AUSTIN, Texas It took decades of fighting against images of a white bearded old guy in a white nightgown, but the spawn of Charles Darwin finally found a mascot of their own.

No, it’s not Jim Lehrer of NewsHour fame.

It’s the other big purple dinosaur on PBS Barney!

At a recent Texas State Board of Education meeting in Austin, a pro-evolution activist in a Barney the Dinosaur costume showed up with a placard asking, “How old am I? 4,000 or 64,000,000?”

Regardless of whether this radical furry meant years, weeks, or hours old*, the message was clearly a dig at board chairman Don McLeroy, a rabid foe of the science behind evolutionary biology.

For evidence of his rabid nature, dig through the dust to last month when McLeroy told The Associated Press, “I look at evolution as still a hypothesis with weaknesses.”

Dig a little deeper to this past June in The New York Times, and you’ll find McLeroy pulling supernatural systems of “science” from his own ribs, much like a rabbit out of a hat. “You’ve got a creationist system and a naturalist system,” he said.

To the Texas Freedom Network, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and others, McLeroy’s “strengths and weaknesses” argument is silly because, as they say, biologists have long held evolution as the foundation of their science.

“[It] is widely accepted, and any other model should not be used in the science classroom,” said Francis Eberle, head of the National Science Teachers Association. “Students are easily impressed and are not often able to comprehend the complexity of adult arguments.”

So there was Barney the Dinosaur breaking the argument down along with dozens of scientists, students, teachers, clergy and other citizens outside the hearing to support science for children in Texas public schools. In fact, the Texas Freedom Network’s blog quoted Barney as saying: “Creationism isn’t science. Let’s listen to scientists. Physicists know that the universe is billions of years old. Geologists know Earth is more that four billion years old. Biologists know that life has evolved over eons.”

Barney then added, “Shouldn’t Texas kids know at least as much as a purple dinosaur?”

The day, Wednesday, Nov. 19, was important because the Texas school board listened to the first hearing of public testimony during its latest round of reviewing the state’s science curriculum, specifically new rules that would allow students to hear unscientific explanations for Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The writing teams that reviewed the science curriculum apparently held a Barney frame of mind a few months ago when they proposed revised science textbook standards to the board.

Dan Quinn, TFN’s communications director, told The Lone Star Iconoclast that those revised standards included two really good things.

“One, they stripped out language requiring schools to teach about so-called ‘strengths and weaknesses’ of scientific theories because first of all, it’s not scientific the way they talk about it that way and second of all, politicians on the board have been abusing these phony arguments to go after evolution. They replaced it with more language, I think, that promotes scientific, critical thinking,” he said.

“The second thing they did was in the biology standards include a definition of science that essentially eliminates