Cavemen At The GOP

SCIENCE -- THREE CONSERVATIVE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES SAY THEY DO NOT BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION: During last night's Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Library in California, a reader of Politico.com asked Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for a yes or no answer on whether he believed in evolution. McCain paused for a second before answering "Yes." Politico's Jim VandeHei, one of three moderators for the night, then opened up the question to the other nine candidates. Three candidates -- Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AK) -- raised their hands to say that they do not believe in evolution. While the three politicians' lack of belief in evolution is shared by a slim majority of Americans, "outside of the precincts of the religious right, though, the scientific consensus about evolution is very close to unanimous." The National Academy of Sciences, "the nation's most prestigious scientific organization," declares evolution "one of the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have." President Bush's scientific adviser John Marburger has called it "the cornerstone of modern biology." But for years, conservative activists have been seeking to push evolution out of school classrooms in order to replace it with "intelligent design," a theory that posits extra-natural, non-scientific phenomena as its basis. Despite McCain's expressed belief in evolution, he appeared recently as the keynote speaker for the most prominent "intelligent design" advocacy group in the country, the Discovery Institute.