Poll of March 31, 2007. Just 25 percent of evangelical Protestants believe that evidence supports evolution, along with 57 percent of non-evangelical Protestants, 58 percent of Catholics, and 73 percent of agnostics and atheists. And last year, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that 58 percent of those interviewed support the idea of teaching creationism along with evolution in schools. It ain’t over.

More than 1,300 local rallies were held on Saturday April 14 by StepItUp2007.org, a citizen’s group based in Burlington, VT that is pushing for an 80 percent global reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. Bill McKibben, who introduced the topic of global warming to the world in his 1989 book The End of Nature, is the chief spokesman for the group. He went around the country for several weeks whipping up support for the rallies while he also promoted his new book, Deep Economy. The book questions the “more is better” approach to economic growth and instead argues for solar energy, farmer’s markets, and other ways to rely more on neighborliness and less on fossil fuels.

Most of this is familiar stuff – the big bad oil companies, the plucky grassroots activists – but McKibben is a more searching thinker than is your average organic farm enthusiast, so he takes it further. Yesterday I heard him say something that made me both thoughtful and hopeful. He was explaining why the rally organizers decided to promote local events instead of a huge single march on Washington DC. First, he said, they did not have the organizational skill to pull off a big march. Second, they also did not want thousands of people burning tons of fuel to go to Washington. And third, he said, “we also wanted people to make their voices heard in the places that mattered to them.”

The creativity of local responses has been astonishing, he says. On April 14, scuba divers held an underwater rally in the Florida Keys to draw attention to vanishing coral reefs. Skiers schussed down glaciers in formation. People wearing blue t-shirts linked arms in Lower Manhattan to show where the new shoreline will be if Greenland’s ice cap melts. There was a big contra dance in tiny little Hamilton, Montana. And at the end of the day, all 1300-plus rallies sent photos to the web site, so the politicians and the press in Washington knew that hundreds of thousands of people got together to call for “dramatic radical ambitious action on climate change now.”

“We are in a very lucky position today when we think about localness,” said McKibben. “Before, the choice had been between a local life and a larger life. People left their local place to go out into the larger world. One of the things that has gone with localness has been parochialism – a stifling inability to get rid of old prejudices and old ideas. But now we live in a moment when this very interesting new technology represented by the Web allows us to contemplate the best of both worlds. We can strengthen local economies and really start depending on our neighbors, and at the same time we can keep an open window to the larger world around us.

“I used to think about now nice it is to be able to use the Internet to trade recipes instead of shipping ingredients around the world. Now, all these rallies are showing me that people can have it both ways. They can be in their own place with the people they love, in the landscapes they love, and make a witness to their local media and politicians. And at the same time, thanks to these new technologies, they can participate in the life of the nation and the world.

“That new ability should allow us to think more creatively about the world we live in than we have in the past. And we’d better think fast. The problems we have are coming up on us faster than we can imagine. The window of opportunity is still there, but it is narrow and it is closing. It is our job to try to jimmy it open and try to give the rest of creation, and the people who come after us a little bit of breathing space and a little bit of possibility.”
McKibben’s talk is available from Alternative Radio. To see the rallies, visit StepItup2007.

Easter is over but they will be skiing for several more weeks on Tug Hill, the part of New York just east of Lake Ontario. The reason is “lake effect,” a local phenomenon that occurs when prevailing Arctic winds from the north and west sweep over the comparatively warm surface of the water. The wind carries the moisture into the air, freezes it, and drops the snow just downwind, sometimes with spectacular results. Lake effect forms in narrow bands that move back and forth, spraying snow over the land like a high-pressure hose. It isn’t unusual for it to accumulate at five inches per hour. Osceola, NY got nearly twelve feet between February 3 and 10 this year, a new state record.

February 3 was also the day of the 27th Tug Hill Tourathon, a citizen’s ski race that winds 50 kilometers through the Winona State Forest east of Sandy Creek. This isn’t an Olympics kind of race. It is more like a grand day out for the skiers combined with an annual party for a diehard band of local volunteers. Only a few of the skiers want to win. Most of us just want to finish, or maybe beat our time from last year. We glide through pine plantations and stands of mature hardwood, the trail mostly level but undulating just enough to stave off boredom. Stark winter silences sharpen a landscape of white, black and gray. The snow is the cleanest and most reliable in the East. But the lake effect bands were going to be cranking away on race day, and if they happened to be over the course at just the right time, the party would have to be cancelled due to too much of a good thing.

Tourathon Contestant 

A foot of new snow did fall the night before, but the race started with just a one-hour delay. About 150 skiers showed up, a light turnout because of the dicey conditions, but many at the finish line said it had been the best race in years. This meant a lot to Dr. Jay Chapman, who has a family practice in nearby Pulaski. Jay is the Tourathon’s chief promoter and spokesman. “Half of the kids in our local schools weigh more than they should,” he says. “I see the effects of obesity in my patients every day. We need to attract the next generation to the outdoors. We need to go to war against video games.”

Jay Chapman

Cross-country skiing does great things for your body, but so far most kids aren’t listening. Chapman says that the average age of racers who finish the 50 kilometers – that’s about 31.5 miles — is 53. Still, all kinds of people were out there. We wore everything from Lycra to Levi’s, and I am living proof that we weren’t all in great shape. The winning time for the 50K race was three and a half hours, which was considered slow. The final finisher took six hours. But everyone who finished 25K or 50K got a medal.
New technology made the 2007 Tourathon possible, says Chapman. He decided to go ahead with the race at 4:30 that morning after exchanging e-mails with the meteorologists at a Syracuse TV station. They told him they expected the snow bands to move north of Sandy Creek around 9 am and stay north until late afternoon – a window just long enough to pull off the race. And it worked. The skiers got fresh snow swirling off the trees, bright sunlight, and a perfectly groomed track.

Hand-held radios also make the race safer and smoother than it was back in the 1980s. Dozens of local volunteers turn out every year to staff the race, and a few of them told me it is the highlight of the year. They stand out in the snow to hand out warm Gatorade and cookies at food stations, drive skiers around in borrowed school buses, and stand at road crossings to check people off the master list as they glide by. If anyone needs help, it arrives quickly – you are never more than a kilometer or two from a road, and snowmobiles run back and forth all day. You stay warm because you keep moving, and after the first few miles your sense of time gets lost in the rhythmic kick-and-glide of the skis. It does take a bit of preparation and practice to stay outdoors all day in the middle of a Tug Hill Winter, but the feeling is incomparable.

“If I didn’t like winter, I wouldn’t live here,” says Tom Towne. He is standing next to his big yellow Arctic Cat at one of the road crossings. Tom lives in Tug Hill, and two minutes into our conversation he tells me that he subscribes to Accuweather.com’s professional edition, which is marketed to “weather enthusiasts.” A lot of people around here do, he says. Tom is a traveling salesman for a tool & die company. He says he likes nothing better than to spend the day this way, going way out into the Winona and turning the machine off so he can soak in the silence. Maintaining a Tug Hill address has always required a person to be tough and clever – not college clever, but a deeper kind of quickness that comes from regularly having to meet a challenge. I guess it isn’t surprising to find people way out in these unforgiving woods who are masters of e-mail and wireless communication and the interpretation of satellite images. These tools give them a better chance.

Tom Towne

People waiting to get on the bus after the race are sweat-soaked, tired, and generally happy. While steam rises off my sweater, I eavesdrop on a man talking to a young woman. At first he bores her with a long discussion of gear and wax, which is the romantic downfall of many X-C ski geeks. But then she asks him something about the snow and he becomes lyrical. He was skiing in Tug Hill once early in the morning after a snow like the one that fell this morning, he says. He was moving through a tunnel of trees that were loaded down with fresh snow, getting cold and wet, and he asked himself why he was going to all the trouble. Then the sun reached just the right angle and lit up the path before him, and the snow crystals swirled from the trees like a million fireflies in front of him, and he found himself skiing along into an enchanted forest, he says, and he got his answer.

Patsy Cline died 44 years ago. She only lived for 30 years, and her career as a singer lasted just five and a half. But she ended up like Elvis: dying young made her an icon. Now she is getting ready for another comeback, thanks to a dedicated group from her hometown of Winchester, VA.

Cline was really Virginia Patterson Hensley, the eldest daughter of a single mother. A childhood throat infection gave her the rich, booming voice that made her a star, and she was determined to make the most of her gift. She sang in church and at nearby talent shows and nightclubs. Her mother sewed her cowgirl stage outfits and drove her to gigs. She was also a soda jerk at Gaunt’s Drug Store while in high school in the late 1940s. Today you can go to Gaunt’s and see a booth Patsy used to wait on. Ask and they might give you a photo of her waving from the back of a big ol’ convertible when she was queen of the Apple Blossom Festival in 1954. The photo captures a moment when her career was just starting to pop.

Cline moved to Nashville in 1958, after she recorded her first hit, and she did not get back to Winchester much before she died in a plane crash in 1963. Her husband continues to manage her career; her mother inherited her stage outfits, jewelry, and other possessions (including a large collection of salt and pepper shakers). When her mother died in 1998, the material was split between her brother and sister, who did not get along. They had a court battle nasty enough that in 2003, her elaborate stage costumes had to be auctioned off to pay the legal bills. One of the costumes ended up at the Smithsonian Institute. But all is not lost: “most of the auctioned items are in good hands,” says Judy Sue Huyett-Kempf, President of Celebrating Patsy Cline, Inc.

Winchester never forgot Patsy. Fans gather there for annual observances, and a bell tower erected in her memory plays hymns daily at 6:00 p.m., the hour of her death. Celebrating Patsy is trying to open a museum, and they are making progress. They purchased the items from her brother’s estate when he died shortly after the court battle ended. They own her childhood home, a late 18th-century cottage they intend to restore to the way it looked when Patsy lived there in the 1940s. They have secured a building site and an architect, and they’re getting ready to launch a fund-raising campaign. The biggest loose end is the stuff owned by Patsy’s sister, Sylvia. Judy says they keep in touch.

Patsy’s grave is just outside of town. It isn’t much – just a bronze marker for her on the left and a placeholder for her husband on the right. Her bereaved mother had the marker inscribed, “Death Cannot Kill What Never Dies: Love.” A museum is what the mother wanted, says Huyett-Kempf, so that is what she’s going to get.

It is almost time to give the Institute for Northern Studies a rest, but I have one more report to add before I move on to other topics. The Institute’s first project was a survey of the Mason-Dixon line by founder Linton Weeks, published in the February 14 Washington Post. Linton spent the weekend driving around between Emmitsburg, MD and Gettysburg, PA, crossing the Mason-Dixon Line and looking for the spot where the South becomes the North. His conclusion was that on the border, North and South are all mixed up. I found further evidence of this on a recent trip through State Line, PA, a tiny hamlet just north of Hagerstown, MD in Franklin County. I drove a few miles on Mason-Dixon Road, a two-lane blacktop which is the actual Mason-Dixon Line — the state line of Pennsylvania and Maryland. Here is what I observed.

1. On the Maryland side, a large processing facility for Citicorp, the quintessential New York bank. Very corporate, very Northern.

2. Across the street, in a large parking lot for an automobile warehouse, a young man spinning donuts in a customized Plymouth Duster painted primer gray, with an oversized air scoop on the hood, dual exhaust, and “Pappy’s Pride” stenciled on the side in an extravagant, flowing script. As Southern as it gets.

3. At the east end of Mason-Dixon Road, in the hamlet of State Line, I visited Earl’s Market. I highly recommend that you do, too. Earl’s has a great meat counter featuring pints of fresh Chesapeake oysters, homemade sausage, and delectable sugar-cured country ham from a small smokehouse in Virginia. Score one for the south.

4. Earl’s also had a big display of Philadelphia’s own Tastykakes at the end of the aisle near the cash register. So I give up. The apple crumb kake was delicious, though.

Education is the most important thing that makes Yankees different from the rest of us (see previous post). A deeper look at the numbers shows that states in the Northeast and New England may be pulling even further away from the rest of the country in this regard, with one exception. Meanwhile, the least educated region has moved from South to West.

As part of the continuing research program of ePodunk’s Institute for Northern Studies, I looked at the educational attainment of young adults (aged 25 to 34) and older adults (aged 65 plus) in each state. I looked at both ends of the education mill, finding the proportion of young and older adults who do not have a high school diploma and the proportion who have a four-year college degree or more.

This exercise shows that the Deep North is still doing the best job of making and keeping eggheads. Every state in the mid-Atlantic and New England regions has a higher-than-average share of young college grads, except for Maine. The state with the highest share of young college grads in 2005 is Massachusetts, where 45 percent of adults aged 25 to 34 have four-year degrees. States number two through four are New Jersey (40 percent), Connecticut (39 percent), and New York (38.5 percent). The national average for this age group is 30 percent.

Things get even more interesting when you look at the bottom end. The state where young adults are most likely to be high school dropouts is Texas (where 21 percent of adults aged 25 to 34 do not have a high school diploma), followed by Nevada and California (at 20 percent each, compared with a national average of 14 percent).  These three states also have more than half of the nation’s Hispanic population.

The numbers also show that South’s “dumb hillbilly” reputation is becoming more of a media creation than a fact. Nine of the top ten states with the highest share of adults aged 65 and older who do not have a high school diploma are in the South: 41 percent of Kentucky’s elderly are dropouts, and the figures are almost as dismal for Mississippi (38%), Tennessee (37%), Louisiana (36%), West Virginia (36%), Alabama (35.5%), Arkansas (34%), South Carolina (34%) and Georgia (33.5%). But this cohort is now dying off, and younger Southerners are doing far better.   Only four of the top-ten states for young high school dropouts are in the South. Six are in the West.

It is a truism here at the Institute that the North’s fascination with Southern culture is yet another example of the privileged making fun of the poor.  If this is what’s really going on, we can all look forward to the next version: a Mexican edition of Hee-Haw.

The need to adapt to cold weather certainly makes Northerners different from the rest of the United States. But over-education may be a more important factor in the traditional “Deep North” states of New England and the Mid-Atlantic, according to a new analysis by the Institute for Northern Studies (see post). After all, people in Manhattan and Fargo, ND both must guard against frostbite – and yet, very few North Dakotans read The New York Review of Books.

Five of America’s ten most-educated states are in the Deep North. They include top-ranking Massachusetts, where 37 percent of adults aged 25 and older have a four-year college degree, plus Connecticut (35 percent), New Jersey (34 percent), Vermont (32.5 percent), and New Hampshire (32 percent). New York and Rhode Island are also above the national average of 27 percent, and the least-educated states in the region (Pennsylvania and Maine) are not far below the national average (at 26 percent). As a result, people who live north of the Mason-Dixon Line are more likely than the rest of us to dwell on the benefits of eating tofu, calculating compound interest, and other abstract concepts that normal people find hard to grasp.

One by-product of the education gap is that Yankees are more likely to have money. New Jersey has the highest median household income of the 50 states ($61,672 in 2005), and six of the nine Northeastern states have median incomes above the national average. Another consequence is that Northerners tend to avoid short-term pleasures that have bad long-term consequences. Connecticut has the lowest smoking rate of any state except Utah, and four other Northeastern states are also near the bottom of this list (fewer than 20 percent of adults smoke in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont). Northeastern states have some of the nation’s lowest divorce rates, as well as the lowest rates of church attendance. Go figure.

Several correspondents at the Institute for Northern Studies have commented that they find Northerners to be smug and irritating. Unfortunately, the facts show that they are also smarter, richer, healthier, and have happier relationships than the rest of us. One promising area for future research might be devising ways to take their stuff.

If you enjoyed this attempt to mix wit and statistics, you might also like Cheryl Russell’s blog, Demo Memo.

Linton Weeks is the Founder of the Institute for Northern Studies because he said it first when were jiving around several years ago. I am the Executive Director because I have kept a manila folder labeled “Northern Studies” in my desk since he said it. Linton is a Memphis boy and a reporter for the Washington Post; I am from rural Florida, and I work for ePodunk. This means that we both have professional reasons to read highly technical socio-cultural analyses of the Southern states. It also means that we both have personal reasons to smirk while we read the stuff. So we decided to do a little think tank judo. This here is a call for papers, y’all.

Maybe you know about Southern Studies already. A list at Ibiblio.org describes at least three major academic centers that are exclusively devoted to studying the American South, plus several dozen Southern websites. You can page through these sites whenever you want to ponder Dolly Parton’s hidden feminist messages or read about William Faulkner’s personal habits or hear the distinctive field hollers of Alabama turnip farmers. In fact, excessively thoughtful people have been writing about the peculiarities of Southern culture ever since W.J. Cash wrote his first editorial for the Wake Forest student newspaper back in 1921. But where do you send your article if you want to write about the charming peculiarities of the North?

I’ve been living in upstate New York for 27 years now, and there are still some things I just can’t get used to. Two weeks ago, people in the small town of Whitney Point were heartbroken because they had to cancel an ice fishing competition called the New York State Crappie Derby. Several thousand people had been expected; the motels were booked full for miles around. Contestants were going to drive for hours to walk out onto a sheet of ice, drill a hole, drop a line, and wait all day in sub-freezing temperatures for an edible sunfish to take their bait. Then they would have to scale and gut these small, bony fish with numb, wet hands before enjoying the reward: a real Crappie dinner. Maybe a trophy. But it has been an unusual winter. People were grumbling because it had not been cold enough for the lake to freeze over. Does that seem normal to you?

The North can be a confusing place if you aren’t tipped off to its ways. For example, it is traditional to eat Crappie with salt potatoes, which are thumb-sized spuds harvested early, boiled in brine, and served in a bowl drenched with butter. They are delicious – a gym sock is also delicious if it is drenched with butter – but if you aren’t from Central New York, you probably don’t know what they are. A five-pound bag of Hinerwadel’s Salt Potatoes is really just potatoes with a 12-ounce packet of salt enclosed to add to the boiling water. I recently heard about an uninformed woman from Geneseo, NY who bought a bag, saw the packet, and called the cops. She thought that Hinerwadel’s was smuggling cocaine.

I know several Southerners besides Linton and I who have moved up north and are intrigued by bowling leagues, scrapple, arguing as a form of recreation, and other forms of Northern culture. I hope they’ll be chiming in. If you would like to share an observation about Yankees and their distinctive folkways, we at the Institute would like to visit with you about that. What have you noticed? –Brad Edmondson