Latest Challenges to the Teaching of Evolution

and these two special llamas don't know they have names either.

I wonder how I'd have evolved differently if I'd been named Aidan as opposed to Rebecca.

There is no controversy, creationism is bunk
(Dave Balson, Opinions Editor, The Daily Eastern News, 3/28/11)

When I saw the headline, "Libertyville Creationism Teacher Keeps Job," I thought "They must be talking about Libertyville, Ala." It turns out there is a town called Libertyville in Alabama (lucky guess), but the article was about a public school in Libertyville, Ill.

The "teacher," Beau Schaefer, admitted to teaching creationism in his high school biology class. The school board met March 22, heard arguments from members of the community, and decided to keep Schaefer on the taxpayer-funded payroll

Some years back, I signed up for the e-newsletter of the National Center for Science Education, an organization that defends the teaching of evolution in public schools. I think it would surprise most people how often legislation aimed at push creationism into science classrooms is introduced into state legislatures across the country.

But those states always seem to be south of the Mason-Dixon line. I grew up about 10 minutes south of Libertyville. It is a wealthy suburb north of Chicago. In 2009, the Illinois State Board of Education ranked Libertyville High School the fifth highest-performing suburban school-this in an area that includes some of the best high schools in the country. It is a place where one expects more from educators.

It's one thing to do a poor job teaching the material. It's quite another to undermine the material by injecting religious dogma.

We hear a lot about the creation vs. evolution "controversy." It is one of those issues where the media completely cops out of their supposed dedication to objectivity. Instead of reporting the objective facts, they do the much easier work of pretending there are two equally valid positions.

There aren't. Evolution by natural selection is one of the most widely accepted theories in all of science and is the basis for the entire field of biology. Don't be mislead by the word "theory." In science, the word grants much more validity than it does in our colloquial language.

Creationism is the idea that organisms do not evolve through natural selection and genetic mutation, but are guided by God, who has a special little plan for everything. You may have heard it called intelligent design, creationism's much more scientific-sounding alias.

Many creationists believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago (long after the agricultural revolution), and that god planted all those dinosaur bones to test our faith.

As you can imagine, there isn't any real controversy in the scientific community, they look to the mountains of observable, verifiable data, not the guy in the sky.

But creationists want us to believe there is a real scientific debate over evolution, and they make the plea that we should "teach the controversy" (it sounds so open minded).

A young woman named Arika Egan made this point at the school board meeting.

"Saying you can't mix creationism and biology is like saying you can't mix chemistry and physics," she said. "They are connected."

Wrong. It is not like saying that at all. Chemistry and physics are two fields of scientific study, each with its own theories, based on observable evidence, which overlap in several areas. Saying you can't mix chemistry and physics is like saying you can't mix chemistry and biology; at certain points, you need chemistry to explain some parts of biology.

For those young people who will probably have similar difficulties with the analogy section of their SATs, let me present a better analogy.

If we are to teach evolution alongside creationism in biology, we should also teach alchemy alongside chemistry, astrology alongside astronomy and magic alongside physics.

One would hope anyone caught teaching such a curriculum, much less proudly admitting to it, would lose his job. But because our educational system has to tread so lightly around the zealots' eggshells, our students are held hostage to religious indoctrination.

Here was a guy showing up everyday, miseducating a class full of students, misusing taxpayer dollars and students' time. He was teaching material that the Supreme Court has said should not be taught in public schools, as it is, by nature, religious.

What does a teacher have to do to get fired?

We hear a lot about the creation vs. evolution "controversy." It is one of those issues where the media completely cops out of their supposed dedication to objectivity. Instead of reporting the objective facts, they do the much easier work of pretending there are two equally valid positions.

Here was a guy showing up everyday, miseducating a class full of students, misusing taxpayer dollars and students' time. He was teaching material that the Supreme Court has said should not be taught in public schools, as it is, by nature, religious.

What does a teacher have to do to get fired?

Evolution theory is a creation theory isn't it?

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MJA, Your confusing creationism with evolution.