Rocky Mountain News
Wednesday, November 3, 1999


LETTERS


Thanks to school board
for basket of bananas

I'm writing this to publicly thank your state's Board 
of Education for the lovely gift it sent me last week:  
a basket of bananas  accompanied by a note that reads: 
"Congratulations  -- Colorado State Board of 
Education." A day later, I received a funny letter 
from Clair Orr, the Board's chairman.  The bananas, 
explains Ms. Orr,  celebrate the 1999 Ig Nobel Prize 
for Science Education, which the Colorado Board shared 
with the Kansas State Board of Education. The prize 
citation, in case you missed it, reads:

	"for mandating that children should not 
	believe in Darwin's theory of evolution
	any more than they believe in Newton's
	theory of gravitation, Faraday's and
	Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, or
	Pasteur's theory that germs cause disease."

I am chairman of the Ig Nobel Board of Governors. The 
Prizes were presented at Harvard on September 30. 
(Anyone who wants to see the ceremony can find video 
of it at www.improbable.com)

The Kansas Board says that evolution should not be 
taught in science classes. The Colorado Board says 
it's okay to teach about evolution, but that evolution 
does not apply to human beings.  That's like saying 
it's okay to teach about gravity, but that gravity 
does not apply to human beings. Orr says that this is 
a matter of "political correctness."  That's a rather 
weird thought, because except in Board of Education 
meetings, evolution (like gravity and 
electromagnetism)  is a matter of science, not of 
politics.

The bananas are excellent. It's good to see that the 
Colorado State Board of Education maintains high 
standards for its fruit baskets.

Marc Abrahams
Editor, Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)
Cambridge Mass.