Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen sits on the state’s Education Accountability and Reform Committee as well as the Natural Resources Committee. So, it was a bit scary to hear Allen display her knowledge of science and geology recently during her call for uranium mining. In the clip below, Allen casually explains that the Earth is 6000 years old and that it has done just fine without environmental laws of any kind for most of that time. She represents Snowflake, Arizona.

Of course, even if one defines the age of the Earth by the existence of man, she is roughly 194,000 years off from the first evidence of DNA of the modern human. I particularly love the idea that the absence of environmental laws during the last 6000 years as evidence of the lack of any need for such laws. Since this period would start when the entire human population of the entire Earth was less than the current population of Texas.

Of course, creationists believe that the population at that time was two people, here — which would certainly explain why no environmental laws were needed. That is, unless one counts God’s prohibition on eating the forbidden fruit as an early environmental law. Allen may be counting (Genesis 2-3 as the first agricultural law. (“but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”)

Allen’s science lesson is reminiscent of the Republican Presidential debate when three out of ten candidates proudly announced that they do not believe in evolution, here. She, of course, has a study buddy in Sarah Palin who reportedly believes that dinosaurs and man walked the Earth at the same time, here.

It is perhaps Allen’s obvious ignorance of science when coupled with her advocacy of uranium mining that is most off-putting. It comes across like a Cro-Magnon saying “Me Like Uranium, It Make Big Boom.” There should be a law that you cannot toy around with uranium until you pass high school science classes like a driver’s education class for legislators. Of course, Allen herself may be the greatest case against the concept of evolution of the human species. Then again, the world’s science community may be the one with pre-historic egg on their faces when Allen reveals cave drawings of a Neanderthal riding an Anchiceratops while carrying bags of uranium ore.

This fierce ignorance of science was on display when some god-fearing, science-avoiding folks in Waco attacked Bill Nye the Science Guy over his statement that the Moon did not generate its own light, here.

Just as a matter of trivia, in case anyone was wondering about snowflake as a name for a town in Arizona, it was named after its founders in 1878: Mormon pioneers William Jordan Flake and Erastus Snow.

The great thing about the world according to Allen is that, if open yourself to uranium mining, “you will never know the mine was there when they’re done” — much like science classes in Snowflake it appears.

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