This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky. Got a minute?

Creationism evolves and sometimes those new strategies succeed.

Nicholas Matzky, an evolutionary biologist currently on a fellowship at the Australian

National University in Canberra.

So I think a lot of people, it might not have been on their radar that we have two states that

have a statewide policy that

encourages teachers to introduce sort of false criticisms of evolution and it also

more explicitly prides to prevent administrators from doing anything about it if they have a

teacher that's doing this kind of thing.

Those states are Tennessee and Louisiana.

Matzky used to work for the National Center for Science Education, the NCSE, which tracks these legislative efforts to get religiously motivated creationism and its thinly disguised offshoots like intelligent design into public school classrooms.

Matski and the NCSE were involved in the Kitzmiller versus Dover case in Pennsylvania

in which the judge found the inclusion of intelligent design in the biology curriculum to be a violation of the First Amendment.

December 20th marks the 10th anniversary of that decision, but dozens of similar bills that do not explicitly mention creationism or intelligent design have been proposed since.

Over the years, I had kept in touch with NCSC people and we had always talked about, you know, we're like these bills that look like they're just being copied and modified, you know, we should we should do a phylogeny at some point, you know, do an evolutionary analysis of them.

So we've gotten up to being about 60 bills.

I took all those bills, lined up all the texts, coded all the characteristics, all the variations

between these texts, and then ran them through the standard phylogenetic analyses that we use for

DNA, we use them for dinosaurs, they get used to study virus evolution, those same programs

can be used on texts that have been copied and modified.

Matsky's tongue in cheek or rather Pandas thumb in a creationist's eye analysis

is in the journal Science. It reveals a high degree of relatedness among the bills.

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