Jonathan B. Wight

According to news accounts, Alyssa Campanella, who was crowned Miss USA last night, actually believes in evolution and thinks it should be taught in schools.

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Forty-eight of the other Miss USA contestants weren't sure, or didn't think such controversies should be taught in schools.

Women who get to the finals of the Miss USA pageant are highly talented and extremely competitive. Is anything to be made from the fact that (aside from the winner and one other contestant) they do not appear to be particularly supportive of science? A disheartening word I received today is that students in Belgium start preschool at … age 2! We thought we had a missile gap, and now we know it is a pre-K gap. How can we ever keep up?

While beauty pageant contestants (as a group) have little to say about evolution, evolutionists have plenty to say about beauty. Beauty affords advantages to procreation by signaling fitness. Interestingly, Adam Smith weighed in on the subject, and argued that our perception of beauty had not as much to do with usefulness as with achieving a standard of perfection for its own sake (The Theory of Moral Sentiments , Glasgow edition, p. 180).