Coach the beauty pageant contestants in critical thinking, please

Everybody else has to know it, or suffer without it.

Can you tell which of these is the parody?

Is it this one?

Or is it this one?

Stephen Law reports the science geek won the competition — maybe that will be enough to spur other beauty pageant contestants to get hip to reality?

Susana Speier explained what’s going on at Scientific American’s online site:

Last week, self proclaimed “geek,” Miss California, Alyssa Campanella made beauty pageant history…by default. When the interviewer posed a Theory of Evolution question, she was one of only two delegates to use the scientific definition of the word “theory” in her response.

The honey-drenched, colloquial definition that the majority of her competitors clung to was, yes, diplomatic. Miss California, now Miss USA, however, did not aim to please or to appease the 60% of Americans that a 2009 Gallup Poll concluded do not believe in Evolution. Rather than aiming to please or appease an ignorant majority, The future Miss USA delivered a response that supported an empirical evidence based definition of specified phenomena: the scientific definition of the word, “theory.”

Brains is beauty, it seems to me.  We should certainly run our schools as if intelligence and learning are great virtues in themselves.