American Idiocracy

I just heard about this.  It has apparently been floating around about a week.

US House Science Committee Member: Evolution Is a Lie From Hell

With more links and comments:

• Slashdot: US House Science Committee Member: Evolution Is a Lie From Hell
• the Daily Dolt: Tea Party Rep. Paul Broun: Evolution and Big Bang Are “Lies Straight From the Pit Of Hell.” Why Yes, He Serves On the House Science Committee With Todd Akin
• NBC News Cosmic Log: Video shows 'scientist' in Congress saying evolution is from 'pit of Hell'

This kind of butt-ignorant garbage from a person in political office makes me really concerned for the future of the U.S.  It's bad enough that he's a national-level politician.  It's even worse he's on the House Science Committee.

Perhaps the Honorable Mr. Broun doesn't know that the U.S. space flight capability works because the Earth is not at a fixed position, contrary to some interpretations of the same Bible he claims be believe literally (see Biblical Geocentrism).  If U.S. leaders were screaming his crap in the late 1950s, space would have been dominated by the Soviets.

Perhaps the Honorable Mr. Broun doesn't know that the U.S. nuclear weapon capability succeeded because the U.S. had a number of scientists who had, prior to WWII, been exploring nuclear reactions in stars and cosmology and used many of the techniques they developed for understanding stars in building nuclear weapons.  The irony is many of the scientists in the U.S. program were immigrants, who fled Europe in the 1930s due to growing anti-Semitism and a related pseudo-science, Deutsche Physik (Wikipedia).

Much of the economic prosperity the U.S. has enjoyed in the latter half of the 20th Century was driven by U.S. science and the nation having a critical mass of talented scientists and engineers who could explore many leading-edge problems. 

I suspect Mr. Broun has very little understanding of how the science behind technologies he uses every day actually came about.  If he were making these types of statements in the 1940s-1960s, it might be viewed that he was trying to undermine U.S. efforts against the Nazis or the Soviets.  As it is, he is simply aiding U.S. economic competitors today.

• Bill Nye: Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children
• America's Science Decline - Neil deGrasse Tyson‬
• Cosmos in Your Pocket: Illustrating the paths taken by science to technology.