Question

"Nature News 05. June 2012 - South Korea surrenders to creationist demands

Publishers set to remove examples of evolution from high-school textbooks." -> What do you think about this? I simply can't believe that some people still trying to destroy science... thats ridiculous and realy drives me angry.

Answer 1

http://www.nature.com/news/south-korea-surrenders-to-creationist-demands-1.10773 For you to check it.

Answer 2

They're not really destroying science. What they're doing is increasing the odds that their children will receive low grades (at least in first year classes) if they decide they want to study biology at university. The poor kids will have a lot of catching up to do, so they may be at a disadvantage compared to students in other countries. I don't know about you, but I think that's cruel.

Answer 3

Ofcourse it is. But if they can say "Allright, let's take this out of a book" what's next?

Answer 4

To be fair, they do have a point about Archaeopteryx probably not being the ancestor of modern birds. If the textbooks say that it is, that's a problem... but it is not a problem that should be solved by just removing that content from the book.

It'd be better to change the books to say that Archaeopteryx was a prehistoric bird (of course, how you define "bird" is open to debate) and that it probably branched off the line that became modern birds, so they share a common ancestor.

Answer 5

Yeah, that might be the right way to handle this problem, but in the text is also, that they want to continue deleting evolutionary stuff out of books, and even if it's far away from us, it makes me sad :/

Answer 6

It's sad that the children there won't be getting a proper education. I don't really care if people decide that they don't want to accept evolution (most people aren't scientists: if my plumber has odd ideas about evolution, that's fine with me, because it's not his field, and I probably have odd ideas about plumbing too), but I DO think that children should learn the basic principles behind the theory in school. Evolution underpins pretty much every aspect of biology. Not teaching it would be like trying to teach maths without ever mentioning algebra: you won't get very far.

Now, whether students choose to accept evolution as truth or not is up to them (though I think most would accept it given the mountain of evidence), but they need to know what it is and how it works. Otherwise, they'll be at a significant disadvantage if they decide they want to study biology at university.