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Devolution

The state government of Georgia has proposed guidelines that would remove the word “evolution” from their high-school biology classes. They’re even removing the word “long” from references to “Earth’s long history.” This is happening even though Georgia students have incredibly high failure rates in science — probably because what they’re being taught isn’t, er, science. Professors at universities say their first-year students are arriving for the first day of class barely knowing what fossils are.

Here’s the icing on the cake. In a story in today’s New York Times, Keith Delaplane, a professor of entomology at the University of Georgia, defends Georgia’s embrace of creationism. He says “the wholesale rejection of alternative theories of evolution is unscientific”:

“My opinion is that the very nature of science is openness to alternative explanations, even if those explanations go against the current majority,” said Professor Delaplane, a proponent of intelligent-design theory, which questions the primacy of evolution’s role in natural selection. “They deserve at least a fair hearing in the classroom, and right now they’re being laughed out of the arena.”

He’s wrong. Creationism has enjoyed an absolutely fabulous hearing in the classroom: It was the dominant teaching on Earth’s history for hundreds of years or even millenia, if you include pre-Christian concepts of creation. Indeed, Darwin’s theory of evolution is the new theory, historically speaking.


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I'm Clive Thompson, the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better (Penguin Press). You can order the book now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powells, Indiebound, or through your local bookstore! I'm also a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. Email is here or ping me via the antiquated form of AOL IM (pomeranian99).

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