Time, already, to follow up on the previous item, because Oolon Colluphid of Kansas, as far as I know, was the first to give us the key to nailing down once and for all what Kris Helphinstine was up to in his high school science classroom. At this point, we have a rather healthy collection of creationist smoking guns.
Colluphid’s discovery was that one of the slides in Helphinstine’s presentation on human history was listed wholesale from a website about the beliefs of an infamous creationist and Holocaust denier. The tip-off for Colluphid was the fact that Helphinstine didn’t remove a footnote number when he cut-and-paste from that website.
I’d been wondering whether or not Helphinstine’s presentations were pre-fab stuff, ready-made from one creationist organization or another. While that line of investigation came up empty, Colluphid’s discovery sent me on some excusions around the web of my own.
Let’s stick with the human history presentation (pdf) for the moment, this time turning to Slide 27. Run a search for the first part of the opening sentence and what do you find? Indeed. Here, too, Helphinstine pulled the slide’s information from websites about the very same creationist and Holocaust denier from which he pulled Slide 20 — including the very same website used for Slide 20.
Turning to his presentation on eugenics (pdf), look at Slide 18, which Helphinstine presents as being a quote from an article in American Scientist. Run a search on the first few words and you discover that it’s not a quote from American Scientist at all. Instead (wait for it), it’s an article by one Jerry Bergman from a 1999 issue of a creationist magazine.
You might note that the website which offers up this archive is the self-same Answers in Genesis organization from which Helphinstine lifted his “redacted” version of Ken Ham’s article on poodles. Oddly, you’ll also notice that there appear to have been a number of thesis papers making use of the exact same phrase, if not the exact same paragraph in its entirety.
The contents of Slide 19, although correctly sourced, in fact also appear in the same article as the contents of Slide 18. So it seems clear that it’s where Helphinstine actually encountered it.
The same goes for the contents of Slide 20.
Remember that Helphinstine all along has claimed that he wasn’t teaching creationism, but rather teaching accurate science. It’s important to remember this because, now that Colluphid has shown as where and how to look, the question is: If it was just more science, why did Helphinstine have to go to creationist sources to find it?
Of course, the answer (which is not found in Genesis) is that he didn’t. But because the point of his lessons was to undermine science and plant the seeds for further, and perhaps later, indoctrination of his students in the ways of creationism, where else was he going to turn?
