Next week's evolution2009 conference offers a K-12 educators workshop entitled "Evolution 101: Evolution and Biogeography." The announcement explains that:

Biogeography is traditionally a keystone approach to evolutionary biology, as seen in the works of Charles Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace and Henry Bates.

The works of Darwin and Wallace? The Darwin-Wallace paradigm was a restrictive dogma, not a keystone, in biogeography. It took a century to exorcise but now, fifty years later, is it resurrected as good science.

In addition to brainwashing, workshop participants will also receive a small library of evolution propaganda, including the National Academies of Science's Science, Evolution and Creationism. This handy booklet is packed with evolutionary newspeak, such as the wonderfully freeing thought that evolution is true regardless of the evidence. "Even if their negative arguments against evolution were correct," the NAS informs young scientists, it would not matter because evolutionists can always contrive alternative explanations. Now that's hard science.

Also, Mike Webster and Louise Mead will lead a session on "tree-thinking." Apparently unaware of the scientific evidence, and that even evolutionists are admitting that tree-thinking needs a reassessment, Webster and Mead will "use simple games and simulations to demonstrate why it is that evolution leads to tree-like patterns of relationships among species." If that is true then evolution is false.

And of course do not miss the Gould Lecture that evening where Eugenie Scott will be rewarded for her tireless efforts in saving the world for evolution. Scott will bemoan the public's "high incidence of rejection of evolution" and encourage teachers to do what they can to dispel such ignorance. The problem, as Scott sees it, is that people just don't understand the basic ideas of evolution.

Don't understand the basic ideas of evolution? How could that be? In fact we are, and have been for many years, awash in evolution education. Public school classes, with their highly produced textbooks, have been inculcating tender minds for generations. And our media, legal system, entertainment, and cultural elites are all dominated by a positive, evolutionary-is-good-science, mindset. TV specials, museums, science and popular magazines--everywhere we look we are told about the virtues of evolution and the nefarious motives of those who doubt.

The problem is not that folks do not understand evolution well enough, the problem is that folks understand evolution too well.

Is there a religious influence and authoritarian tradition in science? Evolutionist PZ Myers rejects any such notion. Though Myers relies on the usual theological truth claims that are fundamental to evolution, he is sure that science is free of all such nonsense. When he is not busy shutting down scientific inquiry with religious dictates, he reassures his readers that science is a process that empowers questioning and change.

Certainly that is what science should be, but it is precisely the opposite in the hands of evolutionists such as Myers. They believe evolution is a fact, based on religious dogma that goes back centuries. Far from the empowering the asking of questions when the evidence contradicts their theory, they protect evolution from harm. You can see examples of Myers' religious commitment here and here. Myers criticizes the religious ignorance and dogma he disagrees with, but he ignores the religious dogma that is foundational to evolution.