Since the 1950's high school biology textbooks have focused less and less on the concept of race. This follows naturally the scientific refutation of the various arguments upon which the race concept was built. Over the decades science has debunked theories of race based upon facial features, cranial capacity, brain weight, skeletal differences, language, IQ testing, blood type, polygenism, psychometrics - the list goes on.
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Creationist to Give Invocation at Inauguration is a blog entry at Panda's Thumb. Matt Young notes that President-Elect Barack Obama has chosen Pastor and author Rick Warren to deliver his inaugural invocation. Young identifies Warren as a creationist and quotes Warren as stating the following:

If Darwin was right, which is survival of the fittest[,] then homosexuality would be a recessive gene because it doesn’t reproduce and you would think that over thousands of years that [sic] homosexuality would work itself out of the gene pool.

Young then goes on to add his own take on Obama's decision with respect to Warren:

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God is not the enemy of reason from The Jewish Chronicle and appearing at The Jewish Community Online was authored by Melanie Phillips. Melanie excoriates secular fundamentalists and the arrogance that is frequently displayed by them. She notes the irony that increased influence of secularism has coincided with increasing interest in astrology, the occult and other fringe movements. Phillip's linked article is a frontal assault on a counter-cultural movement that now finds itself very much part of the mainstream.

Frederica Mathewes-Green says this in When Mother Comes Home:

While I’m not very informed about the Intelligent Design debate, the idea sounds inoffensive enough: Scientists cannot prove there is a Designer, and neither can they prove there’s no Designer, so why not leave the question open? Instead the concept of Intelligent Design has been greeted with outrage and the case is considered closed. Clearly, it struck a nerve.

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TT member John A. Designer quoted Sternberg:

…rarely did anyone attack me or the Meyer article on the basis of its actual content– in fact, those who did read the paper and who did object to Meyer’s case for design at the end of it, tended to be civil in their correspondence. No: The two kind of angry responses I received invariably began with a statement about how the offended party did not or refused to read such pseudoscientific or creationist nonsense, followed either by a denunciation of my assumed motives or how the paper was the tool of some vast right wing conspiracy to which I supposedly belonged. And when the situation in the museum really became nasty, I could have used a stopwatch to mark the seconds from the start of a conversation about Meyer article to the tirades about Christians, “fundies”, Republicans, Goerge Bush, etc. that so often ensued.

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…for the Candidates to answer

Thought Provoker is a little ruffled that there's a non-science specific thread on the front page [Lying to Advance a Cause], so I thought I'd post something genuinely scientifical that some here might be interested in.

This is, right on time following the political minutiae of hammering platform planks into a sturdy stage and getting nomination formalities out of the way, Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama's Answers to the Top 14 Science Questions as winnowed by ScienceDebate2008 and leading science organizations from more than 3400 questions submitted by more than 38,000 scientists, engineers and other concerned Americans.

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Politics isn't a focus of this forum, and participants here cover the spectrum of political views and policy leanings. This is not a thread about politics, please don't use it as one.

That out of the way, I'd like to post a few excerpts from a review of progressive activist Markos Moulitsas' new book Taking On the System, because his words have broader social application.

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