The state government of Georgia has proposed guidelines that would remove the word “evolution” from their high-school biology classes. They’re even removing the word “long” from references to “Earth’s long history.” This is happening even though Georgia students have incredibly high failure rates in science — probably because what they’re being taught isn’t, er, science. Professors at universities say their first-year students are arriving for the first day of class barely knowing what fossils are.

Here’s the icing on the cake. In a story in today’s New York Times, Keith Delaplane, a professor of entomology at the University of Georgia, defends Georgia’s embrace of creationism. He says “the wholesale rejection of alternative theories of evolution is unscientific”:

“My opinion is that the very nature of science is openness to alternative explanations, even if those explanations go against the current majority,” said Professor Delaplane, a proponent of intelligent-design theory, which questions the primacy of evolution’s role in natural selection. “They deserve at least a fair hearing in the classroom, and right now they’re being laughed out of the arena.”

He’s wrong. Creationism has enjoyed an absolutely fabulous hearing in the classroom: It was the dominant teaching on Earth’s history for hundreds of years or even millenia, if you include pre-Christian concepts of creation. Indeed, Darwin’s theory of evolution is the new theory, historically speaking.