You Have To See This Fundamentalist Mom’s Anti-Science Video Rant At The Natural History Museum

megan fox homeschooling creationist momIn case you’re not sold on the serious need for some sort of rigorous standards in homeschooling, let me present to you homeschooling mom Megan Fox (no, not that Megyn Fox) and her rage-filled diatribe against the Evolving Earth exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum, as well as against common sense and the nature of how we do science. (According to Fox, looking at a fossil in a glass case: definitely science! Carbon-dating the fossil to determine its age: DEFINITELY NOT SCIENCE!)

The video of her whirlwind tour through the exhibit is half an hour long, so please consult a doctor before watching it in its entirety, or I can’t be held responsible for any leakage of gray matter out through your ears. At the very least, you ought to pop some popcorn first. But I watched it so you don’t have to – join me for my own rage-filled diatribe down below.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32mxZxv3dYM#t=1257]

Fox, who is unable to pronounce the word ‘eukaryote’ unassisted, takes a great deal of pride and amusement in her total lack of engagement in reality. The video starts out with her jabbing her finger at a display describing the origins of multicellular life – she takes great umbrage with the fact that single-celled organisms are portrayed as the ancestors of multi-celled creatures while there are also, SOMEHOW, still single-celled creatures on earth today. How can one thing stay the same while also giving rise to a new different thing, Fox wants to know, who based on her own logic should have ceased to exist at the moment her children were born. This woman is allowed to teach her kids science! “This doesn’t make any sense!” she yells repeatedly, and well, I have to agree with her there.

If Fox’s tour of the Evolving Earth exhibit were a term paper, it would be ripe fodder for my red pen. How can you argue so vehemently against something when you obviously have never read a single paragraph on the subject that didn’t come from a Jack Chick tract or Creation magazine? While looking at fossils, Fox cracks herself up with a joke about how ‘missing links’ don’t exist: “That’s why it’s called ‘missing!” Hur hur hur. Well, actually, people who didn’t fail eighth grade biology call them ‘transitional fossils’, and you’re walking past an entire exhibit full of them.

Fox stops to laugh at a group of parents standing with their children at another display. “They’re buying it!” she exclaims in a stage whisper. “They’re teaching it to their children … Hook, line and sinker.” That’s particularly rich coming from a woman who later explains in wide-eyed earnestness about how cave people drew paintings of dinosaurs and how Neanderthals are really just people with big foreheads, “like Eastern Europeans”. If other people haven’t heard about dinosaur cave paintings, it’s just because of a “massive cover-up”, she affirms seriously. God, her poor kids. I wish I could send them a care package of Carl Sagan books, but maybe they accidentally learned something from the museum in the few moments free from their mother’s blathering about evil science conspiracies.

Several of the display boards in the exhibit (which I have been to and loved, in case you weren’t sure of my bias in this situation) relate the history of the world to museum visitors, and the sight of the words ‘X million years old’ are sure to set Fox off. “They weren’t there!” she insists. “Did you have a video camera there?” is her question to the display, because obviously unless she’s seen footage on Fox News, it didn’t happen. She must be fun on jury duty – no video evidence, no crime! If you don’t believe humans can know about things that they weren’t physically on hand to see, maybe you shouldn’t be teaching science, or history for that matter. She shakes her head sadly at the display. “This isn’t good thinking.” Again, no arguments from me.

Fox also feels it’s patently unfair that the exhibit called ‘Evolving Earth’ doesn’t suggest alternative (and totally incorrect) explanations for the history of life. “Nobody else is allowed to have an opinion,” she whines, which is obviously true, even though we have a entire video of her inane opinion posted to YouTube where the entire world can see it. Work that persecution complex, lady!

In case you were wondering if the same demand for hard evidence holds up when Fox starts making her own incredible claims, don’t hold your breath. Near the end of the video, she relates a story of visiting a museum in Indianapolis, where she laughs breathlessly at the ‘ignorance’ of a museum technician who corrects her when she tells her child that a fossilized skull belongs not to a dinosaur but to … a dragon. Yes. You see, people wrote about dragons hundreds of years ago, and just as when J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about dragons in the 1930s, it must have been because dragons were real. No video evidence needed! I feel sorry for that technician, but I feel sorrier for these kids who have no chance of growing up with anything like a scientific education.

Dragons-or-Dinosaurs-DVD(Yeah, this looks like science to me.)

Whole-heartedly buying into the existence of dragons is pretty bad, along with rest of the gleeful denial of the evidence being presented right in front of Fox’s eyes – why bother understanding why science works when you can just put your hands over your ears and scream? But I think the absolute worst thing for me is to hear how she explains what science ‘really is’. To Fox, real science is the chance to ‘wonder and exclaim’ over amazing fossils. And while I do think we need to make room for wonder in science, I also think wondering and exclaiming isn’t going to do a lot to address climate change, antibiotic resistance, or a cure for HIV.

For that, we need kids who grow up understanding that science isn’t just a noun, not just rooms full of long-dead dinosaurs (or dragons) and dusty fossils. Science is a way of understanding the world and processing evidence. Science is a verb, and pinning butterflies and drawing cavemen riding dinosaurs is definitely not science. Only 22 states require any testing at all of home-schoolers, which means that Fox’s kids are probably going to spend their whole education internalizing the unchallenged notion that science is over and done with, that’s something you look at in a museum and not something you do. And that’s the saddest thing of all in this video.

(Image: YouTube)

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