When it comes to explaining human origins and early man, don’t forget:

The club came before fire.

Long before man figured out that lumber could be burned to illuminate and heat the cave, he knew that he could wield lumber to clobber his fellow man.

That was the case in Austin the other day in a 21st-century way.

A person whose job was illumination got clubbed.

Some alarmed observers assert that it was way too symbolic. The clubbing, they say, was on the altar of those who insist dinosaurs and man shared the same marshes a few thousand years ago.

Whatever the case, what happened to Chris Comer appears to have set us back a few eons — if we’ve been here that long.

Comer until last month was the director of science curricula for the Texas Education Agency. In that role she had won high marks for devotion to high standards when science class is ever in the cross hairs of the oh-so-powerful religious right.

Heaven forfend that each of us would be fired for what Comer did. She committed the 21st-century offense of forwarding an e-mail.

No, John, not politics!

Steer clear of politics? Not the Trib's John Young. His new book of political columns Ghosts of Liberals Past yields to no sacred cows. Available at the Tribune-Herald front desk ($16, plus $1.32 tax) and for mail delivery by e-mailing the author at jyoung@wacotrib.com.

Neutrality on this?

The agency says that act alone isn’t what cost Comer her job. But according to one TEA official high up in the clubbing order, it was enough unto itself.

The forwarded e-mail was about an upcoming speaking engagement by Barbara Forrest, author of Inside Creationism’s Trojan Horse.

Forrest is an expert on the cottage industry devoted to Biblicizing science class by getting a foot in the academic door with the theory of intelligent design.

TEA officials said that Comer’s forwarding of an announcement about Forrest’s speech was tantamount to endorsing the anti-creation science point of view.

Imagine. Someone devoted to real science forwarding an e-mail about someone devoted to the same thing.

To Lizette Reynolds, this act was unfathomable, “an offense that calls for termination.”

The accused, for nine years TEA’s science curricular chief, you might call the definition of an education professional. The accuser you might call the definition of a political appointee. A former staffer to Gov. George W. Bush, Reynolds worked a few years in his U.S. Department of Education. As of last January, she’s been senior adviser to TEA Commissioner Robert Scott.

Reynolds said Comer violated an agency position of neutrality on intelligent design. I guess you can read anything you want into the act of forwarding an e-mail.

Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education said that she reads “the politicization of science education” into the fact that Comer has lost her job for it.

People who are concerned about this point out that Comer’s ouster comes just as TEA prepares next month to rewrite the state’s essential elements for teaching science.

Concerns have been expressed that a right-leaning State Board of Education might seek to diminish the current requirement to teach about evolutionary biology.

Instead, the thrust for the creation science-intelligent design crowd is to cast doubt, to require that teachers “teach the controversy.”

But there’s no controversy about evolution as a process, just as no controversy surrounds the greenhouse effect and what increased greenhouse gases do in an atmosphere.

We can only hope that the state school board is not so inclined as to turn discussions of evolution, as with the greenhouse effect, into the picking of nits that completely undermines and ignores the immense science backing both biological facts.

Steve Schafersman, a PhD and president of Texas Citizens for Science, says Chris Comer now joins the ranks of “martys of science, much like Galileo and Nickolai Vavilov,” the latter jailed by Stalinist Russia for studying genetics. Yes, that was a crime.

Imagine what a crime the Stalinists would have assigned to forwarding an e-mail.

John Young’s column appears Thursday, Sunday and occasionally Tuesday.